The State in MyanmarHurst, 2009 - 555 páginas Statecraft in Myanmar, previously referred to as Burma, has a lineage going back ten centuries or more. While the state today is expected to provide many other services for a vastly larger population than were its pre-modern predecessors, its basic functions of maintaining social order, controlling economic distribution, and ensuring the perpetuation of itself and its elite managers, remain much the same. The tools available now to do so may be different, and the challenges it faces may have grown, but the issues it addresses would be familiar to the predecessors of the modern rulers of Myanmar. Myanmar, with an estimated population of about 55 million, the 24th largest country in the world, is larger than England. With a territory as big as Texas, it is wedged between the two of the oldest civilisations and now dynamic economies on the globe, India and China. Having been influenced by both India and China for centuries, Myanmar has developed its own cultural distinctiveness in contrast with its near neighbors in South East Asia, especially Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Once governed as a British Indian province, Myanmar emerged from the colonial era and the Second World War an economically devastated but strongly nationalistic socialist state. Riven since independence by armed ethnic and ideological conflicts that lasted most of the years between 1948 and the 1990s when ceasefire agreements were reached with multiple insurgent armies, Myanmar's little studied politics contain element common to many countries. However, in few have the complexity of forces, historical and contemporary, religious and secular, foreign and indigenous, come together in one place to create so many little understood, and seemingly irresolvable, political issues. The State of Myanmar attempts to draw the complex history of state making and state perpetuation in Myanmar into one volume. The social and economic forces, as well as international and domestic issues, which have made Myanmar one of the poorest and least understood Asian countries, are discussed in this volume. The efforts of Myanmar's kings, British colonial officials, nationalist politicians, socialist ideologues, and army generals to preserve the state in Myanmar is a history worth attempting to understand on its own terms. -- from cover flap. |
Índice
The Precolonial State | 13 |
The Rationalisation of the State 18251942 | 69 |
1 | 91 |
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AFPFL agricultural Arakan areas army Asia Asian Asiayon Aung San Aung San Suu authority Ba Maw Bamar became British BSPP Buddhist Burmese cent central centre Chit Hlaing civil civilian Committee Communist constitution created Daw Aung San Democratic economic elections elite ethnic forces foreign GCBA groups Ibid increased independence Indian indigenous institutions internal Japanese Kachin Karen Kayah Khin Khin Nyunt king Konbaung Konbaung dynasty labour land leaders leadership Lieberman major Maung Maung middle class military Minister Modern Burma monarch monkhood monks movement Myanmar National nationalist Ne Win officials organisation peasantry peasants People's Councils politicians population precolonial Pyithu Hluttaw Rakhine Rangoon reforms regime regional Restored Toungoo revenue Revolutionary Council rice rule San Suu Kyi Sangha sawbwas Shan SLORC social socialist society Southeast Asia Southeast Asian Studies state's Tatmadaw Tenasserim Thakin tion township trade Union village Yangon