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  • La réforme politique en Birmanie pendant le premier moment colonial (1819–1878) by Aurore Candier
  • Penny Edwards
Aurore Candier. 2020. La réforme politique en Birmanie pendant le premier moment colonial (1819–1878). Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient. 430 pages. ISBN 978-2-85539-135-9

This impressive study throws a gauntlet at prevailing British and European schemas of nineteenth century Burma as a trifecta of colonial conquest (1824, 1852, and 1885) and Burmese collapse. Focusing on the period between 1819 and1878, historian Aurore Candier resets both the clock and the lens, shifting the perspective to success through the prism of political reform. Across these six decades, Candier reminds us, the Burmese court managed to maintain its sovereignty in the north and center, even as its western and coastal territories were being nibbled away and absorbed into British India. The riddle of this central resilience is at the heart of this book.

The book’s title, with its postcolonial gesture to the “moment,” would have confused key actors from the period, whose thought-worlds and administrative antics Candier so deftly illuminates. For as Candier demonstrates through meticulous research and innovative analysis, this was no “moment” but an extended period of transition and adaptation. As tensions arose between the notions of “cyclical reform” embedded in scriptural traditions, enshrined in prophecies, and reinforced by ritual calendars and alternative agendas of “social reform” [End Page 187] as a linear progression, Burma’s royal, intellectual, and monastic leaders and seers engaged in an extended wrestling match with time and notions of it.

Stretching the contours of “political reform” to encompass cultural, religious, social, and spiritual concerns, Candier draws on four key types of literature: historical, administrative, normative, and prophetic, across several Burmese linguistic registers, and demonstrates an extensive command of Burmese intellectual history and spiritual geography. Her keen eye for cultural nuance and sociopolitical contexts is shaped in part by the author’s long-standing lived experience of political transition across several turbulent and for the most part tyrannical decades in Myanmar.

The book’s structure is thematic and partly anachronic. Part I sets a conceptual and historical and regional context for precolonial reform (réforme precoloniale). Part II (1819–1879) examines the adaptation of cyclical reform (réformes cycliques) to transformation of historical context, Part III (1830–1860s) looks at the “réformes conjuncturelles: ajustées à l’expérience coloniale,” and Part IV (1820s–1870s) at sociopolitical conceptions in transformation. Candier brings coherence to the whole by focusing on three different “Stages” of reform that cut across all four parts of the book.

Candier’s methodology is spellbinding. She intertwines Burmese vernacular sources including normative literature and prophecy, Burmese and European chronicles, royal and colonial archives, and writes history from prescriptions for moral and behavioral norms and interpretations of omens. Engaging with normative or didactic vernacular texts such as the Jataka tales (stories of the Buddha’s lives before he became the Buddha) alongside highbrow court chronicles such as yazawun, literary texts, and prophecy, Candier provides rare insights into [End Page 188] the “lunivers des pensées birmanes” and extends the parameters of that “universe” from elite views to popular perceptions. As the century wears on and colonial influence thickens with the appointment of European advisors to the court, so do European chronicles, and Candier makes judicious use of such sources.

Wielding this web of source materials, Candier argues for a distinct understanding of “la réforme politique” in Burma. She demonstrates that there was a specifically Burman conceptualization of both “political” and of “reform,” that was dynamic and responsive, and shines a light on the acumen and impact of court advisors over time.

In the 1810s, four rigid “tiers” regulated life in the kingdom and shaped roles at court: King (Min), Advisors (Ponna), wealthy (Vessa), and poor’; the king’s sovereignty was supreme and the role of appointed court advisors was to interpret the vedas rather than tinker with structures. By the late 1870s, there was far more fluidity, and the role of ponna, or appointed court advisors, had shifted from interpreting the vedas to normalizing, synthesizing, and codifying a diverse body of texts. These...

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