A century and a quarter ago, the British annexed the last vestiges of the kingdom of Burma, what had once been mainland Southeast Asia’s greatest empire. Burma was carved up by the British in three Anglo-Burmese wars (1824–1826, 1852–1853, and 1885) and for much of the nineteenth century there were two competing Burmas, a shrinking independent state in the north and an expanding colonial entity in the south. While a desperate Burmese court raced to introduce administrative reforms and to modernize with the latest Western technologies, court politics and a poorly developed economy ensured its ultimate defeat.

Colonial rule created much of the “Burma” seen by the outside world today. The extension of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India into Burma in the late nineteenth century defined Burma’s political geography and recorded its topography. Western writers associated in one way or another with the colonial state produced representations of Burmese culture, how Burmese thought, and how they behaved, that have shaped contemporary understandings. It could be suggested that perhaps more foreigners over the years have read George Orwell’s Burmese Days than any other single publication about the country. D. A. Ahuja who ran a photographic studio in Rangoon in the first quarter of the twentieth century produced by far the most popular series of postcards of Burma, amounting to over 800 “scenes” of Burmese pagodas, architecture, and people. Mailed out to locations throughout the British Empire, the English-speaking world was provided with snapshots of what “typical” Shan, Burman, Kachin, Mon, Karen, and other peoples looked like and how they dressed.