The Return of Mi Shwe Tin? Native Litigation and Speculative Futures in a Burmese Oilfield

• In Event: Unearthing Environmental Justice: Energy Development and Indigenous Communities

Abstract

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the dramatic growth of the nascent oil industry in Yenangyaung in colonial Burma created expansive economic prospects as well as substantial social ruptures. Focusing on native litigations over oil-wells, this article examines this extraordinary moment when an emerging oil industry and a nascent colonial legal regime converged. Situating these intra-family lawsuits in the context of the Burmese oil boom, this article argues that the expansion of the capitalist oil industry nurtured a certain vision of economic future among the Burmese litigants, whose active participation in the colonial legal system inadvertently contributed to the articulation of the colonial category of ‘Buddhist law’ in colonial Burma. Taking a micro-historical approach, this article delves into the realm of individual lived experiences and mentalities of oil litigants to illustrate the concrete on-ground dynamics of colonial economic and legal transformation, situating their behavior in the broader context of global financial capitalism in colonial resource frontiers. This article explains the extent of native legal participation through the lens of a vision of individual economic futures, which challenges the long-standing culturalist trope that the Burmese have little interest in the accumulation of wealth due to a Buddhist economic culture of donation and merit-accumulation.

Author

• Chao Ren, University of Michigan