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INTRODUCTION With the rise of the Konbaung dynasty in the last decades of the eighteenth century, the Burman! people reasserted their hegemony over the various ethnic groups whose territories bordered on their traditional heartland, the Dry Zone of the region later known as Upper Burma. After several years of bitter warfare between 1752 and 1757, the Burmans defeated the Mons and added their lands in the Irrawaddy-Sittang delta regions and Tenasserim to the growing Burman empire. The rulers of the Shan kingdoms to the north and east of the Dry Zone proffered their allegiance to the Konbaung monarchs and supplied troops for their armies. Following a number of victorious campaigns against the Siamese kingdom of Ayuthia and a successful struggle to repulse a Chinese invasion from the north, Burman armies overran Arakan on the western littoral in 1784-85. The Konbaung monarchs also demanded tribute and corvee labor from the various peoples who inhabited the rugged hill and forest regions which fringed the plains of the Dry Zone and the Irrawaddy delta. The most important of these peoples were the Karens, who were scattered along the Pegu Yoma and throughout the Irrawaddy delta and the Sittang River valley, and the Chins and Kachins, who inhabited the mountainous terrain to the west and 1. Following current usage, the term "Burman" is used throughout this study to refer specifically to the major ethnic and linguistic group of modern Burma. The term "Burmese" denotes all the groups which presently constitute the population of Burma, including the Burmans, Mons or Talaings, Chins, Shans, Karens, and Kachins. 3 4 Introduction northeast of the Dry Zone. These groups avoided contact with Burman forces whenever possible, and thus offered little challenge to Konbaung supremacy. Within a matter of decades the Konbaung rulers had restored the Dry Zone to its traditional position of pre-eminence, and it became once again the political, economic, and cultural center of the region which presently constitutes the nation of Burma. The Burmans' defeat in the first Anglo-Burman war in 1824-26 and their loss of the outlying provinces of Arakan and Tenasserim did little to erode the predominant position of the Dry Zone within the Burman empire. However, British victory in the second Anglo-Burman war and the subsequent annexation of the Irrawaddy-Sittang delta region, or Lower Burma,2 to the Indian Empire in 1852, initiated a number of developments which resulted in a dramatic shift in the center of influence and control away from the Dry Zone to the Delta area. For several decades political power was shared by the Konbaung monarch at Mandalay and the British Commissioner at Rangoon, with the latter clearly dominant. Following the final Anglo-Burman conflict and the annexation of the remaining portions of the Konbaung Empire in 1886, the royal palace at Mandalay was made into a British club, while Rangoon became the capital of the Province of Burma within the Indian Empire. British efforts to develop the Delta region into a source of raw materials and a market outlet in the decades after 1852 insured the dominant economic position of the area during the period of colonial rule in Burma. Within fifty years Lower Burma was transformed from an underdeveloped and sparsely populated backwater of the Konbaung Empire into the world's leading rice-exporting area. This transformation resulted in a shift in the demographic balance within Burma. The growth of an export economy in the Delta attracted large numbers of migrants from the Dry Zone and the Indian subcontinent. By 1891, the year of the first British-administered census in Upper Burma, the population of the districts which made up the Delta area was greater than that of the Dry Zone, which had historically surpassed the population of surrounding regions.3 In addition, the growth of processing, port, and rail centers in Lower Burma, particularly Rangoon and Bassein, far 2. The British initially called the area which they annexed in 1852 Pegu, a name which reflected its traditional position as the heartland of the Mon people. In this study I shall refer to this region as either the Delta (capitalized to distinguish it from the Irrawaddy or Sittang deltas which form only part of the whole) or Lower Burma. The latter designation is something of a departure from conventional usage, since many authors have included Tenasserim with Pegu in their references to Lower Burma. 3. Burma Census, 1921, Tables, p. 6. The Dry Zone contained the districts of the Magwe...

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