This chapter explores the long-term patterns of mainland south-east Asian strategic conduct and the variables behind it. In this region, the ancient Khmer Empire, the Tai polities and the Burmese, whose statecraft was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist belief, were warlike. The Hindu–Buddhist imperial concept of cakravati became the expansionistic norm shared among ambitious monarchs. Thereupon, the south-east Asian polities continually engaged in warfare to impose control over the population and tributaries. Wars were waged to displace the mass of the vanquished to enhance the victor’s economic capacity and prestige. The development of military strategy and war aims generally were geared towards the displacement and resettlement of the enemy population. Interestingly, territorial gains were minor objectives except for the crucial lines of communication and coastal areas vital for trade; polities would secure and expand their power spheres rather than dominating demarcated spaces. The fortification of the central polity also led to protracted siege warfare. In this war of attrition, stratagems, such as ruses and guerilla raids on enemy camps and supply lines, were widely employed against invading armies. There were continual shifts from forceful subjugation and vassalage to the strategic destruction of enemy polities from the twelfth to the nineteenth century in order to seize the centre. Failure to muster manpower and secure influences led to the decline and destruction of the state by more aggressive neighbors. Polities that survived or were revived then pursued a more expansionist policy and waged pre-emptive warfare against smaller states and peer competitors. The military means to achieve such strategic goals consisted of a mass of corvée forces that formed the main body. The core of the army consisted of skilled professional units comprising the aristocratic royal elite and foreign adventurer ‘specialist’ mercenaries. Gunpowder weapons became the crucial instruments to maintain tactical superiority on the battlefield and in siege warfare, as well as assuring control over the displaced population. War elephants and cavalry forces operated as shock units to smash and scatter enemy forces in set-piece battles. However, sieges were the majority of military conduct.

This chapter examines the Baghdadi network in British Asia and its identity crisis during decolonization with a focus on Southeast Asia and the survival of the Singapore community in particular. The chapter argues that through the colonization process, the transient identity of the Baghdadi Jewish diasporic communities was largely cemented as an anglicized one. However, following decolonization, the class divide within the communities was made all the more obvious as the anglicized elites emigrated to English-speaking countries while leaving the poor behind, as noted in Singapore.

This chapter offers a survey of the three principal environments of Buddhist law in precolonial mainland Southeast Asia: vinaya (monastic law), dhammasattha (juristic law), and rājasattha (royal legislation). It assesses, on the basis of manuscript and epigraphic evidence from Burma and Thailand dated between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, the scope and significance of constitutional norms and jurisprudence within each sphere. The chapter seeks to dethrone prior scholarship on constitutionalism in Theravāda Buddhism that has narrowly fixated on idioms of kingship and dharma, arguing that such work misconstrues and diminishes regional legal history. It explains, moreover, that the comparative study of Buddhist constitutionalism in precolonial Southeast Asia must necessarily expand the horizon of inquiry to consider those fields of law (such as family law) concerned with matters other than higher-order institutional governance.

Joseph Stilwell’s career and campaigns in China present a counterexample to Samuel Griffith and unconventional war. Sunzi was essentialized into the Chinese way of fighting and used to encapsulate the problems facing Stilwell and excuse his inability to do more. One of the central messages of Barbara Tuchman’s account of Stilwell in China was that he accomplished what he did despite ferocious resistance from Chiang Kai-shek and the GMD. He was heroic because he achieved anything at all, defeating the Japanese Army at Myitkyina and building an impossible road through Burma. Yet Stilwell’s mission, like the American engagement with China more generally, was a failure. America could not overcome the reality of China under Chiang Kai-shek. China was “lost” to the Communists, who were also Chinese. Mao Zedong won by using Sunzi, but Chiang Kai-shek lost by using Sunzi. Chiang did not produce military writings validated by victory like Mao.

At the outbreak of War in 1939 the drug control system stood as a mixture of contradictions and uncertainty. On the one side were the strict control advocates, led by the United States. On the other side were producing states, agrarian countries whose economic, cultural and political systems were entwined with the very drugs the system sought to limit. In the middle were the old colonial powers, recognised the role opium played within many their colonies. The outbreak of war would fundamentally reshape international drug control. Moreover, it was driven by US-led bilateral efforts, utilising its wartime leverage, while other states were confined to rear-guard defensive actions. The reshaping of control during wartime was in many ways the result of aggressive wartime diplomatic manoeuvring by Harry Anslinger and key members of the Washington drug control lobby. The most radical wartime departure occurred in 1943 when Britain and Holland promised to adopt a policy of total prohibition of opium smoking and monopolies in many of their colonial territories. This shift, enabled Anslinger to bring new pressure to bear on the traditionally recalcitrant states such as Iran and Afghanistan to impose stricter controls and prohibitions.

This chapter examines regional efforts to secure drug markets and re-regulate industries. As peace arrived, and the creation of a UN drug control system looked certain, questions of national and regional controls loomed large. First was the question of re-establishing regulatory frameworks in post-war Europe. Germany was key given its historical centrality to licit manufacturing as well as its geopolitical lynchpin status. However, it was unclear whether the Allies could bridge widening geopolitical fault lines to re-establish drug control. In the case of Japan the US had a potential prohibitionist and regulatory beacon for the rest of Asia. With the strong support of the General Douglas MacArthur Administration US goals would be far easier to achieve. Next was the re-resettling of political frontiers of international drug policy reform. Momentum towards a production limitation convention had stalled prior to the war. The future role of China, the world’s largest opium producer, was rendered insoluble by its internal collapse. The US initially focused on creating a tripartite Turkish-Yugoslav-Iranian producer agreement. Further, the question of ‘quasi-medical’ opium use in British and other European colonies remained a transatlantic dividing line. If Britain could continue a non-smoking form of opiate consumption in Malaya, Hong Kong, Borneo and Burma it would provide an alternative to the US model of outright prohibition.

Studying the history of animals in colonial Myanmar is a project that reveals new understandings of the impact of British imperialism, necessitating historians to attend to both the material and cultural transformations in the colony. However, studying animals and colonized people throws up two challenges to the historian. First, how can we recover the historical experiences of both within the same analytical frame. Second, how can postcolonial and post-humanist animal studies be integrated. This introduction offers an approach to studying interspecies relations as way of addressing these issues.

In this chapter, I show that existing theories of colonial legacies in South Asia cannot explain the full spatial variation of Maoist control in India. I engage with alternate explanations by Verghese (2016) and Iyer (2010) and show empirical and conceptual weaknesses in their arguments. Different types of colonial indirect rule created the ethnic inequalities and weak state capacity that are exploited by the Maoist rebels to foment insurgency and need to be included in the theoretical framework to explain this spatial variation. I develop a general theoretical framework of how colonial indirect rule can create opportunity structures in the form of weak state, ethnic mobilization networks in the form of excluded ethnic groups with grievances, and how these structural conditions are then exploited by rebel leaders who provide ideological frames of rebellion to start and sustain rebellion. While none of these conditions is sufficient to produce rebellion, rebel agency in the form of ideological frames in conjunction with such opportunity structures and ethnic networks is a jointly sufficient condition to explain insurgency. My theory conceptualizes rebellion as part of a long-term process of state formation unlike the current myopic frameworks of civil war theory.

Is my theory generalizable to other cases of British and Spanish colonial rule beyond India? I use historical data to show that the mechanisms of land and natural resource extraction and lower development seen in Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh in India are found in other cases. The British used indirect rule in the "frontier" areas in Pakistan and Myanmar, which created structural conditions for insurgency. Within Pakistan, the Tehrik-e-Taliban insurgency since the mid-2000s in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) has occurred in areas of erstwhile British indirect rule. In Myanmar, there have been multiple ethnic secessionist insurgencies in the periphery that were frontier areas of indirect rule. My theory can also be generalized to Spanish colonialism in Latin America. I briefly describe two cases of Spanish colonial land tenure institutions creating land inequalities and leftist insurgency, one is the case of Spanish rule in Mexico, which created conditions for the Zapatista insurgency, and another case is of Spanish and then American rule in the Philippines that resulted in the New People’s Army (NPA) insurgency.

The final chapter summarises the findings on the importance of understanding the role of intermediaries in rule of law assistance. As Myanmar struggled for foreign credibility and investment, the findings are also consistent with the global version – foreign actors’ influence and local dependence in societies where donors become an established but delicate feature of social, political, and economic life that people encounter on a daily basis. In this new landscape, intermediaries become responsible for navigating local and national institutions, values, and people. This book keeps both sides in view while focusing on the intermediaries. It also considers the extent to which the findings could be generalised beyond Myanmar and their practical implications for helping to advance enquiry into the field of rule of law assistance globally.

I had travelled to Hpa-an, the capital of Myanmar’s eastern Karen state, for a chance to meet with a local lawyer who worked for several of the foreign-funded initiatives of rule of law assistance – defined here as foreign actors’ transnational ‘project’ of supporting legal systems in fragile settings – that were initiated in the country after its political opening in 2011. While usually based in Yangon, the lawyer was in Hpa-an for one of his regular training sessions with local activists and lawyers. On my way to our meeting, I walked through the pitch-black streets of the small town in a country I still did not know much about to meet a person whom I imagined would have little patience with a foreign researcher asking questions about his work. As I walked into the tiny shed of a restaurant where we were meeting, I saw Zaw Win Thein’s dazzling smile, and I felt a sense of instant relief. His personality was inviting and friendly.

This chapter deals primarily with the Company commercial policy in East Asia and mainland Southeast Asia but also discusses extensively the first territorial Dutch colony in Taiwan. It highlights the crucial position of Japan where the Dutch could build on their exclusive trading rights in Deshima to procure the precious metals that were necessary for the India trade. The China trade is discussed in connection with the restrictive policies of the Ming and Qing states as well as in the context of the trading interests of the Dutch headquarters in Batavia. In conclusion, a comparison is made between the Dutch position in Mughal India and Qing China as well as between the Dutch Empire and other European empires in Asia.