The Logic of the Colonial Marketplace: Race, Nation, and Prosperity in the Popular Burmese Imagination, 1910-1930

• In Event: 233. Re-working the State: Geographies of Power in Colonial and Post-colonial Burma. Sponsored by the Burma Studies Group

Abstract

Kyà kyau' yweí shin-gyì koù. Shin-gyì kyà-hte' hsoù. "You're afraid of the tiger so you worship the shin-gyi, but the shin-gyi is worse than the tiger." Buried in an introduction to business methods, this Burmese proverb cautioned those wise enough to listen to its rhyme that greater evils in this world disguise themselves as cures. In this case from 1912, the local maxim was deployed to alert readers to the dubious consequences of a business decision thought to provide relief from economic burdens: the declaration of bankruptcy. Accompanied by expert knowledge gathered from all over the world (especially in the sciences of the mind), local understandings of the colonial marketplace like these voiced themselves on the pages of business manuals and other how-to-succeed handbooks in the 1910s and 1920s. These popular productions, which both sustained and were sustained by an enthusiasm for personal wealth and success, gave readers tools to navigate a colonial marketplace made famous for its plural character. In this talk, I focus on the way the logic of the market was both affirmed and reimagined through the prescription of individual money-making practices and the ideal of the Myanma sì-bwà-yeì (Myanmar economy) as a whole. I show how race and nation were critical to this logic, and how authors worked within these confines to sketch alternative possibilities for personal prosperity through the molding of the Burmese economic subject.

Author

• Allegra E. Giovine, University of Pennsylvania