Buddhist Teak and British Rifles: Religious Economics in Burma's Last Kingdom

Abstract

This article examines negotiations over teak and rifle sales during the reign of King Mindon (1853–1878) to consider the relationship between religious formations and the economic control of teak in the last Burmese kingdom. This article focuses on archival documents from 1864–1865 that describe the Konbaung court's struggle to purchase Enfield Rifles from a private British merchant while the British government would not allow the guns to pass through its territory. King Mindon was finally able to buy a stockpile of rifles when he threatened to stop exporting teak—the tropical hardwood highly coveted by the British for its suitability to shipbuilding. King Mindon convinced the British that he had a special Buddhist right to reserve this particular timber for monasteries and royal buildings in Mandalay. This article argues that these Enfield-teak negotiations hinged on traditional Buddhist understandings of the king as owner of the earth (bhūmisāmika) as well as on a British practice of defining Buddhism as an elevated world religion. By studying the rhetorical strategies used in these negotiations—and in related commercial treaties and royal pronouncements—this article shows how control of material resources was established through expressions of concern for the future of Buddhism. Furthermore, this article examines documents from the archives of the American Baptist mission to Burma to reveal how the powerful teak industry worked with Buddhist and Christian institutions to promote particular political leaders, ethnic groups, and religious communities at the expense of those with less access to material resources and social mobility. This collection of Burmese, British, and American sources reveals the influence of teak in the fight for religious, political, and economic control of nineteenth-century Burma.

In September 1864, William Wallace, a private teak merchant in Burma, requested permission from the British government to sell 3,600 Enfield Rifles to the Burmese Kingdom. The kingdom was then ruled by King Mindon, who had assumed power in 1853 by overthrowing his half-brother King Pagan, the monarch who had reigned during the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852. King Mindon had become very popular in the decade since he took over the throne and maintained peace with the British authorities occupying southern Burma, but he was starting to grow worried that he, too, would be overthrown, perhaps by one of his nearly seventy children. He wanted rifles to arm his palace guards, but his request was denied by the British, who thought that the Burmese king might use the guns against them. King Mindon subsequently prohibited the export of teak to the British, claiming that this particular timber was the only special type to be used for Buddhist monasteries and royal buildings in his capital and that he needed teak just for these very construction projects. This was an aggressive move. The British had grown dependent on the tropical hardwood because its natural oils made it resistant to water corrosion and therefore ideal for the ship-building that was transforming the island country into a global empire.

Over the course of the 1864–65 Enfield-teak negotiations, the British ultimately accepted King Mindon's claim that teak had a special relationship to Buddhism and Burmese royal power and agreed to allow the king to buy 2,000 rifles. The following year, two of King Mindon's sons attempted a coup in the newly armed palace and assassinated the crown prince Kanaung, but failed to kill King Mindon, igniting a civil war. In 1867, a more cautious and savvy King Mindon signed what would become the final commercial treaty between the Burmese and the British, which established timber as a Burmese royal monopoly, secured the Burmese the right to purchase guns in British territory, and gave the British easier and more secure access to Burmese teak markets.¹

This article examines these consequential trade negotiations in order to consider the relationship between religious expression and the economic control of teak in the last Burmese kingdom. It seeks to contribute to the study of Burmese Buddhism by drawing attention to economic systems that have not yet received adequate attention in this field. I focus on a collection of documents held in the British Library and related documents from Burmese and American archives to ask the following questions: How did King Mindon connect the teak industry and related economic policies to the sāsana? What were the cultural and historical contexts that allowed King Mindon's claim about teak's special status within Buddhist practice in the country to succeed in these negotiations? What Buddhist traditions was King Mindon drawing upon? What was the nature of the British relationship to Buddhism that primed them to accept this claim? How did European efforts to define "Buddhism" in the model of "Christianity" play into both the Burmese and British positions? And what does this case study suggest about the ways that scholars of Burmese religions should think about economics and Western influence in the nineteenth century?

I argue that these teak-and-rifle negotiations hinged on traditional Buddhist understandings of the king as the owner of the earth (P. bhū misāmika), ruler of the economy, and lead merit-generator, as well as on a British practice of defining Buddhism as an elevated world religion that, according to British colonial policy, should not be interfered with. By studying the rhetorical strategies used in these negotiations—and in related commercial treaties and royal pronouncements—we will see how control of material resources was established through expressions of concern for the promotion of Buddhism. These negotiations reveal the co-constitutive relationship between economic, religious, and political systems in nineteenth-century Burma.

In the first section, I will proceed to build this argument by first situating my economic approach within the landscape of Burmese Buddhist studies. Then in the second section, I will examine the Enfield-teak negotiations of 1864–65 in detail to show how King Mindon made Buddhist claims to economic authority. In the third section, I will explore the Buddhist traditions King Mindon invoked to justify those claims. In the fourth section, I will explore the romantic attitudes that the British had toward both teak and Buddhism that primed them to accept those claims. In the fifth section, I will investigate archival sources that reference the ways the teak industry shaped the lives of less powerful communities. This final section reveals how the powerful teak industry worked with Buddhist and Christian institutions to promote particular political leaders, ethnic groups, and religious communities at the expense of those with less access to material resources and social mobility. Both Christian missionary networks and the royally sponsored Buddhism of the Bamar majority used teak to fight for religious, political, and economic control of Burma.

Situating These Negotiations within Scholarship on Burmese Buddhism

This article demonstrates the importance of economic conflict within religious authorizing practices by attending to the specific relationship Buddhism had to the economic exploitation of teak in this period. As Kathryn Lofton succinctly puts it, "religion is an inherently political and economic category." This is because religion, Lofton explains, "is always organizing" (Lofton 2017:4). Whether we think of religion in nineteenth-century Burma in terms of the sāsana (the collection of the Buddha's teachings and the institutions that preserve and promote it) or in terms of emerging lists of world religions penned by Europeans, we are thinking about organizational practices. It is these practices that produced the modern category "Buddhism." And these practices clearly operated within and through power structures that simultaneously organized political hierarchies and the economic mechanisms that concentrated and distributed wealth and resources. The work of the Burmese royal court is an obvious example of this. King Mindon's campaigns to secure the country's economy and independence while standing at the edge of the British Empire were regularly cast as projects for the sāsana. Within the logic of Burmese Buddhism and the larger Theravada tradition, a king made his country prosperous by making it a place where the purest forms of the Buddha's teachings and monastic institutions could flourish, and vice versa a king made his country an abode of the sāsana by making the country rich enough to support the merit-making practices that promoted the sāsana.

King Mindon was especially committed to displaying himself as following in these traditions. As his monastic tutor Paññasāmi put it in his royal Buddhist chronicle (B. thathanawin) the Sāsanavamsa: "under the patronage of the virtuous king, in the realm of Burma, the religion of the Perfectly Enlightened One is caused to shine brilliantly, and it reaches development, maturation, and prosperity."² To make Buddhism shine brilliantly, King Mindon spent an extraordinary amount of the country's resources building new pagodas and restoring old ones, sponsoring monasteries and monastic exams, and renovating important shrines. Buddhism was especially expensive in this period of political contestation.

This article draws attention to the ways that Buddhism has given rise to particular economic systems and the ways that economic systems have supported particular forms of Buddhism by building on recent groundbreaking scholarship that has uncovered interactions between political and religious systems in Burma. I seek to further this postcolonial turn toward power analysis in Burmese Buddhist studies while also calling for more consideration of the role that economic policies and material resources play in these interactions. Two examples of this groundbreaking scholarship on religion and power dynamics in Burmese history are Erik Braun's Birth of Insight and Alicia Turner's Saving Buddhism (Braun 2013; Turner 2014). These books reinvigorated the study of Burmese Buddhism with their excellent explorations of the ways that late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century monks and lay people creatively drew on Buddhist traditions to protect the sāsana during British colonial occupation. Both works make convincing arguments that Burmese leaders and communities used Buddhist resources, such as textual traditions and meditation techniques, along with new technologies, such as the printing press, to ward off an acceleration of the sāsana's decline and renegotiate the conditions of British colonialism. While a detailed analysis of economic policies and materially marginalized communities is outside the scope of these projects, the light they shed on the previously unstudied history of Burmese Buddhist developments in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries helps illuminate the path this article is taking toward studying the financial instruments and economic-religious logics developed in this and earlier periods. These works also highlight a pervasive sense among Burmese Buddhists that the British threat to the country's monarchy would lead not only to a political disaster but also to a cosmological demise, a sense that affected the royal and popular attachment to control over the teak industry. The loss of a strong Burmese king at the center of the realm would mean the loss of a secure system for the economic advancement in this life and the Buddhist advancement toward salvation in future lives.

Since the publications of Birth of Insight and Saving Buddhism, long-forming projects on Burma have come to public light to further explore the ways that religious practices—both popular and elite—have interacted with larger cultural conditions. In 2018 alone, three remarkable books were published on Burmese Buddhism, including D. Christian Lammerts's Buddhist Law in Burma, which examines dhamma-sattha texts and jurisprudence from 1250 to 1850 to show the close-knit relationship between law and Buddhism in Burma, the only country where Buddhist law claims jurisdiction over all members of society (Lammerts 2018). The Burmese Buddhist Teak section of this article draws on Buddhist Law in Burma to consider connections between the legal theories Lammerts studies and the economic and religious practices central to the Enfield-teak negotiations. A second notable book on Burmese Buddhism is Alexandra Green's Buddhist Visual Culture, Rhetoric, and Narrative in Late Burmese Wall Paintings, which studies how Burma's Buddhist communities have visually represented powerful paths to desirable rebirths and ultimate enlightenment (Green 2018). Finally, Thomas Patton's The Buddha's Wizards turns to twentieth-century and twenty-first century popular developments in Burmese Buddhism with special attention to questions of how power is structured, affectively expressed, and understood to be harnessed in the weizzā tradition (Patton 2018). Patton's analysis of weizzā networks in the British colonial period demonstrates how those people and practices worked to harness special weizzā power to defend the sāsana against perceived spiritual attack and the foreclosure of Buddhist healing and advancement toward nirvana.

Each of these works pays some attention to economic concerns, but this burgeoning field of Burmese Buddhist studies still seems hesitant to pay sustained attention to commercial systems and the relationships between revered Buddhist systems and practices that consolidate wealth among the elite. This article will explore these systems by examining the economic structures that mobilize natural and material resources and the religious theories that empower those economic structures.³

Enfield-Teak Negotiations

The economic activities at the center of this article are the 1864–65 negotiations between the Burmese royal court, the British government, and the Scottish-born private teak merchant William Wallace. As we will see, these negotiations hinged on an agreement that there was a special Buddhist relationship between teak and the Burmese kingdom. After examining the four letters documenting the insertion of this religious clause and the two most relevant commercial treaties, I turn to authoritative Buddhist texts that connect the Buddha to teak and the king to its profits to understand the clause's Theravada and Konbaung contexts.

On September 7, 1864, the chief commissioner of British Burma, Arthur Purves Phayre, wrote the secretary of state for India, Colonel H. M. Durand, to report that a Rangoon merchant, W. Wallace, applied for permission to supply the Burmese government with 3,600 Enfield Rifles. Phayre simply notes that Wallace "… has the lease of several teak forests within the Burmese territory" (Phayre 1864). He did not add that Wallace had won the lucrative contracts to lease those forests with Phayre's help, most importantly an 1862 contract with King Mindon to extract teak from the prized Pyinmana forests near the Burma-British border (Bryant 1996:64). These contracts positioned Wallace, with his brothers and associates, to found the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation Limited in 1863, a hugely successful company that would become India's second oldest publicly quoted company and is still flourishing today as one of the four publicly listed companies of the Mumbai-based Wadia Group.⁴

In the mid-nineteenth century, teak supplied a booming timber industry because of the tall tree's suitability to ship-building. Teak is resistant not only to water corrosion but also to termites. This resistance allowed this tropical tree to grow large and its timber to remain strong at sea.⁵ Furthermore, by the early nineteenth century, the British Empire's insatiable desire for overseas political and economic exploits was already depleting oak forests. As oak supplies dwindled, the British began targeting the teak forests of Malabar in southern India, but those forests were exhausted by the 1820s (Bryant 1993). Therefore, when the British annexed Tenasserim in southern Burma after the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–26, they turned to the high-quality teak in Burma's tropical forests, which were conveniently located at the edge of its Indian dominion and accessible through the Bay of Bengal via the Irrawaddy River. Wallace and his business partners, working out of the port city of Rangoon (modern-day Yangon), quickly became teak tycoons by forming relationships with King Mindon and Phayre. These relationships were built upon the Westerners' familiarity with Burmese networks and culture and with King Mindon's willingness to use teak as a bargaining chip—and also actual currency—to attain Western merchandise, such as steamers, telegraphs, and guns (Myint 2012:275–79).

While Phayre's September 7, 1864, letter did not go into detail about Wallace's prominence in the teak business, it is likely that his name was known in the secretary of state's office. What Phayre did say in his letter was that he understood that "… the Burmese Government is more likely to remain quiet and to suppress its annoyance if it lacks arms and ammunition, than if well supplied with both." Phayre was quick to add that even though the Burmese would be less troublesome to the British without guns, it would be "ungracious" not to occasionally allow firearms to pass through British territory. Phayre also pointed out that the "… Enfield Rifle is the least dangerous firearm which could be supplied to the Burmese. In a short time it is probable that, from careless handling, the rifles would be less effective than the old musket. …" (Phayre 1864). This letter is striking in two ways: (1) for this denigrating strategy of supplying the Burmese with a flawed weapon and expecting them not to know how to use or care for it properly and (2) for how it describes the British possibility of allowing war materials to pass through its territory as a matter of graciousness. For the British to seem like courteous neighbors, they should, every once in a while, let the Burmese buy some guns.⁶

A month later, on October 7, 1864, the Indian secretary of state formally denied Wallace's application (Durand 1864). Four months after that, on February 7, 1865, Phayre wrote the Indian secretary of state again and explained that "the King is somewhat vexed" by the government's decision not to let Wallace pass guns through the British territory so that he could "arm the palace guards." King Mindon had explained to C. Williams, Phayre's agent at Mandalay, that he understood that the 1862 treaty between the Burmese and the British, the Treaty for the Protection of Trade, allowed the Burmese to import arms. This 1862 treaty was the third commercial treaty signed between the two countries (the first two were from 1826 and were largely responsible for ending the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–26; no treaty was signed after the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852). The 1862 treaty did not explicitly mention arms; it only described "goods" in general when it established that the British and the Burmese would tax commodities traveling through their countries at a rate of 1 percent. The treaty also declared protections for "traders and other subjects" of the Burmese and British governments traveling and living in these neighboring countries (Ireland 1907:349–51). Clearly King Mindon signed the 1862 treaty expecting that weapons and arms dealers would be able to move from British territory into the Burmese kingdom. Phayre was also under this impression and told King Mindon that he "did not anticipate any difficulty as to muskets or Enfield rifles being allowed to pass." Phayre wrote that if the British government did allow King Mindon to get his desired weapons, "the indulgence would have good effect." As with his earlier strategy of appealing to British manners and gracious sensibilities, here Phayre argued for the allowance as an "indulgence," a harmless scenario of the great British Empire cosseting the small Asian country. As we will see in the British Romance with Teak and Buddhism section below, this demeaning, patronizing attitude pervaded the teak business in this period, leading to the institution of forestry techniques and labor structures that demoted indigenous Burmese timber technologies and submitted Burmese foresters to control by British, German, and Dutch managers.

In addition to a telling expression of the British's condescending attitude toward the Burmese, Phayre's February 7, 1865, letter included the passages about teak and Buddhism most relevant to this article. These passages explain that King Mindon had started to prohibit timber exports because "… teak timber is alone used at the capital for sacred and royal buildings, so that the King deems it to be his prerogative to prohibit the export of it when it is required for such building." Phayre submitted a copy of Wallace's diary (from January 9, 1864, through February 17, 1865) in which Wallace recorded the king's minister (B. wun gyi) saying, "timber is required here for the Kyongs and Zayats" (Phayre 1865). In other words, the king and his ministers insisted that royally sponsored Buddhist monasteries and public buildings in Mandalay needed teak, and therefore the king was justified in prohibiting British merchants from buying the timber from Burmese territory.

This February 7 letter that relayed Burmese threats to use Buddhist needs to withhold teak convinced the British government to finally let the Burmese import guns through their territory. In just two weeks after Phayre wrote it, the British replied—the fastest correspondence turnaround of these negotiations—that they would allow "as a special case, the importation of 2,000 Rifles." The secretary of state explained that he wanted this special allowance to give King Mindon "confidence in the permanence of the friendly relations cemented by the conclusion of the treaty of 1862" (Durand 1865). This letter did not make an explicit mention of monasteries or Buddhism, but the British surely wanted to guarantee that merchants—especially lucrative teak merchants—could export Burmese resources from the Buddhist kingdom, no matter how many Buddhist monasteries or royal buildings the Burmese needed to build.

These economic negotiations of 1864–65 contributed not only to the belligerence of the 1866 Burmese rebellion and the resultant three-month-long civil war but also to the fourth—and what would be the final—commercial treaty between the Burmese kingdom and the British government: the Treaty for the Further Protection of Trade, which was signed on October 15, 1867. This treaty is significant for establishing timber as a royal monopoly (along with earth-oil and precious stones) and for allowing the Burmese government to purchase "arms, ammunition and war material generally in British territory, subject only to the consent and approval in each case of the Chief Commissioner of British Burma and Agent to the Governor-General" (Ireland 1907:352). Clearly, the Burmese and the British found that the 1862 treaty had been too vague to protect the Enfield-teak negotiations, so they devised a new treaty that directly addressed the Burmese royal monopoly over teak and gave more power to Phayre's office to approve arms sales. The Burmese royal monopoly over teak that the treaty established worked out quite well for merchants like William Wallace who had forest contracts with King Mindon. For example, in years 1870 and 1871 those holding licenses extracted over 34,321 tons of teak, in comparison to 21,756 tons they extracted in 1866 and 1867—a 58% increase (Bryant 1997:66). Teak was a big business for both the Burmese and British traders. The question that remains is, though, how, exactly, does Buddhism fit into this story?

Burmese Buddhist Teak

What did King Mindon mean when he suggested that there was a special connection between Buddhism and teak? And why did the British seem so quick to accept his argument that he urgently needed this particular timber to build monasteries and therefore was justified in prohibiting its export? Is there anything in the larger Theravada tradition or in Burmese iterations that suggests that teak is a particularly Buddhist wood? The short answer to the last question is no, not really. There is one curious connection between the Buddha and teak (P. sāka) mentioned in the Tipitaka that I will briefly note, but I will instead spotlight the Theravada tradition in which the king is understood to be the bhūmisāmika, or owner of the land, as the Buddhist precedent for the religious-economic negotiations under consideration here. By considering the history of this bhūmisāmika tradition and King Mindon's particular application of it, we will see how co-constitutive Buddhist flourishing and economic prosperity were in the religious imagination of this period, which will help us understand how this religious imagination was expressed in the Enfield-teak negotiations.

First, I will narrate the curious story about the Buddha's family connection with teak and consider the possibility of King Mindon using it to promote the Burmese teak industry. In the Ambaṭṭha Sutta, the third discourse in the Dīgha Nikāya, the Buddha tells the story of ancestors from his clan who, after being banished from the kingdom, retreated into a teak grove. In an attempt to keep their lineage pure, brothers and sisters slept together (P. saṃvāsaṃ kappentī). The head of the clan, King Okkāka, who had banished these relatives in the first place, asked for their whereabouts. His ministers reported that they had taken up in a teak grove, and King Okkāka then took the term for teak, sāka, and turned it into the name of the clan, Sakyans, exclaiming "these princes are truly Sakyans. Indeed, they are the ultimate Sakyans" (P. sakyā vata, bho, kumārā, paramasakyā vata, bho, kumārā).⁷ The Buddha simply relates this history of exile and inbreeding to explain how his clan got its name. This family backstory is not told as a caution against incest or as a celebration of the benefits of living next to teak trees; instead, it is told as part of the Buddha's strategy of humbling a young, brazen skeptic, Ambaṭṭha, by explaining that Ambaṭṭha descended from a slave-girl of the Sakyans. The Buddha tells the family histories of Ambaṭtḥa and his own family, the Sakyans, to show that the Buddha's family had a history of royalty and concern with the purity of their line, whereas Ambaṭṭha's history was one of humiliating slavery and inferiority. Ämbaṭṭha's pride was then diminished, and he was able to see the Buddha as an enlightened teacher.⁸

This canonical story has the potential to be used to declare the Buddha the "Teak Sage" and to claim that the Burmese have a special connection to the Buddha because of their prized teak forests and their celebrated history of promoting Buddhism. Yet it seems that King Mindon never made this declaration or claim. At the time of these very teak negotiations, King Mindon was commissioning the inscription of this story—along with the rest of the Tipiṭaka—on 729 marble slabs (each five feet tall, with gold lettering, adorned with precious gems, and enshrined). But there is no record of him or any of his ministers drawing special attention to this canonical story about the Buddha's ancestral connection to teak and connecting it to the Konbaung kingdom's economic or political interests. If anything, it is more remarkable that King Mindon did not play into the Western Orientalist fixation on the historical Buddha by invoking him in these negotiations. The absence of any mention of the Buddha who was capturing European and American imaginations suggests that the kind of Buddhism that King Mindon was bringing to the table was not entirely determined by the British romantic attitudes toward Buddhism explored in the next section.

It seems that the key Buddhist precedent King Mindon was instead invoking in his teak negotiations is the connection between royal ownership of the land and the royal obligation to support Buddhist institutions. King Mindon, like other rulers in the Konbaung dynasty, portrayed himself in the model of famous ancient Indian Buddhist emperors (P. cakkavattin), such as the archetypal King Ashoka, as well as in the model of the legendary first king of the world, Mahāsammata. As Lammerts explains, Southeast Asian vernacular Buddhist literature and Pali literature have a long tradition of telling stories of King Mahāsammata in which he serves as an exemplar for Burmese rulers. King Mahāsammata is said to be the forbearer of the Sakyan lineage, a previous incarnation of the Buddha, and, most importantly for this analysis, this world's very first king. In this literature, King Mahāsammata is described as bhū misāmika, the owner of the earth or land. For example, Lammerts analyzes a Burmese dhammasattha text written by the mid-seventeenth-century monk Tipiṭakālaṅkāra that refers to King Mahāsammata in its discussion of the longstanding practice of a community giving a share of the produce it grows to an authority figure. Tipiṭakālaṅkāra writes that the first humans harvested rice, divided it into ten shares, and gave one share to their first king, Mahāsammata, since he was understood to be the bhū misāmika. Lammerts explains that, in Tipiṭakālaṅkā ra's writings and in the larger literary tradition of which it is a part, this tithe is justified as the "old practice of Jambudīpa" (P. jambudīpe porāṇakacāritta) and that interpretations of Mahāsammata's tithing practice "… served as the principal Buddhist scriptural justification for royal taxation in the amount of one-tenth of all produce that was advanced in numerous Burmese administrative treatises in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (Lammerts 2018:68). Indeed, King Mindon explicitly drew on this bhū misāmika tradition and this 10-percent taxation practice when he rewrote the Burmese tax code after he took over the throne. Mindon explained his new tax system as a noble Buddhist practice. Similarly, he explained his other economic reforms as part of his traditional royal duty to make the kingdom prosperous so that it could promote Buddhism.

As Myo Myint has shown, King Mindon knew that previous Konbaung kings, especially Mindon's predecessor, King Pagan, had taxed their subjects excessively, so "King Mindon issued a royal order that no more than one-tenth of the produce should be taken as tax" (Myint 2012:255). This economic policy was part of a more complicated set of reforms that included the introduction of a salary system, so King Mindon publicized the 10-percent tax system as a longstanding noble Buddhist practice and, as Myo Myint explains, "justified his action in Buddhist terms intelligible to the common people" (Myint 2012:261–62). The Burmese were primed to accept Mindon's tax reforms as in line with proper Buddhist practice and to accept the larger conceit that the king's duty to generate wealth for his family and his kingdom was intertwined with his duty to promote Buddhism. Furthermore, King Mindon added the arming of soldiers to his central economic-religious responsibility. For example, in the official royal order he issued on March 21, 1862, to explain his decision to move the royal capital to Mandalay, King Mindon decreed that he had created this new capital city "in order to bring prosperity to the Royal Family for several generations to come, to the Buddha's religion and to all the creatures in general" and that this capital featured "a multitude of soldiers to protect it from all enemies" (Tun 1989:117). Two years later, King Mindon would start manipulating the teak business with Buddhist claims in order to get those soldiers new Enfield Rifles.

King Mindon also invoked an image of himself as bhū misāmika in other contexts, such as when he promoted his extraordinary generosity in letting his Burmese citizens share in the riches of the earth he owned. For example, in a royal order he had proclaimed on July 19, 1854, regarding found treasure, King Mindon explained to his citizens that he was always committed to the righteous path of lokattacariya, of actions for the sake of the world and its inhabitants. Therefore, when his subjects found treasure in the ground—riches that would have normally been considered asāmika, without an owner, and have defaulted to the king because he was the owner of the earth—King Mindon made an exception and let the finders keep the treasure. King Mindon's 1854 order made a Buddhist argument that it was the treasure finder's accumulated merit that led him to that treasure; therefore, it was just for him to enjoy the fruits of the good deeds he had performed in his past lives. Thus, in one short royal order, King Mindon presented himself as the bhū misāmika who was so generous and reverent toward the Buddha's teachings about merit that he was willing to waive his right to the treasures of the land he owned (Tun 1989:22).

Students of Burmese history will find King Mindon's rhetorical pairing of Buddhist and economic prosperity familiar. Indeed, it seems that this standard royal trope of making the kingdom rich and Buddhist by supporting business and consolidating power is so common that it often goes unexamined. Lammerts's study of the Burmese dhammasattha tradition is therefore exceptional in its attention to the textual particularities and literary logics of how economics and religion come together in Burma. Lammerts's study of Burmese jurisprudence shows how the Buddhist law was valued for "its capacity to encourage prosperity" by justly resolving economic disputes (Lammerts 2018:188). Lammerts goes on to explain that the evidence we have from manuscript colophons and donative inscriptions shows how intertwined economic prosperity, rituals of merit-making, and kingship have been in the Burmese literary imagination. Textual evidence regularly describes merchants, moneylenders, and farmers as crucial members of the Buddhist community because they generate the very wealth that preserves the sāsana through rituals of merit-making. Lammerts shows how dhammasattha and related texts assert that "kings and judges have a special interest in implying dhammasattha for such purpose, since they, according to this passage, will receive one-sixth of a share of all merit—or demerit—generated within the country" (Lammerts 2018:188). Konbaung kings, then, had Buddhist texts, traditions, and personal incentives to justify taxing their subjects and pressing them to perform acts of merit.

King Mindon certainly saw his personal store of merit and prospects in future lives to be directly dependent on how the Burmese kingdom and the sāsana flourished during his reign. Furthermore, he saw his personal connections to economic systems and Burmese Buddhism to be a key resource in his negotiations with the British. Indeed, Buddhism was one of King Mindon's most powerful tools for asserting Burmese authority in the face of British colonial incursions. As Myo Myint's puts it, "religion in [King Mindon's] hands became not only a weapon of statecraft to consolidate his rule but also an instrument with which to deal with the British" (Myint 2012:191). Thus, King Mindon not only spent exorbitant amounts of resources on Buddhist projects—Myo Myint has calculated that he spent a total of 226 million kyats on Sangha support and Buddhist donations during his reign (Myint 2012:192)—but he also called on Buddhist traditions during key negotiations with the British. The Enfield-teak negotiations of 1864–65 are a prime example of King Mindon using Buddhism to promote Burmese independence. In the following section, we will explore the British relationships to teak and Buddhism that made them so susceptible to King Mindon's strategies.

British Romance with Teak and Buddhism

In the most basic economic terms, Britain wanted teak for shipbuilding after oak forests were depleted, and Burma had ample teak forests. Yet to see this relationship in purely economic, supply-and-demand terms misses a romantic element to Britain's relationship to the wood. As Raymond Bryant has shown, the British idealized Burma's teak forests, seeing them as "the 'jewel in the crown' of the British-Indian forest estate" as well as "the focus of intense … romantic representation" (Bryant 1996:170). Bryant argues that the British saw their cultivation of the special tree as a powerful symbol of progress, which justified their colonization of Burma as part of a larger project of applying Western enlightenment ideas and science to increase wealth for both the British and the Burmese (Bryant 1996:170). This section builds on Bryant's work to suggest that Britain's romantic relationship to teak became entangled with the empire's romantic relationship to Buddhism during the Enfield-teak negotiations. I wager here that a British approach of justified extraction shaped both burgeoning industries of teak commodification and the academic study of Buddhism. The Western empire conquered both industries by claiming that its superior scientific methods uniquely positioned it to care for these attractive Asian resources. Both teak and the newly defined world religion "Buddhism" fueled Britain's imperial project by building its fleet of world-conquering ships and its reputation as a Christian empire that protected the world's religious pluralism.

"There is probably more romance wrapped up in the history of the great teak forests of Burma … than in any other afforested region of similar size in the world," wrote the English forester E. P. Stebbing in the journal Nature in 1947 (as quoted in Bryant 1996:169). Bryant uses Stebbing's observation because it succinctly sets up his argument that Britain's forest management in colonial Burma was represented as an idealized expression of progress. For Burmese teak management to symbolize the Western export of enlightenment ideals of progress, the British control of the country's forests needed to yield increased timber exports through the application of systematic extraction. Bryant classifies Burma's forest politics during the era of the Anglo-Burmese Wars into two periods: pre-1856 "laissez-faire forestry," in which British officials supported a burgeoning timber industry run by private merchants; and 1856–81 "scientific forestry," in which colonial administrators embraced Western technology and government oversight in the management of colonial forests (Bryant 1997:17).

The pre 1856 period was influenced by philosophies of economic liberalism (most famously advanced by Adam Smith) that argued for limited government interference and free trade, but this led to overharvesting in the forests of Tenasserim, the first area of British teak cultivation. This teak depletion in southern Burma led to a new approach in 1856 when Dietrich Brandis, the German forester described today as the father of tropical forestry, arrived in Pegu and began aggressively applying Western scientific approaches to forest management (Bryant 1996:171).⁹ This scientific approach lasted until the passage of the 1881 Burma Forest Act and was therefore the British approach to teak cultivation that was in place during the Enfield-teak negotiations of 1864–65.

To understand the aspects of the scientific approach that were most influential during the Burmese-British economic negotiations, we should consider how teak exploitation under this approach relied on two major systems, the first being the system known as girdling, a method of constriction used to kill trees two to three years before they are cut down. Once girdled, the green teak trees dry out to the point that they can float and therefore be transportable by water. Girdling not only made the export of teak along Burma's river systems more efficient, but it also contributed to a refined surveying system in which a large staff of managers would keep detailed schedules and maps of timber extraction (Bryant 1996:172).

This led to the second key system of scientific forestry in which the British introduced bureaucratic management and staffing methods that quickly became racialized as German and Dutch forestry experts were hired to fill "superior" staff positions to monitor and survey teak forests and Burmese foresters were placed in "subordinate" staff positions in which they enforced colonial mandates in small areas designated for their supervision (Bryant 1997:48). This racist hierarchy of labor combined with an increased criticism of Burma's indigenous teak cultivation practices positioned white Europeans as justified extractors of timber who possessed not only superior scientific methods but also the ability to use them to make the teak industry more lucrative for Europeans and Burmese traders (Bryant 1997:48). Both sides of the Enfield-teak negotiations were well aware of these racialized power structures, and for the Burmese, the negotiations were a way to contest the increasing white dominance of the industry by withholding teak exports and claiming Burmese authority over the wood. Furthermore, we should recognize that the Burmese brought the issue of Buddhism into the negotiations at a particular moment in Britain's relationship to the Asian religion that influenced its positions on teak.

The notion that Burma had a precious resource but needed Britain to help cultivate it echoed contemporary colonial ideas about Buddhism. Specifically, the British imagined Buddhism as an extraordinary ancient religious system that had become corrupted in the hands of modern Asian communities and was in need of European caretakers who could use their scientific philological practices to study and preserve its manuscripts and their advanced archaeology to systematically unearth its history. This Orientalist attitude of denigrating living Asian communities while simultaneously defining Buddhism as a great world religion in need of respect and care has been well documented in scholarship over the last thirty years. Philip Almond's groundbreaking 1988 book, The British Discovery of Buddhism, showed how the British created Buddhism as an important independent religion in the Victorian era (Almond 1988). Tomoko Masuzawa built on postcolonial studies like Almond's in The Invention of World Religions to brilliantly demonstrate how nineteenth-century projects of counting world religions worked to place Protestant Christianity at the top and presented Europe as the glorified protector of pluralism (Masuzawa 2005). These European projects of defining Buddhism in the model of Christianity were happening at the same time that the British were taking over the Burmese teak industry. The British government and officials working in Burma had learned to see Burma's Theravada traditions as belonging to the increasingly admired world religion "Buddhism." Thus, when King Mindon and his ministers argued that they had a special need for teak to build Buddhist monasteries and shrines, the British were primed to first see this as religious activity and, second, to see it as their duty to protect it.

Of course, King Mindon and his court understood themselves to be the true protectors of Buddhism and the British to be one of the greatest threats to the sāsana, not an ally in its preservation. Yet, they were also aware of a growing foreign respect for Buddhism that they could utilize to make claims for a Burmese right to free exercise of Buddhism, and perhaps were cognizant of a relatively recent imperial policy of non-interference with the religions of colonial subjects that had been established by Queen Victoria after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (which is also known as the First War of Indian Independence and the Sepoy Mutiny).¹⁰ Thus, when King Mindon saw the British interfering in their arms deals, he invoked the Burmese's right to build Buddhist structures and therefore reserve teak for this revered work.

Notably for this study of the Enfield-teak negotiations, the rebellion in India was triggered by the new Pattern 1853 Enfield Rifle, which required soldiers to release gunpowder by biting a paper cartridge containing a bullet that was rumored to be greased with beef and pork products. Hindu and Muslim soldiers refused to risk ingesting the forbidden animal fat and rebelled against their colonial overlords. Their successful resistance led to Queen Victoria's new religious non-interference policy.¹¹ As Braun has shown, this made the Burmese even more concerned about who would protect the sāsana in the likely case that their Buddhist king was deposed by this kala queen (Braun 2014:58). Unlike the British, who saw their cultivation of Burmese teak and their appropriation of the study of Buddhism as signs of their noble, progressive contributions to the world, the Burmese saw British occupation and their extraction of Burmese resources as evidence of the sāsana's advancing decline. It was not just the leaders who stood to lose the most power and wealth who saw teak as a symbol of great progress or decline, people in lower socioeconomic positions also invested symbolic power in teak, as we will see in the following section. These less-privileged communities absorbed ideas about teak's cultural cachet and were subjected to both hardship and favor by the British and Burmese teak industries and their cooperating Buddhist networks.

Teak for the Less Privileged

The records considered so far have come from elite sources—most notably the British government, the Burmese royal court, and Theravada Buddhist monastic institutions. These sources show that the Enfield-teak negotiations depended on powerful Burmese royal court figures using traditional Buddhist ideas about the king as bhumisāmika and the most important merit-generator, and they also depended on a romantic British attitude toward teak and Buddhism. It is difficult to find evidence from this period that represents the ways in which royal and British power was imagined by less-powerful and less-privileged figures, especially in relation to the teak industry. There is one archive, however, that I will now examine that offers rare insights into ways this wood signified economic, cultural, and religious values among more marginalized communities in nineteenth-century Burma. This is the archive of the American Baptist Mission to Burma, which began in 1813 and quickly amassed a rich collection of diaries, letters, reports, account books, cultural artifacts, field notes, and popular publications based on interactions between local people in Burma and American and convert missionaries over the course of the mission's active and wide-ranging nineteenth-century evangelical operation. This archive's insights into the impact of the teak industry show it could be both cruel and beneficial for communities at a remove from British authorities and elite Burmese Buddhists.

This archive is extraordinary for the way it spotlights the lives of people who did not belong to the Bamar ethnic majority or to the British colonial class. Minority communities—such as the Karen, the Chin, and the Kachin—proved far more interested in Baptist Christianity than the dominant Bamar. The American missionaries, who tended to move permanently to Burma and establish families in the country, had complicated relationships with the British colonial officials who began arriving around a decade after the establishment of the American mission and tended to stay there only temporarily on tours. Given these different approaches to participation in Burmese society, as well as their different national backgrounds and commitments to religious work, American missionary interactions with the British occupation of Burma ranged from enabling cooperation to active resistance. We must keep in mind, however, that no matter how much the American Baptist mission imagined itself as independent, its identity as a Western, Christian, and modern force often meant that its efforts were co-opted by larger imperial forces, both British and Burmese. This pervasive nature of imperialism means that it influenced the production and preservation of the Baptist archival materials analyzed in this section in ways both obvious and subtle. Therefore, to get some sense from these largely English language materials of what teak meant to people of lower social, economic, and racial status, we need to be sensitive to those influences. I will now attempt to do that as I argue that these American-generated documents contain glimpses into a widespread sense of teak as signifying social and religious power.¹²

As we will see, some communities managed to use teak to assert social and religious power for themselves and their allies, whereas the teak business became an agent of disempowerment for less fortunate communities. One of these less fortunate communities was a village of Karens in Toungoo with a sizable Christian population. During the very time of the Enfield-teak negotiations, a group of Christian Karens in this village were forced to desert their homes and their Baptist chapel because the forest department saw these dwellings as a threat to young teak trees in the region. Edmund Cross, an American Baptist missionary in Burma, recorded the following in his journal from July 1867:

The reason of this desertion of their village and chapel is … that they have been driven away by young teak trees. The teak forests are strictly and carefully guarded by the government; and for any one to destroy a young teak tree, subjects him to a fine of fifty rupees or more. When the Karens cut away the jungle for a village, or for a ricefield, the seeds of the teak, which have before lain dormant, spring up and soon occupy the soil, and for fear of spoiling them, the Karens must quit the village or their field; and there seems to be no consideration in their favor on the part of the forest department of the government. These officers look upon the people and their cultivation as a decided nuisance, which they would see abated. It is, however, a small thing in the eyes of these men that the people aid them by opening the jungle long enough to allow the young teaks to sprout up and get a start in their growth.

(Cross 1867:196)

This scene penned by Cross shows these Karens trying to find spaces in the jungle to live and grow food, which was a common practice for this minority group who has historically been pushed out of Burma's developed lowlands.¹³ Part of the natural process of this relocation was that the soil became tilled as larger trees were cut down, which encouraged teak seeds to sprout. The British forest department, which was in charge of the teak forests in lower Burma in this period, took advantage of this Karen labor to increase their teak production and then forcibly remove the Karen from that land. Here we have an example of the natural process of teak growth feeding into violent British colonial occupation. The teak sprouts were more valuable to the British Raj than these Karen people.

The teak business did not prove detrimental to all Karen communities, however. In 1875, a decade after the Enfield-teak negotiations, the American Baptist missionary S. B. Rand went to visit the remote Karen village of Tah Krai. Rand had visited that village six years prior and said that he "could not help contrasting" those visits because in the earlier one, he had stayed in an "old tumble-down chapel … and there was not a single substantial wooden house in the place." But during his 1875 visit, he stayed in a recently built chapel with "a new and substantial teak parsonage, and six other houses, built of timber." Rand wrote that he "congratulated them on their material prosperity, and hoped that they had improved in the heart also" (Rand 1876:239). Rand's patronizing comment about hoping this group had also improved in the heart probably mostly speaks to his critical attitude toward his Karen hosts (his letter goes on to claim that there is still great work to be done in "trying to Christianize the Christians"); yet, even with the influence of this condescending concern, this text still offers an informative anecdote in which teak possession promotes an image of elevated religious standing and economic prosperity in general. When considered alongside similar kinds of reports, we can gain confidence that this kind of equation between financial and religious success was common and widespread. For example, on September 12, 1875, Henry Soltau wrote in his journal that when he approached the town of Henthada, "a few substantial teak houses among the native huts give the place an aspect of importance" (Soltau 1876:145). If a minority community could manage to obtain teak timber and construct a few houses or a religious building, their village would be seen as more important and prosperous.

Some American missionaries, though, worried about contributing to the popular notion that to be respectable, one had to live in a teak home or worship in a teak building. Stella K. Bennett, for example, in a letter about the education of girls in Burma, wrote, that it was "… not necessary that they should have expensive teak houses, furnished in European style, in order to be healthy and comfortable." She went on to explain that "very few of the great mass can have such houses; and it seems to me that our business as missionaries is to adapt ourselves to their condition and necessities, rather than to attempt at once to lift them to our habits and tastes" (Bennett [1852]1872:220). While missionaries like Bennett pushed back against this taste for teak, their foreign attitudes affected Burmese attitudes toward teak, and vice versa. Attitudes are contagious, especially when driven by a quickly growing economy.

That growing economy was girdling as many teak trees as it could, as fast as it could. As control of the teak forests and timber export processes was taken over by British and Burmese networks, those with access to those networks could use the teak for purposes outside the main work of maximizing profits. One way prominent teak regulators and merchants would use teak for reasons other than selling the commodity at the going rate was to give it at discounts to communities as a kind of religious donation. King Mindon ostentatiously did this with teak timber in Mandalay, but Christian figures were less overt in how they used teak to support Christian institutions. One of the most powerful people in the teak business was Captain W. J. Seaton. His official title was conservator of forests in British Burma, but he used this position to help support Christian missionary work in Burma as well as to protect Burmese forests from depletion. According to a record from 1873, Seaton would allow Burmese and Karen Christian communities to purchase teak at "a nominal rate" to build chapels. One chapel built through Seaton's discount was in Phung-Day near Prome (Simons and Stevens 1873:237). In this economic system, identification as Christian allowed these Burmese and Karen communities to access teak at reduced prices that they could then use to promote themselves within Burmese society as people of greater means and deserving of more respect from the Buddhist majority. The British could therefore endow Christian convert communities with the prized wood to undermine the power of Buddhism in Burma, which, as I have been arguing, was inextricably part of Burma's political and economic power.

Another example of convert Christians receiving economic favors in the form of teak to support their growing social status comes from a report by Rev. H. Morrow, a Savoy-based missionary, who wrote in 1881 about the British government giving him permission to take teak logs that had drifted ashore in the Tavoy River at "one-tenth of the value at an auction sale." Morrow wrote that his community of local Christians was "so poor and [could] give so little, that [they were] glad to get assistance from any quarter" (Morrow 1881:98). Morrow's report seems to convey a sense of shame in taking favors from the British colonial authorities and the powerful teak industry. Still, Morrow sees his work as righteous and therefore justified in taking this morally fraught form of material support. Whatever Morrow's intentions, this movement of resources from Burmese forests into British colonial control, then into American missionary operations, and finally into newly Christianized communities perpetuated a colonial system in Burma in which power began to concentrate among those who were associated with Westerners.

Religious and teak networks did not just overlap in Christian communities. The Baptist archive also contains documents regarding the way the teak business generated Buddhist merit and social status for Burmese merchants. For example, the missionary Abram Rose took notes during a tour to the Burmese capital of Mandalay describing a group of people from Maulmain (present-day Mawlamyine) who were also traveling to Mandalay and who "have been long engaged in the teak timber trade, and some have amassed wealth, and by that wealth have built and are building extensive works of merit." These notes offer a kind of profile of an especially pious teak merchant, Moung Taw Yike, a forty-five-to fifty-year-old man who was said to have spent 200,000 rupees on an opulent kyaung (temple school) and another 100,000 rupees on "feasts and entertainments" that elevated him to "an almost kingly scale" (Rose 1869:2). Indeed, he seems to have been acting very much like his king, Mindon Min, who used the teak industry to generate wealth and merit for himself and for the society that supported his elevated standing. These rich Buddhists described these money-making projects as important and righteous because it meant they could generate merit by supporting Buddhism, which would then benefit them in this life and future lives. The politicians and merchants profiting from the new teak industry promoted this economic system by mapping it onto Buddhist merit-making systems as well as onto Buddhist systems of kingship. This interweaving of economics and religion tended to reward upper-class Bamar Buddhists and Christian convert communities while further marginalizing people in lower economic, social, religious, and ethnic positions.

Conclusion

There is a story about King Mindon's manager of glass factories (B. Pangyetwun) and his clever way of pleasing the king that features teak and offers another angle on this story of the Enfield-teak negotiations. The Pangyetwun had studied arts and manufacturing in Paris, and upon his return, King Mindon is said to have asked the manager if that European city had any buildings as magnificent as those in Mandalay. Instead of mentioning a famous Parisian building like the Cathedral of NotreDame or the École Militaire, the Pangyetwun replied, "the luckless people have not the magnificent teak; how, then, can they hope to raise anything comparable to the meanest of your palaces?" thereby putting King Mindon at ease and putting himself in the king's favor (Yoe 1896:491). When I first read this story in The Burman by Shway Yoe (aka James George Scott) I was skeptical of its veracity (and remain so), but I was also interested in how this story, even if not entirely true, still seemed to capture a shared sense in the royal court that Burma was distinguished by its possession of high-quality teak and that the greatness of its new capital, Mandalay, was directly related to its possession of teak. Likewise, it suggested that King Mindon's significant pride in the teak buildings in his capital city resembled the British romantic attitude toward this special wood examined in this article.

This led me to wonder about how British romantic attitudes toward Burmese forests related to the Burmese attitudes toward teak. When I began investigating these Enfield-teak negotiations, my first hypothesis for why King Mindon inserted Buddhist claims was that he was turning an emergent Orientalist romance with Buddhism back on the British to argue that Burma deserved autonomy because it was a Buddhist country, a land that preserved the teachings of the Buddha, teachings so newly respected in European centers of power. As this article has shown, this hypothesis did not prove to be supported by the extant evidence of these negotiations. First, there is the evidence exemplified earlier that shows how the bhuūmisāmika tradition and related Buddhist and Southeast Asian practices of kingship were so prominent during King Mindon's reign, traditions that are far older than the modern category of "Buddhism." Second, the freighted romantic relationship the British had to Burmese teak forests was affectively related to their romantic attitudes toward Buddhism in fascinating ways that came together in these negotiations. And, finally, the whole approach of casting a Buddhist figure as able to cleverly manipulate colonial powers has problems in the way that it imagines Asian figures defining Buddhism within larger structures of Western imperialism, capitalism, and religious monopoly.

Since Said's Orientalism, scholars of Asian religions have debated how much to focus on Western inventions because that focus continues to privilege Westerners and dehumanize or disempower Asians as figments of Western imagination (Said 1978). A model in Burma Studies for how to respond to this dilemma has been Turner's Saving Buddhism, which ascribes powerful and creative agency to Burmese Buddhists who, in Turner's account, intervene into colonial conditions by wielding traditional Buddhist tools and new technologies. Saving Buddhism certainly does not ignore the power of Western colonialism, but it does tell a story of Burmese Buddhists actively resisting that power.

Scholars and students of Buddhism tend to welcome these kinds of stories of skillful Asian communities using Buddhist practices and teachings to fight off imperial Christians. Not only do these stories celebrate Buddhist traditions and cultures, but they also satisfyingly show arrogant Westerners getting bested by smart Asians. These David and Goliath tales offer some relief to scholars from Western institutions who have become acutely aware of institutional and individual relationships to European colonialism.

I found myself following in the footsteps of this kind of scholarship when I wanted to argue against an idea that the Burmese people involved in the Enfield-teak negotiations could only submit or respond to British conditions. Since the beginning of this research, I have wanted to see these negotiations in a way that does not presume British offensiveness and Burmese defensiveness and in a way that does not set Buddhism as a derivation of Christianity. Part of the appeal of the argument I make earlier about King Mindon using the bhuūmisāmika tradition is that it shows a Burmese figure successfully wielding a precolonial Buddhist tool to assert Burmese authority in the face British imperialism. But I wonder if the best way out of Western hegemony is to tell a story of the Burmese skillfully drawing on premodern Buddhist resources to assert their authority. Does this risk repeating an Orientalist practice of privileging older Buddhist textual traditions?

Perhaps one productive way forward is to renew our efforts to resist romantic notions of Buddhism by paying more attention to the complex ways that Buddhism has been involved with economic systems that have favored small groups of people and disempowered larger groups. Even in the story I have told here that does turn to Buddhist texts and precolonial traditions to understand how the Burmese asserted authority in the face of colonial incursions, we do not have to cast those texts and traditions as largely powerful or liberating. Instead, we can learn to see how Buddhist institutions also work to justify asymmetrical power structures. Indeed, the Enfield-teak negotiations not only temporarily supported the independence of the Burmese kingdom, but they also further consolidated wealth and political power among upper-class Bamar Buddhists. While the Konbaung dynasty and the British occupation are things of the past, the teak business, the firearms industry, and Buddhist economic systems are still powerful in Myanmar today. With more scholarship on religious economics, I hope that we will be better able to understand these industries and their impact on Burma's communities and landscapes.