Racial Capitalism and Peasant Insurgency in Colonial Myanmar

Saha, Jonathan

doi:10.1093/hwj/dbac023

Racial Capitalism and Peasant Insurgency in Colonial Myanmar

Saha, Jonathan

Authors

Professor Jonathan Saha jonathan.saha@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

The Hsaya San Rebellion swept through colonial Myanmar between 1930 and 1932. It took eighteen months and over seven thousand Indian Army troops to suppress. Triggered by acute pressures in the agrarian economy that were compounded by a global fall in rice prices, the violence of the revolt cannot be fully explained by this crisis alone. Bands of peasant rebels massacred Indians; not only moneylenders but cattle-herders, who were themselves a precarious and marginal rural community. These massacres are not easy to interpret. Revisiting the insurgency through the growing literature on racial capitalism provides a framework for a understanding peasants’ racialized violence.

Citation

Saha, J. (2022). Racial Capitalism and Peasant Insurgency in Colonial Myanmar. History Workshop Journal, 94(Autumn 2022), 42 - 60. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbac023

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Jul 26, 2022
Online Publication Date	Sep 9, 2022
Publication Date	Sep 9, 2022
Deposit Date	Sep 13, 2022
Publicly Available Date	Nov 18, 2022
Journal	History Workshop Journal
Print ISSN	1363-3554
Electronic ISSN	1477-4569
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	94
Issue	Autumn 2022
Pages	42 - 60
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbac023

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Advance online version This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.