by | 19 March 2006 · 10:01 pm

Mass Migrations from Burma, 1941-42

From the moment that the first bomb fell on Rangoon on 13 December 1941 there began an exodus from Burma of the Indian, Anglo-Indian and Anglo-Burmese population which was at the time the largest mass migration in history. By the autumn of 1942 in the region of 600,000 people had fled from Burma into India by land and sea. Of these as many as 80,000 may have perished of disease, exhaustion or malnutrition. These events have only paled into insignificance by comparison with the even greater horrors that were to be visited on South Asia over the next six years. They have been eclipsed by memories of the Bengal famine of 1943, by the riots, migrations and massacres that accompanied the partition of India in 1947 and by the Burmese civil war. Two conditions contributed to the scale of the disaster. First, the immigrant population of Burma was very large on the eve of the Japanese invasion because coolies, plantation workers and merchants were all anticipating the Burmese legislation which would restrict the number of new immigrants. People from all over India were desperate to get themselves and their families into Burma before the restrictive legislation was passed so that they would count as old rather than new immigrants. For so many families across India from the Khyber Pass to Cape Comorin, the few extra rupees earned by relatives working in the often appalling conditions of Burmese mines, factories and plantations made the difference between life and death.

The other condition was the vulnerability felt by the whole Indian population. When they fled from the cities, the Burmese could take shelter with relatives among the villages of the interior, or, if they were too far distant, in the hospices of the Buddhist monasteries. The civilian Chinese were on the whole a tightly organized and relatively egalitarian community of traders and skilled artisans. When the death knell of the British began to sound, many of them were systematically evacuated to Yunnan and China by their homeland associations, the regional and sectarian self-help organizations. Many undoubtedly perished in air raids and the nationalist soldiers had to endure appalling conditions, especially if they were wounded. Yet the Chinese devised an effective escape plan. Indians did not have this option. Shelter in India was far distant; with the collapse of industry and agriculture it was doubtful whether they could even find food, let alone a livelihood. They remembered the riots of 1930 and 1938 when large parts of the Burmese population turned on them with savage hostility. The British would not help them. More than one of the vaunted ma-baps, the ‘mothers and fathers’ of the people among the civil servants, had already precipitously fled in their motor cars ahead of the advancing Japanese. The only thing ordinary Indians could do, therefore, was to tie up their pathetic possessions in a bundle and get on the road or make for the ports where they might at least be able to squeeze on a boat as a deck-class passenger. For many, this decision was to prove fatal.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 167-168

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by | 15 March 2006 · 6:46 pm

Burma’s Martial Legacy

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Burmese had built a reputation as one of the most militaristic of the peoples of southern Asia. They had sacked the Thai capital, caused grief to the Indian Mughals and had seen off the Chinese. In 1824, their great commander, Mahabandula, had sworn to bring the governor general of India back to Mandalay in silver fetters. Lord Amherst had not made that journey, however, and the Burmese had been sharply defeated in three major wars. The final one, in 1886, had seen the end of Burma’s independence and its last monarch packed off into exile near Bombay. After 1886, the British did not recruit ethnic Burmese into their forces, as they had the Sikhs of the Punjab when they were conquered fiercely to resist British occupation for much longer than the Sikhs. Later, all sorts of pseudo-anthropological arguments were used about their unfitness. Burmese Buddhists, the British said, regarded soldiers as beings ‘not very high on the human scale’ because they took life. They, like the Bengalis, were supposedly ‘effeminate’ and could not take extremes of heat and cold.

This was all nonsense, as some British officials realized. A small company of Burmese sappers had done exceptionally well in the Mesopotamian campaign during the First World War where it had been 125 degrees in the shade. They also took the cold of the North West Frontier uncomplainingly. The basic reason that the British did not maintain the slightly increased percentage of Burmese recruits after 1918 was that Indians and recruits from the Burmese minorities were cheaper. All this meant that the vast majority of ‘Burmese’ in outfits such as the Burma Rifles and the Burma Frontier Force were Kachins, Shans, Karens like Smith Dun, or else locally resident Indians and Gurkhas. There were hardly a thousand ethnic Burmese officers or NCOs under arms in 1940. This stored up huge problems for the British in the Second World War. When the Japanese offered young Burmese military training, they leapt at the opportunity. It was a matter of pride as well as politics. How could the Burmese be a people if they did not have an army?

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 82-83

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by | 15 March 2006 · 3:01 pm

British Malaise in Malaya, 1941

The lack of civil preparation, the general ‘Malaise’, was to be a persistent charge against the British in Malaya. But, by the outbreak of war, the people of Malaya had experienced more intrusive government than at any time in its history, especially in the form of food controls and price fixing. Mindful of Malaya’s dependence on imported rice, the authorities had by 1940 built up reserves for 180 days. The state also took on new functions such as surveillance and propaganda. By April 1940 there were 312 officers involved in censorship in Singapore and 58 in Penang, plus a number of part-time workers, many of them European wives reading each other’s mail…. However, the Ministry of Information in Singapore soon had a staff of over 100 and issued Chinese newspapers and illustrated propaganda in four languages at a rate of a million pieces a month. Before December 1941 the Japanese could not be mentioned. Instead was broadcast – in the style of Orson Welles’s adaptation of War of the Worlds – a ‘nightmare’ of conquest by the fascists. The dire situation was disguised by over-confident propaganda which encouraged complacency about the scale of the threat. When the war began, the need to maintain this posture immobilized the British regime. The Japanese-owned daily the Singapore Herald fought against the mood by applauding Chinese cabaret girls for dancing with Japanese men and with such headlines as ‘Down with alarmism’ and ‘Prepare for peace’. In October, around 600 Japanese and their families were evacuated, and the consul-general was recalled at the end of the month. But many remained.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), p. 67

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by | 14 March 2006 · 6:24 pm

Economic Disincentives in Cameroon

In the libertarian magazine Reason, Financial Times columnist Tim Harford looks at disincentives for investing in economic infrastructure in Cameroon.

Many people have an optimistic view of politicians and civil servants—that they are all serving the people and doing their best to look after the interests of the country. Other people are more cynical, suggesting that many politicians are incompetent and often trade off the public interest against their own chances of re-election. The economist Mancur Olson proposed a working assumption that government’s motivations are darker still, and from it theorized that stable dictatorships should be worse for economic growth than democracies, but better than sheer instability.

Olson supposed that governments are simply bandits, people with the biggest guns who will turn up and take everything. That’s the starting point of his analysis—a starting point you will have no trouble accepting if you spend five minutes looking around you in Cameroon….

When [President Paul] Biya came to power in 1982, he inherited colonial-era roads that had yet to fall apart completely. If he had inherited a country without any infrastructure, it would have been in his interest to build it up to some extent. Because the infrastructure was already in place, Biya needed to calculate whether it was worth maintaining, or whether he could simply live off the legacy of Cameroon’s colonial rulers. In 1982 he probably thought the roads would last into the 1990s, which was as long as he could reasonably have expected to hold onto the reins of power. So he decided to live off the capital of the past and never bothered to invest in any type of infrastructure for his people. As long as there was enough to get him through his rule, why bother spending money that could otherwise go right into his personal retirement fund?…

Mancur Olson showed that kleptocracy at the top stunts the growth of poor countries. Having a thief for president doesn’t necessarily spell doom; the president might prefer to boost the economy and then take a slice of a bigger pie. But in general, looting will be widespread either because the dictator is not confident of his tenure or because he needs to allow others to steal in order to keep their support.

The rot starts with government, but it afflicts the entire society. There’s no point investing in a business because the government will not protect you against thieves. (So you might as well become a thief yourself.) There’s no point in paying your phone bill because no court can make you pay. (So there’s no point being a phone company.) There’s no point setting up an import business because the customs officers will be the ones to benefit. (So the customs office is underfunded and looks even harder for bribes.) There’s no point getting an education because jobs are not handed out on merit. (And in any case, you can’t borrow money for school fees because the bank can’t collect on the loan.)

It is not news that corruption and perverse incentives matter. But perhaps it is news that the problem of twisted rules and institutions explains not just a little bit of the gap between Cameroon and rich countries but almost all of the gap. Countries like Cameroon fall far below their potential even considering their poor infrastructure, low investment, and minimal education. Worse, the web of corruption foils every effort to improve the infrastructure, attract investment, and raise educational standards.

via Foreign Dispatches

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by | 14 March 2006 · 5:24 pm

Spreading Malay Literacy in the 1930s

A new generation of Malay commoners was also finding a voice [during the 1930s]. An important source for this was the Sultan Idris Training College for Malay schoolteachers in Tanjong Malim, just north of Kuala Lumpur. The college was an unlikely site for innovation because it was founded to provide teachers for vernacular schools, the stated role of which was to educate Malays to become better fishermen and farmers. Yet the Malay staff of the college generated new enthusiasm for Malay literature and history, particularly the vanished golden age of the fifteenth-century empire of Melaka. They developed the Malay language in a new, standard Romanized script. The Japanese ally Ibrahim Yaacob was a graduate, and it was from amongst his costudents that many of the members of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda – the Union of Malay Youth – were drawn. To Ibrahim Yaacob, the rulers had left Malays like ‘a boat without a steersman’. His writings were a call to awareness of the Malay nation, the ‘Bangsa Melayu’, which was to take precedence over old loyalties. In this, the young had a special role. A Penang magazine called Saudara (‘Friend’) had created a revolutionary league of pen-friends modelled on the ‘Teddy Tail League’ of the Daily Mail. It allowed young Malays to address each other as strangers, as equals and across gender lines. Conservatives panicked that it would encourage girls to write love letters.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 48-49

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by | 14 March 2006 · 12:31 pm

Reconstructing Virginia Algonquian

Language Hat notes a NY Times story about the efforts to reconstruct the dead Algonquian language spoken by Powhatan and Pocahontas in order to lend an air of authenticity to the dialogue in the movie The New World.

This family of Indian tongues, in one respect, reminded linguists of the Romance languages. Each was distinctive but as closely related as Spanish is to Italian or Italian to Romanian. Comparisons with related languages revealed the common elements of grammar and sentence structure and many similarities in vocabulary.

A translation of the Bible into the language once spoken by Massachusetts Indians offered more insights into the grammar. The Munsee Delaware version spoken by coastal Indians from Delaware to New York, including those who sold Manhattan, may be dead, but its grammar and vocabulary are fairly well known to scholars.

“We have a big fat dictionary of Munsee Delaware,” said Dr. Rudes, who adapted some of those words when needed for Virginia Algonquian. Recordings of the last Munsee Delaware speakers, a century ago, were a valuable guide to pronunciations.

Another research tool was what is called Proto-Algonquian. It is the hypothetical ancestor common to all Algonquian speech, 4,000 words that scholars have compiled from the surviving tongues and documentation of the extinct ones.

The reconstruction involves educated guesses. Strachey set down words for walnut, shoes and two kinds of beast, “paukauns,” “mawhcasuns,” “aroughcoune” and “opposum.” In Proto-Algonquian, similar words are paka-ni (meaning large nut), maxkesen (shoe), la-le-ckani (raccoon) and wa-pa’oemwi (white dog).

From this, Dr. Rudes reconstructed the Virginia Algonquian words pakán, mahkusun, árehkan and wápahshum,” or pecan, moccasin, raccoon and opossum.

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by | 13 March 2006 · 12:52 pm

Bad Call Beats Japan in World Baseball Classic

New Japundit contributor Mike Plugh gives a rundown on the World Baseball Classic‘s badly umpired game between Japan and the U.S. in a post headlined If You Can’t Beat ’em, Cheat ’em.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing Korea and Puerto Rico in the finals. Both are proven giant-killers.

UPDATE: Wow. Japan managed to defeat Korea pretty decisively in the semifinal. Canyon of Heroes has a good rundown. Now I have to root for Japan as the underdog against Cuba.

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by | 13 March 2006 · 12:21 pm

Malaya’s Role in the British Empire, 1930s

If India was the jewel in the imperial crown, Malaya was the industrial diamond. In 1940, the governor of Singapore estimated, Malaya was ‘worth’ an estimated £227.5 million to the British Empire. Its exports were £131.25 million, of which £93 million were to foreign countries, especially to the United States, to which it sold more than any other territory of the British Empire except Canada. From 1895 until the Japanese war, at no point did British Malaya need financial help from outside. Its status as a model colony was achieved from its own resources, and its accumulated budget surpluses saw it through the Great Depression. The key to the great public works and civic conceits of the Straits Settlements was opium. Duty on opium accounted for between 40 and 60 per cent of its annual revenue. Its production was monopolized by the government ‘Chandu factory’ on Pepys Road in Singapore which turned out 100 million tubes a year. Much of the revenue burden of Malaya therefore fel upon the Asian, particularly Chinese, labourers who were the greatest consumers of opium. The British crescent in Asia was supported by narco-colonialism on a colossal scale.

One of the most dramatic effects of the coming war was the way it forged the crescent into a bloodstained unity. First, the Japanese unified the peninsula from Singapore through Thailand to the borders of Assam by armed invasion. In response the British punched a land route from north India through the nearly impassable ranges of Assam and north Burma into the Irrawaddy valley. Reoccupying the Malay peninsula, they reclaimed their Southeast Asian patrimony. In fact, the designation ‘Southeast Asia’ was itself a brainchild of the military strategists who created Southeast Asia Command in 1943. Yet, as jazz-age imperialism drew to its end in 1939, there seemed little enough as yet, besides their rock solid belief in British superiority, to draw together the white settler societies of the crescent.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 33-34

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by | 12 March 2006 · 1:58 pm

Japanese in Southeast Asia before WW2

Japanese goods were at the heart of the consumer boom in Malaya in the later 1930s. The closure of American markets in the Depression led Japanese manufacturers to focus their attention on the emerging markets to the south. In 1941, Japanese investments in British Malaya totalled 85 million yen. Japanese firms attempted to corner the market in goods from matchboxes to condensed milk; they imported over half of Malaya’s everyday goods The people of Singapore marvelled at the new technology in a ‘Japanese Commercial Museum’. Children in Malaya grew up with toys from the ‘ten-cent’ stalls on Middle Road in Singapore and elsewhere; the small army of Asian clerks depended on Japanese stores such as Echigoya for the cheap white shirts and ties they were required to wear in European offices. The Japanese were responsible for what was perhaps the most revolutionary innovation within the rural economy of Southeast Asia at this time: the bicycles with which country people could get their own goods to market. In the Blitzkrieg in Malaya in 1941, this technology would be used to devastating effect by General Yamashita’s shock troops in a highly mobile form of warfare.

The Japanese had been a prominent feature of the urban landscape of Southeast Asia for many decades. Japanese ships routinely visited the ports; Japanese sailors drank in the bars and cafés, many of which catered especially to their needs. In the early period of Japanese southward enterprise, some of the earliest economic pioneers were the karayuki-san, the Japanese prostitutes. The rationale for this was, in the words of one pimp: ‘Put a whorehouse anywhere in the wilds of the South Pacific and pretty soon you’ve got a general store to go there with it.’ In the face of the 1915 boycott of Japanese businesses by the Chinese in Southeast Asia, it was largely the karayuki-san that kept Japanese commerce afloat.

SOURCE: Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper (Penguin, 2004), pp. 5-6

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by | 12 March 2006 · 1:13 pm

Rapa Nui Settled Later Than Thought?

New archaeological findings from Rapa Nui suggest the island may have been settled later and denuded faster than previously thought.

HONOLULU – Recent archaeological study and analysis conducted by University of Hawai‘i at Manoa anthropology professor Terry Hunt suggests that the colonization of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) took place not between 400 and 800 A.D. as previously assumed by scientists, but at least 400 to 800 years later, closer to 1200 A.D.

The finding, which challenges current beliefs about the island’s prehistoric chronology and the dramatic environmental changes that occurred on the island, is detailed in an article by Hunt and co-author Carl Lipo of California State University, Long Beach, and scheduled for publication in the journal Science. It is previewed and available online now in Science Express.

As part of a UH archaeological field school on Rapa Nui, Hunt and a team of field researchers have been excavating archaeological deposits at Anakena, Rapa Nui’s only sand dune and the landing and settlement site of the island’s first inhabitants. Archaeological materials found here with superb preservation include artifacts, charcoal, faunal remains, and the distinctive tubular root molds of the giant Jubaea palm, now extinct….

A later settlement raises some interesting implications for Rapa Nui.

“Human impacts to the environment, such as deforestation, began almost immediately, at least within a century,” explains Hunt. “This means that there was no period where people lived in some ideal harmony with their environment; there was no early period of ecological sustainability. Instead, people arrived and their population grew rapidly, even as forest resources declined. The short chronology calls much of the traditional story into question.”

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