“Burmanization” and the Impact of J.S. Furnivall’s Views on National Identity in Late-Colonial Burma

J.S. Furnivall’s interventions in connection with extending the franchise under the Burma Reform Scheme while serving in the ICS, helped to create political identities that might be said to have reinforced the territory’s ethnic divisions. This confirms his agency in generating political identities that were distinct from the market-based identities that he later labeled the plural society. As a result, these actions and his personal efforts to establish a trans-ethnic national identity based on the dominance of Burmanization, have obscured rather than elucidated understandings of Burma and its problems since Independence.