The three articles in this Modern Asian Studies Forum centre on a moment in time when Asian political maps were reconfigured by imperial design. In the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, seen from afar, the competition for the borderlands of India, Burma, Yunnan, Siam, and French Indochina looked like a ‘Great Game’ where social and political order was to be secured by agreements on international geopolitical borders. However, from within these territories and in the many smaller polities in the borderlands, the encroachments had a very different impact. Such meddling with native authority governing the polities and the complex relationships between them caused disorder, defiance, and dramatic transformation. The articles not only investigate such struggles, they also shed light on their interconnection. We use the word ‘polity’ when we speak of the socio-political forms in contrast to the often-used ‘chiefdom’, ‘society’, or ‘state’ that come with many assumptions. We do this to emphasize the many different forms of authority in this region. The term ‘state’ does not reflect such organizations, and the term ‘society’ tends mostly to focus on social forms. We use ‘polity’ to capture both the political and the social—‘polity’ is intended to convey socio-political diversity.Footnote ¹

Recent research in borderland studies and trans-Himalayan studies has opened new opportunities for investigating past and present connectedness, mobility, and interdependence in a region spanning lands from Bengal and Assam in the west to Yunnan in the east, and from the eastern Himalayas in the north to Thailand in the south. Our aim is to reconnect academic research within this region, in which scholars still work in the separate fields of South, Southeast, and East Asian studies. Even though this may be a new field of study for contemporary scholars, it is one that the smaller polities actively shaped long before the imperial onslaught. It is a field that has no unified form but is tied together by a multitude of interconnections, mobility, and integration through kinship, exchange, shared experiences, and warfare. Academically, we see the necessity of talking across the epistemic borders. In this Forum, Willem van Schendel focuses on an autonomous enclave (the ‘Free Hills’) surrounded by British territory in the Indo-Burma mountain range. Christian Daniels’ study, which is located at the crossroads of northern Thai (Lan Na) and eastern Burma (Kengtung), centres on strategic moves by strong polities when under pressure by British imperial power. Gunnel Cederlöf investigates the large Tai/Dai territories where many small polities were challenged by Chinese and British forces and their violent claims to sovereignty and the right to enforce hard geopolitical borders (Figure 1).Footnote ²

Figure 1.

Key to the maps used in this Forum. Source: Drawn by Laurie Whiddon.

Imperial expansion took place at a time when warfare had ravaged parts of these borderlands, triggering several conflicts. Burma’s expansion south, east, and west in wars beginning in the 1750s, and the kingdom’s subsequent contraction in battles against China and Britain, caused much damage to the small polities that we consider here. Until the late nineteenth century they had been feudatory to the Burmese Konbaung rulers but had managed their own affairs with some degree of autonomy. After the British annexation of Upper Burma, they found themselves enclosed by imperial forces—the British entering from the west and the Chinese increasing their presence from the east. Simultaneously, during British imperial expansion eastwards from their previously annexed territories in India, British officers came across the Free Hills between the Chittagong, Lushai, Chin, and Arakan hills.

Even though encircled by British-administrated territories, people here turned out to be very difficult to subjugate. If empire was the rule, the Free Hills seemed like an imperial anomaly. In Van Schendel’s words, the Free Hills demonstrated the limits of imperial aggression—and people held out until the end of the British empire.Footnote ³ This area serves as a reminder that imperial-scale powers were taking a firm grip on the region, but with varying levels of success.

Further east, representatives of Qing China, British Burma, Siam, and France despatched troops to compete for territory and win control over natural resources, long-distance communication routes, and populations who could be exploited as labour reserves and taxable subjects. Negotiations between these imperial powers aimed at dividing the land and preventing military conflict among them. For centuries, the small polities had been tributary to their stronger neighbours, functioning as suppliers of human and material resources as well as buffer zones on different imperial frontiers. The inhabitants included Tai/Dai, Jinghpaw, Lahu, Lisu, Wa, Akha, Palaung, and many other communities. But in the 1890s the frontier zones rapidly shrank into borderlines.

These confrontations between small polities and expanding empires attest to the profound transformations that occurred worldwide at the time. In this Forum we concentrate on experiences at the ground level to help understand the radical changes that underlie the formation of the region’s modern states. We focus on encounters, encroachments, and clashes that had an impact on how imperial or colonial rule materialized in each location and region. It is important to think of these polities, and the people residing in, or passing through, their territories as comprising competing interests—of subsistence agriculturalists, merchants, military men, bankers, explorers, missionaries, and bureaucrats, all seeking an income, security, advantage, or profit. This is evident in the complexity of conflicts among rulers of small polities who allied with and against each other to tactically manoeuvre under uncertain socio-political conditions. When we stop ‘seeing like an empire’, we can follow the counterpoints of the imperial design in the numerous activities that we observe within and between these polities.

An important feature in the concurrent and competing claims to authority was that they were rooted in different notions of spatial, social, and political order—some derived from imperial claims to sovereignty and others from authority embedded in particular locations. Van Schendel describes how, in the areas around the Free Hills, the British introduced ‘novel concepts of spatial control, territorial exclusivity, linear borders, sovereignty, and subjecthood’, whereas the Free Hills under the Zo ‘formed a separate political universe with its own well-established rules and a completely different sense of spatiality’.Footnote ⁴

By contrast, the Tai/Dai polities had long dealt with imperial overlords. Some had been integrated into the Chinese bureaucracy since the fourteenth century, during the Yuan dynasty, and others had been feudatory to the Burmese courts since the sixteenth century. Cederlöf shows how the British superintendents tailored a bureaucratic grid that appeared to fit the diverse polities that they subjugated—but with a view to radically alter their socio-political and spatial organization. The bureaucracy they sought to introduce was as violent a force as the armed troops that sustained its implementation, and during negotiations the different forms of governance became entangled. The colonial government struggled to match existing native legal terminology with an altered content that corresponded to British interests.Footnote ⁵

Daniels emphasizes the different and competing notions of governance that were embedded in the negotiated border treaties between the British and Siamese governments. When the British bifurcated larger polities, such as Kengtung on the borders of Siam, they rarely bothered about vassal polities. Although the vassal polities realized that their allegiance had been shifted to Siam, they failed to understand that they could no longer return their allegiance to Kengtung.Footnote ⁶

The British and the French were relative newcomers who, in the late nineteenth century, sought to introduce transformations that deviated from the old imperial forms. Burmese influence had already begun to crumble from the late eighteenth century, and the Qing court’s influence weakened in Yunnan from the mid-nineteenth century and even more dramatically after the Du Wenxiu (Yunnan Hui, or Panthay) rebellion (1856–1873). Initially, the British too were overpowered by troops under Tai/Dai or Jinghpaw command. They may have had the better arms but often underestimated the advantage of superior knowledge of the terrain among the people in the polities. Even though the Burma-China boundary commission’s work for northern Burma and Yunnan in 1897 is often taken as an endpoint to the establishment of British rule in Burma, resistance remained strong across the Jinghpaw region in northern Burma even until 1915.Footnote ⁷

Local encounters reveal the polities’ strategic operations when they came under threat. In addition to confronting British aggression, local rulers also used British or Chinese authority against each other in local disputes. By combining documents in British and Chinese archives, we open a window on the intricate manoeuvres of people of different ethnicities, local rulers, Han merchants, Chinese county officials, British private entrepreneurs, and British government officials. All were eager to benefit from the region’s wealth, especially its timber and mineral production, and cross-country trade. In border negotiations, imperial viewpoints were shaped by these local dynamics.Footnote ⁸

The articles in this Forum move in mobile landscapes. Monsoons, earthquakes, floods, and erosion determined seasons for warfare and trade. Enormously diverse ecosystems and widespread swidden cultivation added to this mobility. Warfare, political disputes, and the search for improved livelihoods caused waves of migration. However, there were also clear notions of borders and territorial limits to political authority. Instead of fixed borderlines, however, the extent of these limits was defined by alliances and allegiance to strong political centres. This made borders vague and variable. As is shown by Jianxiong Ma, there were significant markers in the landscape that indicated the borders of individual centres of authority and restricted the influence of others.Footnote ⁹ Such bordering manifestations were time sensitive. For example, by the nineteenth century, the eight gates built during the Ming dynasty as watchtowers along the Irrawaddy River had long been dysfunctional. Even so, in the 1890s, the Ming gates surfaced in border surveys carried out by the Burma–China boundary commission in its search for markers that could serve as indisputable limits to imperial authority. But they were judged irrelevant and soon gave way to more immediate realities.Footnote ¹⁰

Across the region, loyalties and alliances shifted between the small polities. Some were relatively strong, while others were weak and dependent on protection. Examples of these shifts were noticeable in intermittent violence when the Zo in the Free Hills clashed with people in the surrounding Lushai, Chin, Chittagong, and Arakan hills. Conflicts also increased in the polities of the Burma–Yunnan borderlands. Attacking small polities and looting and burning their grain stores and houses became common modes of enforcing authority. It was called ‘raiding’ in British administrative semantics and British troops raided as retribution in return—and soon they also ransacked villages proactively. In British reports, such actions were described as ‘punishments’ and ‘punitive missions’, as if they were putting misbehaving children in their place.Footnote ¹¹

Some larger polities were able to respond to imperial encroachments by strategically making a move in a new direction. Kengtung (Chiang Tung) was the largest polity east of the Salween River. Daniels explains how the Anglo-Siamese boundary commission’s decision to deprive it of territory in the east led Kengtung to compensate for the loss of land by expanding southwards into the sparsely populated Chiang Saen plain in the Lan Na kingdom. The ruler of Kengtung could now populate the southern plains by settling people who had been displaced in earlier wars in northern Burma. As Daniels argues, warfare made people mobile and useful as manpower. Just as people’s dissatisfaction could cause mass out-migration, the same people could benefit another ruler, as was the case in Kengtung’s choice to settle people in new territories on its southern borders. Lan Na soon responded by sending people northwards to occupy the rest of the large plains.Footnote ¹²

This Forum is the result of a conversation between historians. The different articles could only happen by way of collaboration across archives, languages, and area-studies regions. Cederlöf’s work has benefitted much from collaborative discussions with Jianxiong Ma, including translation of documents in the Qing archives. Ma’s study of the Tai/Dai polities in Yunnan, based on Chinese, Dai, and Hui sources, are important contributions to the field.Footnote ¹³

Previously, territorial and linguistic compartmentalization has often shaped the region’s historiography. The long-questioned division of South, Southeast, and East Asian area studies separated scholarship along borderlines, thus making interconnections, dependences, and flows more difficult to identify across area-studies boundaries. There have been important attempts to cross these conceptual borders, but these have not yet been able to eliminate the area-studies border controls. Cross-border research in borderland studies—mindful of Arjun Appadurai’s warning to be watchful of the ‘institutional epistemology’ that assigns Cold War geographies to academic work—is yet to materialize on a broader scale. Typically, border-crossing scholarship is still presented in area-studies conferences and journals.Footnote ¹⁴ For anyone at home in one of these area studies, the greatest challenge is to look critically at taken-for-granted historiographical styles and concepts, and appreciate and incorporate those used by scholars next door. This requires a repositioning of frames of analysis.Footnote ¹⁵ Scholarship in borderland studies has much to suggest here.

Comparing imperial ‘frontiers’ that were used as buffer zones may be useful for advancing research in this new field. But we must acknowledge that the mix of imperial influence and small-polity dynamics in the frontier zones of, say, northwestern China or northwestern India differed considerably from the region we explore here. Obviously, studying imperial frontier zones from an imperial vantage point is not very helpful because it gives us only half the picture. The region we present in this Forum can, of course, be compared to other tracts where small polities meet expanding empires, but only fruitfully so after we have delineated local idiosyncrasies and developed appropriate concepts for comparison.

After the Second World War, academic research on the borderlands of India, Burma, Yunnan, Siam, and French Indochina was split into separate fields of ‘area studies’. Our ambition here is threefold: to rise above area-studies limitations, remove the imperial filter that often frames analyses, and acknowledge the interconnected smaller and bigger polities that struggled to stay alive under these pressures. This is a field that is simultaneously territorial, conceptual, empirical, and grounded in lived experience. We aim to recombine these tracts and their historical significance rather than view them as belonging to South, Southeast, or East Asia.

This Forum highlights research that seeks to reconnect the modern history of Yunnan, northern Thailand, Burma/Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Northeast India. Willem van Schendel and Gunnel Cederlöf work largely from British imperial archive collections, which of course include more than just British- or European-authored material. Among the many documents authored by people native to the region, and written in many languages, there are also those stolen from the courts of the local rulers as part of intelligence gathering. This happened to the Tai/Dai rulers’ internal correspondence in the Tai language, kept in Cambridge University Library and used by Christian Daniels in this Forum. Daniels works in the Qing archives and combines these sources with collections in British holdings. We all study across the language barriers, assisted by each other’s fields of competence.

The work is part of the research project ‘Trans-Himalayan Flows, Governance and Spaces of Encounter’ of which Jianxiong Ma and Anandaroop Sen are also members. It is funded by the Swedish Research Council and hosted by Linnaeus University in Sweden and its Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.

Finally, a note about the terminology used. Place names and terms such as those denoting the ruler of a polity varied in different languages and, when transcribed from Burmese and Tai/Dai into English, the British transcription was coloured by language and dialect. For example, the term for Tai/Dai polity rulers is transcribed ‘saohpa’, spelled ‘sawbwa’ as a Burmese version of the same word. ‘Tai’ and ‘Dai’ are autonyms. From the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, in Chinese official documents, the Dai were recorded as Baiyi. ‘Shan’ is an exonym used by Burmans for the Tai/Dai. British copying of Burman modes of administration explains why the British administrators never used the autonym but always referred to the polities’ rulers as ‘sawbwa’ and continued to use the word ‘Shan’. Similarly, Jinghpaw, being the name chosen by the people themselves, stands in contrast to the exonym Kachin. The latter was almost always used by British administrators.Footnote ¹⁶ Each author in this Forum will explain the terminology they prefer in their individual articles.