Description:
Abstract:
"My doctoral research focuses on the development and operation of the
intelligence services in British colonial Burma during the years 1930 to 1942.
This involves an examination of the causes of intelligence development, its
progress throughout 1930-1942, its rationale and modus operandi, and the
pressures it faced. This time period permits us to assess how intelligence
development was a product of the colonial government?s response to the 1930
peasant uprising which came as such a shock to colonial security and how
thereafter intelligence helped prevent popular hostility to the government from
taking the form of an uprising. As a result, intelligence information was
increasingly used to secure colonial power during the period of parliamentary
reform in Burma in 1937. The thesis further examines the stresses that riots and
strikes placed on colonial security in 1938, the so-called ?year of revolution? in
Burma. The thesis then proceeds to consider how intelligence operated in the
final years of colonial rule before the Japanese occupation of Burma in 1942.
This study is significant not only because very little work on the colonial security
services in Burma exists for the period under review, but also because it reveals
that intelligence was crucial to colonial rule, underpinning the stability of the
colonial state and informing its relationship with the indigenous population in
what remained, in relative terms at least, a colonial backwater like Burma. The
argument that intelligence was pivotal to colonial governmental stability in
Burma because of its centrality to strategies of population control departs from
conventional histories of Burma which have considered the colonial army to
have been the predominant instrument of political control and the most
significant factor in the relationship between the state and society in colonial
Burma. Rather it will be argued here that the colonial state in Burma relied on a
functioning intelligence bureau which collected information from local
indigenous officials and informers and employed secret agents to work on its
behalf. This information was collated into reports for the government which then
became integral to policy formulation. The primary source base for this work
includes British colonial material from government and private collections
predominantly in the British library as well as government papers in the National
Archives in Kew."
Source/publisher:
University of Exeter (doctoral dissertation)
Date of Publication:
2010-01-00
Date of entry:
2012-07-01
Grouping:
- Individual Documents
Category:
Language:
English
Local URL:
Format:
pdf
Size:
2.01 MB