1. Record of burials at the Town Cemetery Rangoon of Europeans or Eurasians for the Quarter commencing from the 1 October to 31 December 1908, dated 26 January 1909. British India Office deaths and burials, N-1-353, fol. 342.

2. Record of baptisms at Christ Church, Mandalay, of Europeans or Eurasians for the quarter commencing from July 1, 1910, to September 30, 1910, dated 7 October 1910. British India Office births and baptisms, N-1-366, fol. 240.

3. Long Ago, Far Away: The Burma Diaries of Doris Sarah Easton, compiled by M. Sylvia Morris (London: Minerva Press, 1994), 61.

4. F. E. Penny, On the Coromandel Coast (London: Smith, Elder, 1908), 127.

5. Ghosh, Sex and the Family, 19.

6. Taylor, Social World; Ghosh, Sex and the Family; Carmen Nocentelli, Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). In the Dutch East Indies, Indo-Europeans, the equivalent of Eurasians, were eligible for European legal status but only with the recognition of a European father; that of a European mother could not confer European status upon an Indo-European child.

7. Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 116.

8. Chatterjee, “Colouring Subalternity”; Ghosh, Sex and the Family.

9. Adrian Carton, “ ‘Faire and Well-Formed’: Portuguese Eurasian Women and Symbolic Whiteness in Early Colonial India,” in Ballantyne and Burton, Moving Subjects, 231–251.

10. Holden Furber, Private Fortunes and Company Profits in the India Trade in the 18th Century, ed. Rosane Rocher (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1997), 267. Furber does not provide any details or evidence for this attribution.

11. Stephen Sulivan, letter to Sir Robert Palk, dated 5 February 1780, Fort St. George, reproduced in Great Britain, Report on the Palk manuscripts in the possession of Mrs. Bannatyne, of Haldon, Devon (London: H. M. Stationery, 1922), 331–332. Sir Robert Palk was a former officer of the British East India Company and governor of the Madras Presidency (1755–1763). Stephen Sulivan was the son of Laurence Sulivan, former director and chairman of the company and longtime friend of Palk.

12. Henry Davison Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800 (London: J. Murray, 1913), 491.

13. Elizabeth Buettner “Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races: Defining ‘Europeans’ in Late Colonial India,” Women’s History Review 9, no. 2 (2000): 277–298.

14. David Arnold, “European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 7, no. 2 (1979): 104–127; Charles Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India 1730–1833 (Surrey, UK: Curzon, 1996); P. J. Marshall, “British Society in India under the East India Company,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 1 (1997): 89–108.

15. R. E. Culley, The “Euro-Asian” or “Anglo-Indian”: A Burma Brochure by One of the Community (Rangoon: Mayles Standish & Co. Ltd. Electric Press, 1910), 1, 3, 5, 8, 16–18, 21.

16. Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 54–56.

17. Hitomi Fujimura, “A View of the Karen Baptists in Burma of the Mid-Nineteenth Century, from the Standpoint of the American Baptist Mission,” Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 32, (2014), 132; W. C. B. Purser, Christian Missions in Burma (Westminster: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1911), 103–104.

18. Kazuto Ikeda, “Two Versions of Buddhist Karen History of the Late British Colonial Period in Burma: Kayin Chronicle (1929) and Kuyin Great Chronicle (1931),” Southeast Asian Studies 1, no. 3 (December 2012), 434–435. Sgaw and Pwo represent the two Karen languages with the largest populations of speakers in Burma. As Kato Atsuhiko observes, however, “the range of people who consider themselves to be ethnic ‘Karen’ can vary according to various contexts, including political, ethnic, and linguistic.” Atsuhiko Kato, “Karen and Surrounding Languages,” in Topics in Middle Mekong Linguistics, ed. Norihiko Hayashi (Kobe: Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, 2019), 123.

19. William Womack, “Contesting Indigenous and Female Authority in the Burma Baptist Mission: The Case of Ellen Mason,” Women’s History Review 17, no. 4 (September 2008): 543–559.

20. On the interrelated history of Christian missions, female education, and nursing, see Atsuko Naono, “Educating Lady Doctors in Colonial Burma: American Baptist Missionaries, the Lady Dufferin Hospital, and the Local Government in the Making of Burmese Medical Women,” in Contesting Colonial Authority: Medicine and Indigenous Responses in 19th- and 20th-Century India, ed. Poonam Bala (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 97–114.

21. The other, the Eurasian school and “home for destitute Eurasian girls” in Moulmein and run by American Baptist missionaries, is reported to have predated the British annexation of the province of Tenasserim in 1826. “Eighty-fifth Annual Report,” Baptist Missionary Magazine 79, no. 1 (January 1899), 285.

22. Chatterjee, “Colouring Subalternity”; Firpo, Uprooted.

23. J. E. Marks, Forty Years in Burma, with a foreword by the Archbishop of Canterbury (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1917), 137.

24. Christina Firpo and Margaret D. Jacobs, “Taking Children, Ruling Colonies: Child Removal and Colonial Subjugation in Australia, Canada, French Indochina, and the United States, 1870–1950s,” Journal of World History 29, no. 4 (December 2018), 542, 551–552.

25. Marks, Forty Years, 139.

26. Long Ago, Far Away, 63, 152. Archived in the India Office Records collection at the British Library (mss. Eur C399), Easton’s diaries and letters of her experience in Burma as the headmistress of St. Mary’s School (1916–1917) and then wife of a longtime government officer and headmaster of a government school were compiled by her daughter and published as Long Ago, Far Away.

27. Penny Edwards, “Mixed Metaphors: Other Mothers, Dangerous Daughters, and the Rhetoric of Child Removal in Burma, Australia, and Indochina,” Balayi: Culture, Law and Colonialism 3, no. 6 (January 2004): 41–61.

28. C. Bennett, The Third Annual Report of the Eurasian Ladies’ Society, 1877–78 (Rangoon: American Mission, 1878), 10.

29. Marks, Forty Years, 134; Purser, Christian Missions, 156–158, 239.

30. Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, new ed., ed. William Crooke (London: John Murray, 1903), 669; Pu Galay, Kabya pyatthana (Mandalay: Kyi pwa ye, 1939), 8.

31. See, for example, H. L. Eales, Census of 1891, Imperial Series (Burma Report), vol. 9 (Rangoon: Government Printing, 1892), 212–214.

32. For an insightful analysis of how the word kala became a derogatory term to index foreignness and to refer particularly to Muslims, see Alexandra de Mersan’s study of the shifting usage of kala in Arakan. Alexandra de Mersan, “How Muslims in Arakan Became Arakan’s Foreigners,” in Current Myanmar Studies, Aung San Suu Kyi, Muslims in Arakan, and Economic Insecurity, ed. Georg Winterberger and Esther Tenberg (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2019), 59–98.

33. Aurore Candier, “Mapping Ethnicity in Nineteenth Century Burma: When ‘Categories of People’ (lumyo) Became ‘Nations,’ ” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 50, no. 3 (September 2019), 354–356; Eales, Census of 1891, 213n ; John Crawfurd, Journal of an Embassy from the Governor General of India to the Court of Ava in the Year 1827 (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), 70.

34. Henry Yule, Narrative of Mission to the Court of Ava in 1855 (London: Smith, Elder, 1858), 142.

35. Albert Fytche, Burma Past and Present; with Personal Reminiscences of the Country, Volume 1 (London: C. K. Paul, 1878), 325n.

36. According to Yule, his “Bengalee” servants constantly referred to themselves as “kala admi” (black/dark kala) (Narrative of Mission, 37), suggesting that a distinction between “black” and “white” kala had been established, at least in the minds of some segments of the kala population in Burma, by the mid-nineteenth century. Yet I am aware of only one nineteenth-century usage of the Burmese terms kala byu vs. kala amè, the first Anglo-Burmese treaty of Yandabo (1826), for which the main interpreter was the US-born missionary Adoniram Judson.

37. Yule, Narrative of Mission, 150–151.

38. Yule, 150.

39. The Royal Administration of Burma, compiled by U Tin, translated by Euan Bagshawe, foreword by Michael Aung-Thwin (Bangkok: Ava, 2001), 439–440.

40. Sayyid (male) and sayyida (female) are the Arabic terms used throughout the Muslim world for the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad through his cousin and son-in-law Ali, the husband of Fatima, and their younger son Husayn. The descendants through the elder grandson, Hasan, are known as sharif and sharifa.

41. Cenap Cakmak, “Sayyid (Master),” in Cenap Cakmak, ed., Islam: A Worldwide Encyclopedia, vol. 1, A–E (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2017), 1403.

42. Thibaut D’Hubert, In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Alaol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 87. On “Persianization,” also see Nile Green, ed., The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).

43. Ulrike Freitag and William G. Clarence-Smith, eds., Hadhrami Traders, Scholars, and Statemen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s to 1960s (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997); Ho, Graves of Tarim.

44. R. Michael Feener, “Hybridity and the ‘Hadhrami Diaspora’ in the Indian Ocean Muslim Networks,” Asian Journal of Social Science 32, no. 3 (2004), 358; William Gervase Clarence-Smith, “Entrepreneurial Strategies of Hadhrami Arabs in Southeast Asia, c. 1750s–1950s,” in The Hadhrami Diaspora in Southeast Asia: Identity Maintenance or Assimilation?, ed. Hassan Ahmed Ibrahim and Ahmed Ibrahim Abushouk (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2009), 136.

45. For biographies of these and other influential pathi, see Shwe Bo U Bo U, Shwe man a hnit taya pyi bama mutsalin to e atôk patti (Mandalay: Kyi pwa ye pôn hneik taik, 1959); U Maung Maung Gyi (Mann), Myanma islam gantha win sa so to gyi, vol. 1 (Mandalay: Academy of Islamic Historical Research Foundation, 1972); and Aung Zaw, Taing yin mutslim sa pyu sa so pôggo kyaw mya (Yangon: Pan we we sa pe, 2013); and D’Hubert, In the Shade.

46. Yule, Narratives, 151–152.

47. Victor B. Lieberman, “Reinterpreting Burmese History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no. 1 (January 1987), 167. Also see Jos Gommans and Jacques Leider, eds., The Maritime of Burma: Exploring Political, Cultural and Commercial Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, 1200–1800 (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2002).

48. On the concept of bureaucratic capitalists, see Craig J. Reynolds’s “Editor’s Foreword,” in Jennifer W. Cushman, Family and State: The Formation of a Sino-Thai Tin-mining Dynasty, 1797–1932, ed. Craig J. Reynolds (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), vii–xvi.

49. Yi Li, Chinese in Colonial Burma: A Migrant Community in a Multiethnic State (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 27–28.

50. Jörg Armin Schendel, “The Mandalay Economy: Upper Burma’s External Trade, c. 1850–90” (PhD diss., University of Heidelberg, 2003).

51. Li, Chinese in Colonial Burma, 46–49.

52. Government of Burma, Report of an Enquiry into the Standard and Cost of Living of the Working Classes in Rangoon (Rangoon: Labor Statistics Bureau, 1928), 3–12.

53. Lowis, Census of India 1901, 111.

54. John Nisbet, Burma Under British Rule and Before, vol. 1 (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1901), 451n1; R. Grant Brown, “The Kadus of Burma,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London 1, no. 3 (1920), 2.

55. This interdiction was based on the principle of kafa’ah (“sufficiency” or “equivalence”), which stated that a woman’s partner should be no less than her social equivalent. The long-standing Hadrami interpretation of this principle was that a sayyida could only marry a sayyid or sharif. See Ho, Graves of Tarim, 152–187; Natalie Mobini-Kesheh, The Hadrami Awakening: Community and Identity in the Netherlands East Indies, 1900–1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Southeast Asia Publications Program, 1999), 93–98.

56. Jane F. Collier and Sylvia J. Yanagisako, eds., Gender and Kinship: Essays toward a Unified Analysis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987); Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Ebrey, eds., Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

57. Ian Brown, A Colonial Economy in Crisis: Burma’s Rice Cultivators and the World Depression of the 1930s (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 15–17, 22, 37.

58. Government of Burma, Report on the Administration of Burma for the Year 1911–12 (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, 1913), 15.

59. John S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 116.

60. Though much of the scholarship on “milk debt” has been produced in the context of Buddhist Asia, breastfeeding and mother’s milk function as symbols of the unrepayable love and sacrifice of the mother in a wide range of contexts. See Alan Cole, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Jenny B. White, Money Makes Us Relatives: Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey (London: Routledge, 2004); Reiko Ohnuma, “Debt to the Mother: A Neglected Aspect of the Founding of the Buddhist Nuns’ Order,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 4 (December 2006): 861–901; Andaya, Flaming Womb, 129, 214.

61. Clarence-Smith, “Entrepreneurial Strategies,”154.

62. On the eve of the Great Depression of the 1930s, chettiars owned roughly one-fifth of land in Lower Burma in the possession of nonagriculturists; later in the decade, the figure shot up to almost one-half. Furnivall, Colonial Policy, 111. On chettiars in Burma, see I. Brown, Colonial Economy, 14–15.

63. George Orwell, Burmese Days (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 126, 285.

1. Arnold Wright, Twentieth Century Impressions of British Burma (London: Lloyd’s Greater Britain, 1910), 309–312; Jayde Lin Roberts, Mapping Chinese Rangoon: Place and Nation among the Sino-Burmese (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 64–65; Li, Chinese in Colonial Burma, 66–71.

2. See Wright, Twentieth Century Impressions, 307–326.

3. “Death of Mr. Choa Chuan Ghiock,” Straits Times (25 January 1900); Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore, annotated ed. (Singapore: National Library Board, 2020): 422; Choa Eng Wan v. Choa Giant Tee (1923) in The Privy Council Cases: Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, 1875–1990, ed. Visu Sinnadurai, vol. 1 (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1990), 197–201.

4. Choa Eng Wan v. Choa Giant Tee (1923), 198–199.

5. Captain Abdul Rahman Khan Laudie, by his agent, Fazal Rahman Khan vs. Ma Kye (1914), 8 BLT, 87, 88.

6. Augustin Bergeron, “The Distribution of Top Incomes in British India: An Exploration of Income Tax Records, 1885–1922” (master’s thesis, Paris School of Economics, 2014), 10.

7. S. Anamalay Pillay v. Po La (1906), 3 LBR, 228.

8. S. Anamalay Pillay v. Po La.

9. S. Anamalay Pillay v. Po La, 229.

10. Abdul Razack v. Aga Mahomed Jaffer Bindaneem (1893–1894), 21 Indian Appeals, 56–70, 63, 70.

11. Abdul Razack v. Aga Mahomed Jaffer Bindaneem, 57.

12. Abdul Razack v. Aga Mahomed Jaffer Bindaneem, 57.

13. Abdul Razack v. Aga Mahomed Jaffer Bindaneem, 66–67.

14. Azam Khan v. Daw Khin and Others, BLR 1950, 23 March, 189.

15. Ma Me Gale v. Ma Sa Yi, IA 1904–1905, 72; Privy Council Judgments on Appeals from India, vol. 8 (1901–1905), ed. Pandit Upendranath Mukhopadhyay and Babu Priya Sankar Majumdar, (Phowanipore: Sreenath Banerjee, 1908), 743.

16. Andaya, Flaming Womb, 146–147; Li Minghuan, “ ‘Sons of the Yellow Emperor’ to ‘Children of Indonesian Soil’: Studying Peranakan Chinese Based on the Batavia Kong Koan Archives,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, no. 2 (June 2002): 215–230; Ho, Graves of Tarim.

17. Skinner, Chinese Society; Skinner, “Creolized Chinese Societies”; Cushman, Family and State, 16–26.

18. Alexander Hamilton, A new account of the East Indies, being the observations and remarks of Capt. Alexander Hamilton, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: printed by John Mosman, 1727), 51–52.

19. Michael Symes, An Account of an Embassy to the Kingdom of Ava: Sent by the Governor-General of India in the Year 1795 (London: W. Bulmer, 1800), 72–73.

20. Symes, Account of an Embassy, 217, 328–329.

21. Fitz William Thomas Pollok, Fifty Years’ Reminiscences of India: A Retrospect of Travel, Adventure and Shikar (London: Edward Arnold, 1896), 103–104.

22. Nisbet, Burma under British Rule, 250, 253.

23. Kumal Sheriff v. Mi Shwe Ywet (1875), SJLB, 49, 50.

24. Kumal Sheriff v. Mi Shwe Ywet, 50.

25. Government of India, Census of India, 1911, Report, 82, 146, 149, 281.

26. For detailed analyses of representations of the allegedly unfettered sexuality of Burmese women by British scholar officials and how they served to rationalize Burmese otherness and British colonial rule, see Jonathan Saha, “The Male State: Colonialism, Corruption and Rape Investigations in the Irrawaddy Delta c.1900,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 47, no. 3 (July/September 2010): 343–376; and Lucy Delap, “Uneven Orientalisms: Burmese Women and the Feminist Imagination,” Gender and History 24, no. 2 (August 2012): 389–410.

27. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Marilyn Booth, ed., Harem Histories: Lived Spaces and Imagined Places (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

28. Chamion Caballero and Peter J. Aspinall, “ ‘Disharmony of Physical, Mental and Temperamental Qualities’: Race Crossing, Miscegenation and the Eugenics Movement,” in Mixed Race Britain in The Twentieth Century, ed. Chamion Caballero and Peter J. Aspinall (London: Palgrave, 2018), 21–52.

29. Great Britain, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Royal Commission upon Decentralization in Burma, vol. 3 (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1908), 16.

30. Copleston, Report on the Census, 71.

31. Reid, Age of Commerce; Peletz, Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times (New York: Routledge, 2009).

32. On Buddhism and law in Burma generally and the dhammasat in particular, see D. Christian Lammerts, Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250–1850 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018).

33. On liberalism and the British Empire, see Sudipta Sen’s review essay, “Liberalism and the British Empire in India,” Journal of Asian Studies 74, no. 3 (August 2015): 711–722.

34. For an outline of nineteenth-century legal reforms and judicial administration in India, see Bernard S. Cohn, “Law and the Colonial State in India,” in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India: The British Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 100–140; Julia Stephens, Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 22–56.

35. Furnivall, Colonial Policy, 29–33, 62–64, 71–77, 131–37.

36. Lammerts, Buddhist Law, 9. See Lammerts’s discussion of the colonial production of “Buddhist law” (4–11).

37. For comparison, see Daniel S. Lev, “Colonial Law and the Genesis of the Indonesian State,” Indonesia 40 (October 1985): 57–74; Susan L. Burns and Barbara J. Brooks, eds., Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014); Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty; and Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020).

38. U Gaung, A Digest of the Burmese Buddhist Law concerning Inheritance and Marriage; being a collection of texts from thirty-six Dhammathats, composed and arranged under the supervision of the Hon’ble U Gaung, C.S.I. ex-Kinwun Mingyi, 2 vols. (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1899).

39. Government of India, Census of India, 1911, Report, 149.

40. U Gaung, Digest, 270, 313, 316. On the Ketujā, Vinicchayarāsi, and Manugyè dhammasat, see Lammerts, Buddhist Law.

41. Kirichenko, “From Thathanadaw,” 37. Uposatha days are Buddhist equivalents of Lent or the Sabbath and are determined by the waxing and waning of the moon.

42. Kirichenko, “From Thathanadaw,” 31.

43. Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 244; Eric Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 230.

44. Ponna here refers to the Manipuri Brahmin ritualists in Mandalay in the employ mainly of the royal family. However, ponna were not always or necessarily Brahmin, and the term has other meanings. See Thant Myint-U, Making of Modern Burma, 95.

45. The Royal Orders of Burma, AD 1598–1855, 10 vols. [henceforth ROB], ed. Than Tun (Kyoto, 1983–1990), 17 November 1807, 6:535–536; U Hla Tin (compiled), Myanmar min ôk kyut pôn sa dan nhit Bodaw paya e yaza thit khaw thaw amein daw tan kyi, vol. 4 (Yangon: She haung sa pe hnit yin kye hmu tana su, 1970), 252–254; Thant Myint-U, 51.

46. Scott Alan Kugle, “Framed, Blamed, and Renamed: The Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (May 2001): 263.

47. ROB, 11 November 1878, 9:914; Htun Yee, Yadana bôn kit upade mya / Collection of Upade (Laws and Regulations of Myanmar Last Two of Kings, AD 1853–1885), vol. 4 (Toyohashi, Japan: Aichi University, 1999), 69. The amein daw read: “Cases concerning the department of joint court: cases concerning pathi, tayoke, and kala lu myo gya residing in Mandalay are to go to the Wun Dauk Min Gyi Maha Min Htin Yaza, Myo-za of Pathanago.”

48. Candier, “Mapping Ethnicity,” 4–5.

49. Victor B. Lieberman, “Ethnic Politics in Eighteenth-Century Burma,” Modern Asian Studies 12, no. 3 (July 1978), 459–460.

50. Victor B. Lieberman, “Ethnic Hatred and Universal Benevolence: Ethnicity and Loyalty in Precolonial Myanmar, and Britain,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63, no. 2 (April 2021): 313.

51. Lieberman, “Ethnic Hatred,” 326–327.

52. Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, vol. 1, Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 40–43, 50, 200.

53. Duara, “Asia Redux,” 982.

54. Candier, “Mapping Ethnicity,” 11–12.

55. Yoshinari Watanabe, “Ethnic Policy towards Various ‘Peoples’ in the Early Konbaung Dynasty: Ethnic Awareness in Eighteenth- to Nineteenth-Century Burma,” in The Changing Self-Image of Southeast Asian Society during the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Yoneo Ishii (Tokyo: Toyo Bunko, 2009), 27–53.

56. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 182.

57. ROB, 10:31; Htun Yee, Collection of Hpyat-sa, vol. 2 (Yangon: Myanmar Affairs Bureau, Literature Bank, 2006), 2–3, 32–35, 42–45; Lieberman, Strange Parallels.

58. Andaya, Flaming Womb, 145.

59. Lieberman, Strange Parallels, 195.

60. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

61. Li, “Sons.”

62. Skinner, “Creolized Chinese Societies,” 74–76; Andaya, Flaming Womb, 100.

63. Andaya, 97–103.

1. The judge in this case had followed a precedent set in 1895 in another case, Ahmed and another v. Ma Pwa (1895), concerning a zerbadi family. For a discussion of Ahmed and another v. Ma Pwa (1895), see Chie Ikeya, “The Body of the Burmese Muslim,” in Bodies Beyond Binaries in Colonial and Postcolonial Asia, ed. Kate Imy, Teresa Segura-Garcia, Elena Valdameri, and Erica Wald (Leiden, Netherlands: Leiden University Press, forthcoming).

2. Ma Le and Ma Me v. Maung Hlaing and Ma Mi (1905), 2 UBR, 1, 1–2.

3. Ma Le and Ma Me v. Maung Hlaing and Ma Mi, 3–4.

4. Mitra Sharafi, “The Marital Patchwork of Colonial South Asia: Forum Shopping from Britain to Baroda,” Law and History Review 28 (2010): 979–1009.

5. Ma Le and Ma Me v. Maung Hlaing and Ma Mi, 1, 6.

6. Candier, “Mapping Ethnicity,” 9.

7. Andrew Huxley, “The Anglo-Buddhist War (1875–1905): The Circumstances under Which Christians Developed Their Theory of Buddhism,” Journal of Comparative Law 7, no. 2 (2012): 23.

8. William H. Morley, The Administration of Justice in British India: Its Past History and Present State (1858), quoted in Kugle, “Framed, Blamed, and Renamed,” 300.

9. Kugle, 270.

10. Cohn, Colonialism; and James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

11. Eales, Census of 1891, 4, 193–194.

12. Eales, 197, 203–204.

13. Copleston, Report on the Census, 46.

14. Eales, Census of 1891, 65, 196.

15. Eales, 72–73, 196.

16. Eales, 55.

17. Hla Aung, “Sino-Burmese Marriages and Conflict of Laws,” Burma Law Institute Journal 1 no. 1 (Autumn 1958): 25–55; M. B. Hooker, “The ‘Chinese Confucian’ and the ‘Chinese Buddhist’ in British Burma, 1881–1947,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 21, no. 2 (September 1990): 384–401.

18. See major race/blood, language, and states/countries divisions in the report of the census of 1891. Eales, Census of 1891, 75, 146, 178, 189.

19. Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006), 6, 10.

20. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (New York: Verso, 1998), 318–330.

21. Though census instructions did not explicitly rule out female heads of household, the sample register appended in the report only listed men. The ten houses and one monastery it enumerated were all headed by men. Eales, Census of 1891, lvii.

22. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 166, 184.

23. Lower Burma, Report on the Census, 33; Copleston, Census of British Burma, 70.

24. Copleston, 71.

25. India, Census of 1891, Imperial Tables, 189, 276.

26. Lowis, Census of India, 1901, 228, 236, 260; India, Census of India, 1911, Tables.

27. Lowis, 111; India, Census of India, 1931, Report, 230–232.

28. India, Census of India, 1931, Report, 210–211, 231.

29. Lowis, Census of India, 95–96.

30. Lowis, 96.

31. India, Census 1891, Report, 212; Lowis, 131; India, Census of India, 1921, Report, 90–91; India, Census of 1931, Report, 60–63.

32. India, Census of India, 1911, Report, 82, 281.

33. Eales, Census of 1891, 212.

34. Skinner, “Creolized Chinese Societies,” 68–70.

35. The descriptive “Straits-born” or “Straits Chinese” were used to differentiate Chinese who were born in the Straits Settlements from the so-called sinkeh (literally “new guest”).

36. Hugh Clifford and Frank A. Swettenham, A Dictionary of the Malay Language, Part I (Taiping: Government Printing Office, 1894), 57.

37. C. A. Vlieland, British Malaya: A Report on the 1931 Census and Certain Problems of Vital Statistics (London: Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1932), cited in Charles Hirschman, “The Meaning and Measurement of Ethnicity in Malaysia: An Analysis of Census Classifications,” Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 3 (August 1987): 565.

38. The classification mestizo was used thereafter in Spanish and American Philippines as a legal category inclusive of mixed nonwhites. See Caroline S. Hau, The Chinese Question: Ethnicity, Nation, and Region in and beyond the Philippines, Kyoto CSEAS Series on Asian Studies (Singapore: NUS Press, 2014), esp. 7–25; Richard T. Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila: Family, Identity, and Culture, 1860s–1930s (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2010), 240, 265.

39. Yahaya, Fluid Jurisdictions, 19. While I have come across unconfirmed references to the use of the category Peranakan in Dutch colonial censuses prior to 1930, thereafter, if a child was a recognized child of, say, a Chinese or Indian father, she or he was by legal definition a “foreign Asiatic.” If unrecognized or if the father was native, the child would have been classified as native. See Nederlandsch-Indië, Departement van Economische Zaken, Volkstelling 1930, Deel VII, Chineezen en andere vreemde oosterlingen in Nederlandsch-Indië (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1935); Guo-Quan Seng, Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny, and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023).

40. Gouvernement général de l’Indochine, Annuaire Statistique de L’Indochine, vol. 1, Recueil de Statistiques relatives aux années 1913 à 1922 (Hanoi: Imprimerie D’Extrême–Orient, 1927), 33; Gouvernement général de l’Indochine, Annuaire Statistique De L’Indochine, vol. 7, 1936–1937 (Hanoi: Imprimerie D’Extrême–Orient, 1938), 21–24.

41. For an example of census discussion of “hybrid races,” see the entry on “Kachin-Burma Hybrids” in the 1911 census. India, Census of 1911, Report, 261.

42. India, 248, 250.

43. India, Census of India 1931, Report, 245.

44. India, 207.

45. Jonathan Silk, “The Victorian Creation of Buddhism: Review of Philip C. Almond, ‘The British Discovery of Buddhism,’ ” Journal of Indian Philosophy 22, no. 2 (June 1994): 174–195; and Charles Hallisey, “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravada Buddhism,” in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald Lopez (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 31–62.

46. Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

47. For a discussion of a movement, in the 1930s, that rejected the use of zerbadi and advocated for the recognition of “Bamar Muslims,” i.e., as native or Indigenous Muslims, see Ayako Saito, “The Formation of the Concept of Myanmar Muslims as Indigenous Citizens: Their History and Current Situation,” Journal of Sophia Asian Studies 32 (2014): 25–40.

48. Edmund Burke, The Annual Register: A Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1919 (London: Longmans, Green, 1920), 258.

49. Mersan, “Muslims in Arakan,” 85–86.

50. India, Census of 1931, Report, 230–231.

51. Khan Bahadur Munshi Ghulam Ahmed Khan, Census of India 1901, Vol. 23, Kashmir, Part 1: Report (Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1902), 84.

52. Sonia Nishat Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1939 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1996), 6–7.

53. Government of Burma, Notes and Statistics on Hospitals and Dispensaries in Burma for the Year 1920 (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1921), 5.

54. Naono, “Educating Lady Doctors.”

55. Government of Burma, Notes and Statistics on Hospitals and Dispensaries in Burma for the Year 1903 (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1904), 9; Government of Burma, Notes and Statistics on Hospitals and Dispensaries in Burma for the Year 1912 (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1913), 14; and Burma, Notes and Statistics on Hospitals and Dispensaries in Burma for the Year 1921 (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1922), 7, 14.

56. Eales, Census of 1891, 14–15.

57. J. George Scott and J. P. Hardiman, “Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States,” Compiled from Official Papers by J. G. Scott, Assisted by J. P. Hardiman, Part 2, vol. 2 (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1901), 800; J. George Scott and J. P. Hardiman, “Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States,” Compiled from Official Papers by J. G. Scott, Assisted by J. P. Hardiman, Part 2, vol. 3 (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1901), 368.

58. Scott and Hardiman, “Gazetteer,” Part 2, vol. 3, 368; Eales, Census of 1891, 20–21; Government of Burma, Burma Gazetteer, Yamethin District, vol. B, no. 37 (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, 1913), 44.

59. Eales, Census of 1891; Government of Burma, Reports on Public Instruction in Burma for the Year 1891–92 (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1892), 52.

60. Case, whose parents were in charge of the American Baptist Mission in Myingyan—a town situated about ninety miles southwest of Mandalay—since the early 1880s, lived most of his sixty years in the country. See P. H. J. Lerrigo, ed., All Kindreds and Tongues: An Illustrated Survey of the Foreign Mission Enterprise of Northern Baptists, 4th issue (New York: American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, 1940), 28–29.

61. To some leading African American intellectuals, such as Booker T. Washington, who founded the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, this model of industrial education was the means to self-supporting trades and businesses. To others, such as W. E. B. du Bois, the model’s “denigration of academic subjects” represented a second-class education to keep Black people in low-skilled jobs and preserve the racial caste system. See Andrew E. Barnes, Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African Industrial Education (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2017).

62. Brayton C. Case, “Christianity in Action on the Village Fields of Burma, or Agriculture in Mission Work,” Missions: A Baptist Monthly Magazine, January 1921, 139.

63. Legislative Council of Burma, Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Governor of Burma, vol. 17 (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1932), 65.

64. Government of India, Burma Gazetteer, Yamethin District, vol. A (Rangoon: Superintendent of Government Printing and Stationery, 1934), 43.

65. Firpo and Jacobs, “Taking Children”; Firpo, Uprooted.

66. Institutionalized under Sir Arthur Phayre, the first chief commissioner of Burma, the “grant-in-aid” system of education aimed at sidestepping an expensive duplication of schools throughout Burma. U Kaung, “A Survey of the History of Education in Burma before the British Conquest and After,” Journal of Burma Research Society 46, no. 2 (December 1963): 73, 79–81.

67. The vast majority of these boarding facilities were for primary and secondary schools and were privately run (with government aid).

68. Anicca (impermanence), dukkha (suffering), and anattā (nonself, substancelessness) are the three basic principles of Buddhism, thought to characterize all phenomena.

69. The majority view is that the initial interdiction against the visitation of graves by men and women was replaced by support for the permissibility of visiting graves by men and women. See Obdřej Beránek and Pavel Ťupek, From Visiting Graves to Their Destruction: The Question of Ziyara through the Eyes of Salafis (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, Crown Center for Middle East Studies, 2009).

1. WR Vanoogopaul v. R Kristnasawmy Muduliar alias Maung (1905), 3 LBR, 25.

2. WR Vanoogopaul v. Muduliar.

3. Ma Yait v. Maung Chit Maung; and Maung Chit Maung v. Ma Yait and Another (1921), 11 LBR, 155.

4. Taw Sein Ko, “Correspondence on Buddhist Wills,” Journal of Burma Research Society 7, no. 1 (April 1917): 56–57; Tha Gywe, “Burman Buddhist Wills,” Journal of Burma Research Society 7, no. 1 (April 1917): 57–69; Taw Sein Ko, “Buddhist Wills,” Journal of Burma Research Society 7, no. 3 (December 1917): 274–277; Than Tun, “The Legal System in Burma, 1000–1300,” Burma Law Institute Journal 1, no. 2 (June 1959): 171–184; Andrew Huxley, “Wills in Theravada Buddhist S. E. Asia,” Recueils de la societé Jean Bodin pour l’histoire comparative des institutions 62, no. 4 (1994): 53–92.

5. Great Britain, Minutes of Evidence, 50.

6. Ma Yait v. Maung Chit Maung, 158, 160; Chit Maung v. Ma Yait and Ma Noo (1913), 7 LBR, 362, 363.

7. On the Maha Bodhi Society, see Alan Trevithick, The Revival of Buddhist Pilgrimage at Bodh Gaya (1811–1949): Anagarika Dharmapala and the Mahabodhi Temple (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2007). On the International Buddhist Society, see Elizabeth J. Harris, “Ananda Metteyya: Controversial Networker, Passionate Critic,” in A Buddhist Crossroads: Pioneer Western Buddhists and Asian Networks 1860–1960, ed. Brian Bocking, Phibul Choompolpaisal, Laurence Cox, and Alicia Turner (London: Routledge, 2015), 77–92.

8. Ma Yait v. Maung Chit Maung, 158–159.

9. Ma Yait v. Maung Chit Maung, 158, 160.

10. Eales, Census of 1891, 73.

11. Nisbet, Burma under British, 2:195.

12. Ma Yait v. Maung Chit Maung, 157–159, 162.

13. Maung Man v. Doramo (1906), 3 LBR, 244, 244–45.

14. Pillay v. Firm, AIR 1914, 63, 64.

15. Saw Maung Gyi v. Ma Thu Kha (1915), 8 BLT, 198.

16. Maung Kyi and others v. Ma Shwe Baw (1929), 7 ILR Ran, 777.

17. Kumal Sheriff v. Mi Shwe Ywet, 50.

18. Sona Ullah v. Ma Kin, AIR 1919, also in 12 BLT 1919, 61.

19. For other examples, see Hussain Unwar v. Fatima Bee (1885), SJLB, 368; Ma Saing v. Kader Moideen (1901) in Aviet Agabeg, ed., The Burma Law Reports, vol. 8, pt. 1 (Rangoon: British Burma Press, 1902), 16–18; Ali Asghar v. Mi Kra Hla U (1916), 8 LBR, 461.

20. Queen-Empress v. Nga Pale (1892), Printed Judgments, Lower Burma, 1893–1900, 608.

21. See Kugle, “Framed, Blamed, and Renamed,” 265–281.

22. Esoof Mahomed Baroocha v. Hayatoonnisa, AIR 1918, also 9 BLT (1918), 120.

23. Kyin Wet v. Ma Gyok, Sabyapo, Seikwan, Saing Thein, Khin Myo (1918), 9 LBR, 179. Also see Hong Ku and Hock Kung v. Ma Thin, Selected judgements and Ruling of the Court of the Judicial Commissioner and of the Special Court, Lower Burma, 1872–1892 (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, 1907), 135; Lee Lim Ma Hock v. Saw Mah Hone & three (1923), 2 ILR Ran, 4; and Phan Tiyok v. Lim Kyin Kauk (1930), 8 ILR Ran, 57. The last case, which entailed a discussion of no less than nineteen precedent cases on Sino-Burmese marriages over almost one hundred pages, is particularly illuminating.

24. In Re Ma Yin Mya and one v. Tan Yauk Pu and two (1927), 5 ILR Ran, 406, 419.

25. Ma Sein v. Ma Pan Nyun and Two (1924), 2 ILR Ran, 94, 97.

26. Ma Sein v. Ma Pan Nyun, 97–98.

27. Tim Stretton and Kirsta J. Kesselring, eds., Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998); Ghosh, Sex and the Family, 111.

28. Rachel Sturman, The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and Women’s Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Stephens, Governing Islam.

29. Ma Pwa v. Yu Lwai & another, AIR 1916, 12, 13. The legality of Ma Yin’s adoption was further adjudicated in Ma Pwa v. Ma Yin & another, AIR 1919, 4.

30. Ma Pwa v. Yu Lwai, 13–14.

31. Chan Eu Ghee v. Mrs. Iris Maung Sein alias Lim Gai Po and Two Others, BLR 1953, 294, 299–300.

32. Chan Eu Ghee v. Mrs. Iris Maung Sein, 302.

33. Khoo Sain Ban v. Tan Guat Tean and others, ILR Ran 7 (1929), 234; Li, Chinese in Colonial Burma, 95.

34. Chan Eu Ghee v. Mrs. Iris Maung Sein, 300.

35. For select examples of this vast literature, see Lev, “Colonial Law”; Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Loos, Subject Siam; Sturman, Government of Social Life; Burns and Brooks, Gender and Law; Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty; Yesenia Barragan, Freedom’s Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Yahaya, Fluid Jurisdictions; Seng, Strangers in the Family.

36. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Shah, Stranger Intimacy.

37. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–314.

38. Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Women and the Family in Chinese History (London: Routledge, 2003); Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty.

39. Patriarchal authority, dubbed “traditional,” was bolstered and entrenched not just throughout European colonial empires but also in Siam and the Japanese Empire. See Loos, Subject Siam; and Burns and Brooks, Gender and Law.

40. John Jardine, “Marriage—Its Incidents” (21 July 1882), in Notes on Buddhist Law I, 2nd reprint (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing and Stationery, 1953), 1, 5.

41. Harold Fielding Hall, The Soul of a People (Bangkok: White Orchid, 1995; originally published in 1898), 171–172, 189.

42. R. Grant Brown, “Burmese Women,” in Shades of Gold and Green: Anecdotes of Colonial Burmah (1886–1948), Comp. N. Greenwood (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1995), 216–217.

43. James G. Scott, Burma: A Handbook of Practical Information, rev. ed. (London: A. Morning, 1911), 77.

44. Lammerts, Buddhist Law.

45. Ma Wun Di and another v. Ma Kin and others, BLR 1908, 14:3, 6.

46. Yahaya, Fluid Jurisdictions.

47. Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty, 185.

48. See Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Sharafi, “Marital Patchwork”; Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Stephens, Governing Islam.

49. Ma E Khin & ors v. Maung Sein & ors (1924), 2 ILR Ran, 495.

50. Ma E Khin & ors v. Maung Sein & ors, 500.

51. Ma E Khin & ors v. Maung Sein & ors, 512.

52. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 10.

53. Feener, “Hybridity,” 367.

1. Taw Sein Ko, Burmese Sketches. The commission was appointed in response to the growing demand in India for the recruitment and training of Indians to the ICS.

2. Penny Edwards, “Relocating the Interlocutor: Taw Sein Ko (1864–1930) and the Itinerancy of Knowledge in British Burma,” South East Asia Research 12, no. 3 (November 2004): 309.

3. Gandhi went to Burma in 1902, 1915, and 1929 for the purpose of raising funds from the Indian communities in Burma for the All-India Spinners’ Association, which he had founded.

4. Mahatma Gandhi, “Speech at Indians’ Meeting, Rangoon,” in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 45, 4 February 1929–11 May 1929 (New Delhi: Publications Division Government of India, 1999), 207–209.

5. Mahatma Gandhi, “Report on Burma P. C. C. Affairs,” in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 276–277, 277.

6. Mahatma Gandhi, “To Gujaratis Resident in Burma,” in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 286–289, 287.

7. “Bagyi metta tôn e adata mukha dipani,’ ” Thuriya Magazine, September 1926, 100.

8. Known as the “Simon Commission” after its chairman Sir John Simon, the commission’s visit to Burma came on the heels of its visit, first, to India in 1927 for the similar purpose of evaluating constitutional reforms.

9. Burma for Burmans League, Memorandum Submitted to the Indian Statutory Commission by the Burma for Burmans League, Parts I to III (Rangoon: Impress Press, 1929), IOR/Q/13/1/7, item 22, E-Bur-987: The Burma for Burmans League (31 Jan 1929), 4.

10. Memorandum Submitted to the Indian Statutory Commission by the Separation League (Rangoon: National Printing Works, 1929), IOR/Q/13/1/7, item 23, E-Bur-988: The League for the Separation of Burma, iv; Mya U, Plea for Separation of Burma from India (Rangoon: Rangoon Times, 1929), 3.

11. Burma for Burmans League, Memorandum, 9, 31.

12. “National Deterioration: Myanmar amyo tha mya nyi pa sôk yôk kyin a kyaung,” Myanmar Alin Magazine 1, no. 2 (February 1912): 133.

13. “Myanmar amyo tha mya nyi pa sôk yôk kyin a kyaung,” 134.

14. “Myanmar pyi thi myanmar lu myo tho a bo pyit taik kyaung” (Burma for the Burmans), Myanmar Alin Magazine 3, no. 8 (April 1914): 649.

15. Aye Kyaw, The Voice of Young Burma (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1993), 64–65. Niklas Foxeus, “The Buddha Was a Devoted Nationalist: Buddhist Nationalism, Ressentiment, and Defending Buddhism in Myanmar,” Religion 49, no. 4 (May 2019): 661–690.

16. “Reception to U Ottama: Speech at Jubilee Hall,” Supplement to New Burma (5 July 1922), cited in Donald Eugene Smith, Religion and Politics in Burma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 96.

17. Robert H. Taylor, The State in Myanmar, rev. and expanded (London: Hurst, 2008; originally published in 1987), 192–195. Wunthanu (Pali: vaṃsānu) is derived from the Pali words vaṃsa and anurakkhita, meaning “lineage” and “protected,” respectively, or a “protected lineage.”

18. Few scholars have probed the parallels and links between Hindu and Buddhist revivalist movements in India and Burma at the turn of the twentieth century. See Emanuel Sarkisyanz, Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), 126–127; Foxeus, “Buddha”; and Sana Aiyar, “Revolutionaries, Maulvis, Swamis, and Monks: Burma’s Khilafat Moment,” in Oceanic Islam: Muslim Universalism and European Imperialism, ed. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2020), chap. 5.

19. Anne M. Blackburn, Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 104–142; Padma Anagol, “Gender, Religion, and Anti-Feminism in Hindu Right Wing Writings: Notes from a Nineteenth Century Indian Woman-Patriot’s Text ‘Essays in the Service of a Nation,’ ” Women’s Studies International Forum 37 (2013): 104–113.

20. Maung Kan Baw, Proceedings of the Burma Reforms Committee, vol. 2 (1921), 58.

21. Chie Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011), 86–88.

22. Joseph Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Srirupa Prasad, Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940: Contagions of Feeling (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

23. Po Hla, Burma Legislative Council Proceedings (henceforth BLCP) (31 January 1927), 146.

24. U Pu, BLCP (31 January 1927), 148–149.

25. Kya Gaing, BLCP (1 February 1927), 155–156.

26. U Pu, BLCP, 149.

27. Kyaw Dun, BLCP (1 February 1927), 157.

28. Tun Win, BLCP (1 February 1927), 159.

29. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

30. Tani E. Barlow, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2004); Asha Nadkarni, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

31. Tun Win, BLCP, 159.

32. Mabel Mary Agnes Chan-Toon, A Marriage in Burmah: A Novel (London: Greening, 1905), 22–23, 25.

33. May Oung and John S. Furnivall, “The Dawn of Nationalism in Burma: The Modern Burman,” Journal of the Burma Research Society 33, no. 1 (1950): 4.

34. May Oung and Furnivall, “Dawn of Nationalism in Burma.” On May Oung, see Alicia M. Turner, Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014).

35. Also known as Mrs. M. M. Hla Oung, Mya May was married to the acting controller of Indian treasuries Hla Oung, the first Burmese to serve in such a high position in the Treasury Department. She was the patron and treasurer of the International Buddhist Society. See Turner, Saving Buddhism, 66–67.

36. All-Asian Women’s Conference, Report of the All-Asian Women’s Conference, First Session, Lahore, 19th to 25th January 1931 (Bombay: Times of India, 1931), 2.

37. I. Brown, Colonial Economy in Crisis.

38. The series of peasant uprisings that began on 22 December 1930 came to be known as the Saya San rebellion after Saya San, the prime mover behind them. See Maitrii Aung-Thwin, The Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011).

39. Burma Government, “Minute Paper, Burma Office,” file B3932/38(i), “Burma Riots: Situation Reports,” M/3/513, IOR, 1938; E. J. L. Andrew, Indian Labour in Rangoon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 279–292.

40. Li, Chinese in Colonial Burma, 206.

41. Khin Yi, The Dobama Movement in Burma, 1930–1938 (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1988), 5; Dobama Asi Ayone, “Nainggan pyu sar zu ahmat 1” (National/Country Reform Series No. 1), reproduced in Khin Yi, The Dobama Movement in Burma, Appendix (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1988), 1–9, 5–6.

42. Khin Yi, Appendix, 3.

43. Khin Yi, 8.

44. Margaret Cousins, The Awakening of Asian Womanhood (Madras: Ganesh, 1922), 9.

45. Margaret Cousins, “Notes and Comments,” Stri Dharma 6, no. 2 (December 1922): 17–18.

46. Nehru, Stri Darpan, February 1920, quoted in Shobna Nijhawan, “At the Margins of Empire: Feminist-Nationalist Configurations of Burmese Society in the Hindi Public (1917–1920),” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 4 (November 2012): 8.

47. Mya May, “Burmese Women,” Buddhism 1, no. 1 (15 September 1903): 62.

48. Mya May, “Burmese Women,” 62, 64.

49. Maung Thaw, “Buddhist Activities,” Buddhism 1, no. 1 (15 September 1903): 174.

50. Lowis, Census of India, Report, 68; India, Census of India, 1911, Report, 170.

51. All-Asian Women’s Conference, Report, 38.

52. All-Asian Women’s Conference, 45.

53. See, for example, Mi Kin Gale et al v. Mi Kin Gyi, et al (1910), 1 UBR, 1910–13, 42; Maung Shwe Sa v. Ma Mo, AIR (1914) and AIR (1922); Maung Hme v. Ma Sein, AIR (1918); Po Nyein v. Ma Shwe Kin, AIR (1918); San Paw v. Ma Yin, AIR (1920); Maung Tha Dun & 10 v. Ma Thein Yin, 2 ILR Ran (1923), 1; Ma Thein Yin v. Maung Tha Dun & Ten, 2 ILR Ran (1923), 62; Ma Shwe Yin v. Maung Ba Tin, 1 ILR Ran (1923), 343; Maung Po Nyun v. Ma Saw Tin (1925), 3 ILR Ran; Maung Po An v. Ma Dwe (1926), 4 ILR Ran; Ma Paing v. Maung Shwe Hpaw & 8 others (1927), 5 ILR Ran, 296.

54. All-Asian Women’s Conference, Report, 67–68.

55. All-Asian Women’s Conference, 110, 138.

56. All-Asian Women’s Conference, 138.

57. Mukherjee, Indian Suffragettes, 167–170.

58. Burma Round Table Conference, 27 November 1931–12 January 1932, Proceedings of the Committee of the Whole Conference (Rangoon: Superintendent of Government Printing and Stationery, 1932), 39.

59. Mya Sein, “Land of Happy Marriage,” Daily Herald, 7 December 1931; Mya Sein, “Myanmar amyo thami mya hnit ein daung hmu,” Thuriya, 1 January 1932.

60. Mya Sein, “Land of Happy Marriage,” 8.

61. Mya Sein.

62. Ikeya, Refiguring Women.

63. Ann McClintock, “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism, and the Family,” Feminist Review, no. 44 (Summer 1993): 61–80; Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation.

64. Kathleen Blee, Women of the Klan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Paola Bachetta and Margaret Power, eds., Right Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World (London: Routledge 2002); Devaki Menon, Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

65. The prefixing of the title of newspapers and periodicals to the names of editors and columnists is a practice that remains common to this day. The practice appears to have sprung from the absence of surnames in Burma. To distinguish famous or public figures, who often possess matching names, an identifier of some sort is prefixed to their names.

66. Mya Sein, “The Women of Burma: A Tradition of Hard Work and Independence,” Atlantic Monthly (February 1958), 123; Mya Sein, “Myanmar amyo thami,” in Myanmar amyo thami kye moun (Yangon: Myanmar nainggan sape hnik sanezin apwe, 1998; originally published in 1958), 19.

67. Mya Sein, “Towards Independence in Burma: The Role of Women,” Asian Affairs 3, no. 3 (1972): 297.

68. BLCP (3 February 1927), 214.

69. Quoted in Yin Yin Htun, Independent Daw San (Yangon: Pinnya than saung poun hneik taik, 2009), 25.

70. Buddha batha myanmar ma, “Khin aye kyi,” Thuriya Magazine, August 1918.

71. For an in-depth examination of the life and writings of Daw San, see Chie Ikeya, “The Life and Writing of a Patriotic Feminist: Independent Daw San of Burma,” in Women in Southeast Asian Nationalist Movements, ed. Susan Blackburn and Helen Ting (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2013), 23–47.

72. Draft Bill, Buddhists Marriage and Divorce Bill, 20 July 1927, IOR/L/PJ 6.1944.2398, 3.

73. Jardine, “Marriage,” 6.

74. Quoted in Trudy Jacobsen, Sex Trafficking in Southeast Asia: A History of Desire, Duty, and Debt (New York: Routledge, 2017), 65.

75. See the lawsuits cited above in note 53.

76. “Chief and Lesser Wives,” Burma Law Times 6, no. 4 (April 1913): i–x.

77. Draft Bill, Buddhists Marriage and Divorce Bill, 20 July 1927, IOR/L/PJ 6.1944.2398, 3.

78. Letter from Brahmasree Pandit Suryanarayana Sarma, Bharatasimha, Esquire, B. A., Member of the League of Nations Union (London), President, Burma Buddhist Mission, RGN, to the Secretary to the Government of Burma, Judicial Dept., 24th September 1927, in file Buddhist Marriage and Divorce Bill, Protest Against, L/PJ/6/1944 (P&J 2398, 1927).

1. House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Proceedings of the Burma Round Table Conference, 27 November 1931 to 12 January 1932 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1932), 178, 182.

2. Ba Than, BLCP (29 April 1933), 205.

3. Jacques P. Leider, “The Chittagonians in Colonial Arakan: Seasonal and Settlement Migrations,” in Colonial Wrongs and Access to International Law, ed. Morten Bergsmo, Wolfgang Kaleck, and Kyaw Yin Hlaing (TOAEP, 2020), 177–227.

4. Hnin Mya, BLCP (22 December 1932), 1–3.

5. Kya Gaing, BLCP (2 May 1933), 303.

6. Kya Gaing, 304.

7. Ba Maw and Ba Pe, BLCP (5 May 1933), 412.

8. For examples, see issues of Thuriya from September 1931.

9. Shwe Mann Thi, “Amyo anwe ma pyek si yan saung shauk kya gôn,” Mandalay Thuriya, 21 July 1932, 1–2.

10. Lammerts, Buddhist Law.

11. The Nītimañjarī contains about 166 verses, divided into eight chapters. The author, Dyā Dviveda, defines Nīti as “that law which bids us to act in a right way and forbids us to act in a wrong way. It consists of both injunctions and prohibitions.” See Niti Manjari of Dya Dviveda, edited with an introduction, notes, and appendixes by Sitaram Jayaram Joshi (Benares: Saligram Sharma, 1933), xxvi.

12. Ledi Pandita U Maung Gyi, Nīti manjari kyan, 1st print (Yangon: Hanthawaddy, 1956).

13. Maung Gyi, Nīti manjari kyan, 1–11.

14. On Ledi Pandita U Maung Gyi, see Ikeya, Refiguring Women, 60–70.

15. Shwe Mann Thi, “Amyo anwe ma pyek si yan saung shauk kya gôn,” 1. Dhamma (Burmese taya; Sanskrit dharma), which is often translated as “law of nature” or “universal law,” is a complex concept that has multiple meanings. In general, it refers to the Buddha’s teachings, laws, or rules of conduct that express the true nature of reality, lead to the cultivation of virtuous and meritorious conduct, and sustain universal cosmic order and justice. See Lammerts, Buddhist Law.

16. Shwe Mann Thi, “Amyo anwe ma pyek si yan saung shauk kya gôn,” 1.

17. See Chie Ikeya, “Talking Sex, Making Love: P. Moe Nin and Intimate Modernity in Colonial Burma,” in Modern Times in Southeast Asia, 1920s–1970s, ed. Susie Protschky and Tom van den Berge (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2018), 136–165.

18. For comparisons, see Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin Books, 2006); Mytheli Sreenivas, Wives, Widows, Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Barlow, Question of Women.

19. Leerom Medovoi, “Dogma-Line Racism: Islamophobia and the Second Axis of Race,” Social Text 111 30, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 43–74; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge; Hanscom and Washburn, Affect of Difference.

20. Thein Pe Myint, “Khin Myo Chit,” reprinted in Thein Pe Myint wutthu do baung gyôk thit (Yangon: Ya pyi sa ôk taik, 1998), 34.

21. Lawyer U Ba Bwa, “Amyo thami mya ko hlit hlyu pyu ta kya myi law,” Kyi Pwa Ye Magazine, March 1935, 25–27.

22. Ba Bwa, “Amyo thami mya,” 25–26.

23. Mani, Contentious Traditions; Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation; Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Chen Chao Ju, “Sim-pua under the Colonial Gaze: Gender, ‘Old Customs,’ and the Law in Taiwan under Japanese Imperialism,” in Burns and Brooks, Gender and Law, 189–218.

24. Po Kyar, “Kala gadaw,” Yôp Shin Lan Hnyun, May 1934, 26. On Po Kyar, see Khin Maung Nyunt, “U Po Kya’s Writings: His Rejoinder to Mr. Noyce,” Texts and Contexts in Southeast Asia: Proceedings of the Texts and Contexts in Southeast Asia Conference, 12–14 December 2001, part 2 (Yangon: Universities Historical Research Centre, 2003), 137–144.

25. Po Kyar, “Kala gadaw,” 31.

26. Mi Nafizunissa alias Ma Enda v. Bodi Rahiman (1913), 6.3 BLT June 1913, 125.

27. Mi Nafizunissa v. Bodi Rahiman, 125, 126.

28. Mi Nafizunissa v. Bodi Rahiman, 128.

29. Riot Inquiry Committee, Interim Report of the Riot Inquiry Committee (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, 1939), 13; Riot Inquiry Committee, Final Report of the Riot Inquiry Committee (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing and Stationery, 1939), 1–2, 6–7.

30. Riot Inquiry Committee, Final Report, 11.

31. Riot Inquiry Committee, 13.

32. The Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage and Succession Act (Burma Act XXIV 1939), NAD 1/1 (B) Acc 877, 15–24.

33. Riot Inquiry Committee, Final Report, 319.

34. Riot Inquiry Committee, 19. The translation is my own.

35. Riot Inquiry Committee, 281, 284–285.

36. Riot Inquiry Committee, xxxii–xxxix.

37. IOR/M/5/12, B(P) “Memorandum of the Burma Association to the President and Members of the Riot Inquiry Committee,” 26 October 1938, 3.

38. Hans-Bernd Zoellner, ed., Myanmar Literature Project Working Paper No. 10:12, Material on Thein Pe: Indo-Burman Conflict (University Passau, 2006).

39. Ikeya, Refiguring Women, 88–89.

40. Thein Pe Myint, Kala-bama taik pwe (Yangon: Nagani 1938), 12.

41. Thein Pe Myint, Kala-bama taik pwe, 14, 17.

42. Riot Inquiry Committee, Interim Report, 28.

43. Riot Inquiry Committee, Final Report, 287, 289–290.

44. Riot Inquiry Committee, 273.

45. Riot Inquiry Committee, 3–4.

46. Bama amyo thami me me, “Amyo thami ta u,” Kyi Pwa Ye, July 1939, 24.

47. Ikeya, Refiguring Women, 76–80.

48. Bama amyo thami me me, “Amyo thami ta u,” 24.

49. Khoda or khuda, meaning “god” in Urdu.

50. Bama amyo thami me me, “Amyo thami ta u,” 25.

51. Bama amyo thami me me, 25.

52. On the press and the famous husband-wife partnership, see Ludu Daw Amar, Kyun ma ye te thu bawa Ludu U Hla (Yangon: Kyi pwa ye sa pe, 2009), 326–329.

53. Hla, “Meik set,” in Pu Galay, Kabya pyatthana, 6.

54. Pu Galay, Kabya pyatthana, 39, 57–58.

55. Hla, “Meik set,” 6.

56. Pu Galay, Kabya pyatthana, 11–12.

57. Pu Galay, 89.

58. Pu Galay, 100–105.

59. Pu Galay, 90–91, 95–98, 116–117.

60. Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage and Succession Act, 15–19. The permissible objections had to be made on the grounds that one (or both) of the parties were underage, of unsound mind, or, for the female party, already married.

61. Pu Galay, Kabya pyatthana, 132.

62. Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community, 298. Also see Kumari Jayawardena and Malathi de Alwis, eds., Embodied Violence: Communalising Women’s Sexuality in South Asia (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996).

63. Micheline R. Lessard, “Organisons-nous! Racial Antagonism and Vietnamese Economic Nationalism in the Early Twentieth Century,” French Colonial History 8 (2007): 184–188; Pairaudeau, Mobile Citizens, 222–227.

64. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally; Shah, Stranger Intimacy.

65. Naoki Sakai, “Introduction: Nationality and the Politics of the ‘Mother Tongue,’ ” in Deconstructing Nationality, ed. Naoki Sakai, Brett de Bary, and Iyotani Toshio (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2005), 33.

66. Though the question of how the nation and its citizens were imagined has preoccupied historians of Southeast Asia, few have interrogated the centrality of gender and sexuality to this process. On the feminist rejoinder to probe the embodied, intersectional dynamics of nationalism and state-formation in Southeast Asia, see Aihwa Ong and Michael Peletz, eds., Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Raquel A. G. Reyes, Love, Passion, and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement, 1882–1892 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); and Michael G. Peletz, “Gender, Sexuality, and the State in Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 71, no. 4 (2012): 895–917.

67. Furnivall, Colonial Policies and Practices, 157. See Ikeya’s discussion of the concept of the “plural society” in Refiguring Women, 5–8.

68. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Anderson, Spectre of Comparisons.

69. Historians of Thailand have made significant inroads in dismantling the long-held view of nationalism as necessarily anticolonial, highlighting how nationalists deployed, under the banner of anticolonialism, the very tools of colonial governance for political and territorial aggrandizement. See Thongchai Winitchakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994); Loos, Subject Siam.

70. Barlow, Question of Women, 4.

71. Barlow, 114.

72. Pandey, Construction of Communalism; Nikhil Pal Singh, “On Race, Violence, and So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” Social Text 34, no. 3 (September 2016): 27–50.

73. Riot Inquiry Committee, Final Report, 218–219.

74. Swami Jagadiswarananda, Hinduism Outside India (Rajkot: Kathiawar, 1945), 77.

75. Though born in India and brought to Burma by his Burma-born parents only at the age of three, Raschid belonged to a zerbadi family with deep roots in the country. On Raschid, see Bilal M. Raschid, The Invisible Patriot: Reminiscences of Burma’s Freedom Movement (Bethesda, MD: Raschid, 2015); Maung Maung, “M. A. Raschid,” Guardian 3, no. 4 (December 1956), reproduced in Maung Maung: Gentleman, Scholar, Patriot, ed. Robert H. Taylor (Singapore: ISEAS, 2008), 229–242, 237.

76. Josef Silverstein and Julian Wohl, “University Students and Politics in Burma,” Pacific Affairs 37, no. 1 (Spring 1964): 52; Aye Kyaw, Voice of Young Burma, 63.

77. Raschid, Invisible Patriot, 26–28.

78. Patricia Hill Collins, “The Tie That Binds: Race, Gender, and US Violence,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 5 (September 1998): 932, 924.

79. Parsis are an ethnic group that traces itself back to Persian followers of the prophet Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), who emigrated to India to avoid religious persecution by Muslims.

80. According to Mitra Sharafi’s list of Parsi tombstones from Burma, the inscription on his tombstone reads: “Mr. P. D. Patel. Born 14.10.1874. Died 26.11.1961.” See Mitra Sharafi, “Parsi Tombstones from Burma,” https://hosted.law.wisc.edu/wordpress/sharafi/files/2013/04/Burmese-Tombstones-as-of-8-Dec-2014.pdf.

81. IOR/Q/13/1/7, item 18, E-Bur-979: P. D. Patel, Barrister-at-law, Rangoon (1929?), 9.

82. P. D. Patel, 3.

83. P. D. Patel, 10.

84. P. D. Patel, 10

85. Memorandum Submitted to the Indian Statutory Commission, 11.

86. Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); David P. Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Butalia, Other Side of Violence; Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

87. Indrani Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages, and Memories of Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 365.

88. Chatterjee, Forgotten Friends, 366–367.

89. Das, Life and Words, 215–216.

1. Sunil Amrith, “Reconstructing the ‘Plural Society’: Asian Migration between Empire and Nation, 1940–1948,” Past and Present, supplement 6 (2011): 255; Kratoska, Asian Labor; Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2006); Gregg Huff, World War II and Southeast Asia: Economy and Society under Japanese Occupation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

2. Tani Barlow, “Colonialism’s Career in Postwar China Studies,” Positions: East Asia Critique 2, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 224–267.

3. Duara, “Discourse of Civilization.”

4. Nakano, Japan’s Colonial Moment, 19.

5. Bunka hōkōkai, Dai tōa sensō rikugun hōdō han in shuki: Biruma kanteisen (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1942), 148.

6. Much scholarship exists on Japan’s imperial policies of dōka and kōminka. For recent examples, see Ching, Becoming “Japanese”; N. A. Kwon, Intimate Empire; Kawanishi, Teikoku nihon; Fujitani, Race for Empire; Hanscom and Washburn, Affect of Difference.

7. Ota Tsunozo, Biruma ni okeru nihon gunseishi no kenkyū (Tokyo: Yoshigawa Kobunkan, 1967), 189; Ishii Hitoshi, “Nihon gunseika ni okeru nanpō senryōchi no kyōiku seisaku ni kansuru kisoteki kenkyū,” Bulletin of Okayama Prefectural Junior College 1 (1994): 68; Seki Masaaki, Nihongo kyōikushi kenkyū josetsu (Tokyo: Suri E Network, 2004; originally published in 1997), 60.

8. Biruma nihongo kyōkasho hensan iinkai, Nippon go tokuhon II (Rangoon: Biruma koku kyōiku eisei shō, 1944), 58; Biruma nihongo kyōkasho hensan iinkai, Nippon go tokuhon III (Rangoon: Biruma koku kyōiku eisei shō, 1944), 85.

9. Willard Elsbree, Japan’s Role in Southeast Asian Nationalist Movements, 1940–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953); Josef Silverstein, ed., Southeast Asia in World War II: Four Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1966); Alfred McCoy, ed., Southeast Asia under Japanese Occupation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1985); Paul H. Kratoska, The Japanese Occupation of Malaya, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997); Nicholas Tarling, The Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia, 1941–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001).

10. Aung San Suu Kyi, Aung San of Burma: A Biographical Portrait by His Daughter (Edinburgh: Kiscadale, 1991), 21.

11. Ba Maw, Breakthrough in Burma: Memoirs of a Revolution, 1939–1946 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 274, 276.

12. Ba Maw, Breakthrough; Thein Pe Myint, What Happened in Burma: The Frank Revelations of a Young Burmese Revolutionary Leader Who Has Recently Escaped from Burma to India (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1943); Aung San, Burma’s Challenge (Rangoon: New Light of Burma, 1946); Thakin Nu, Nga hnit yadi bama pyi (Yangon: Myanmar Alin, 1946); Thakin U Thein Pe Myint, Ko twe hmattan (Yangon: Taing Chit, 1950); Thein Pe Myint, Sit atwin kayi the (Rangoon: Shumawa sa ôk taik, 1952); Thakin Nu, Burma under the Japanese: Pictures and Portraits, ed. and trans. with an introduction by J. S. Furnivall (London: Macmillan, 1954).

13. Maung Maung, “The Resistance Movement,” The Guardian 2, no. 5 (March 1954): 9.

14. Maung Maung, “Resistance Movement,” 10.

15. Htin Aung, The Stricken Peacock: Anglo-Burmese Relations, 1752–1948 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), 112.

16. Peter Post and Elly Touwen-Bouwsma, eds., Japan, Indonesia, and the War: Myths and Realities (Leiden, Netherlands: KITLV, 1997); Remco Raben, ed., Representing the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia: Personal Testimonies and Public Images in Indonesia, Japan, and the Netherlands (Amsterdam: Waanders, 1999); and Ronald D. Klein, The Other Empire: Literary Views of Japan from the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia (Quezon City: University of Philippines Press, 2008).

17. William Bradley Horton, “Sexual Exploitation and Resistance: Indonesian Language Representations since the Early 1990s of the Japanese Occupation History,” Asia-Pacific Forum 28 (2005/6): 71.

18. Hla Pe, Narrative of the Japanese Occupation of Burma, recorded by U Khin, foreword by Hugh Tinker (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1961), 77.

19. “Sein Kyi nau … Sein Kyi / lin yu pek sek the / master-gyi Tokyo pyan / baik ta lon ne kyan.” Sein Kyi, the main character of a popular book by Thu Kha, is an archetypical japan gadaw who marries a Japanese soldier during the occupation out of opportunism, not love. Tharaphi Than, Women in Modern Burma (New York: Routledge, 2013), 144–145.

20. N. A. Kwon, Intimate Empire, 200.

21. Won Zoon Yoon, “Japan’s Occupation of Burma, 1941–1945” (PhD diss., New York University, 1971), 195–204.

22. Minamida Midori, “Nihon senryō ni okeru Biruma sakka kyōkai kikanshi ‘sakka’ no yakuwari ni tsui te,” Ōsaka Daigaku Sekai Gengo Kenkyū Sentā ronshū 5 (2011): 143–171; Minamida Midori, “Biruma sakka tachi no ‘nihon jidai,’ ” Ōsaka Daigaku Sekai Gengo Kenkyū Sentā ronshū 7 (2012): 285–311.

23. Tanaka Kakuei, “Biruma gawa shusai utage ni okeru Tanaka naikakusōri daijin aisatsu, 1974 nen 11 gatsu 7 nichi,” Tanaka naikakusōri daijin enzetsu shū (Tokyo: Nihon kōhō kyōkai, 1975), 569–571.

24. On the relationship between Ottama and Ito, see Takano Ikuro, Jūgodai Itō Jirōzaemon Suketami tsuisōroku (Nagoya: Matsuzakaya 1977); Ito Toshikatsu, “Ottama sōjō to Nagai Gyōji Shōnin,” in Bukkyō o meguru Nihon to Tōnan Ajia Chiiki, ed. Osawa Koji (Tokyo: Bensei Shuppan, 2016), 127–142; and Zaw Linn Aung, “Ito Jirozaemon Suketami.”

25. Ito Jirozaemon Suketami, “Indo Biruma shisatsu dan,” lecture given at Tōa Kenkyū Jo, 20 December 1938, published in Ito Jirozaemon Suketami, Indo Biruma shisatsu dan (Tokyo: Tōa Kenkyū Jo, 1938), 11.

26. Burma Intelligence Bureau, Burma during the Japanese Occupation, vol. 2 (Simla, India: Government of India, 1944), 145.

27. Hla Pe, Narrative, 37, 39.

28. McCoy, Southeast Asia; and Jeremy Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).

29. Yellen, Greater East Asia, 21.

30. I. Kwon, “Feminists Navigating.”

31. Leo T. S. Ching, Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 120.

32. Ching, Anti-Japan, 6.

33. Ching, 129.

34. See, for example, N. A. Kwon, Intimate Empire; Ambaras, Japan’s Imperial Underworlds; Ai Baba, “Policies, Promoters, and Patterns of Japanese-Korean and Japanese-Taiwanese Marriages in Imperial Japan: Making a Case for Inclusive History” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2019); Kim, Imperial Romance; and Ching, Anti-Japan.

35. E. Patricia Tsurumi, Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Tani Yasuyo, Nihongo kyōiku to kindai nihon (Tokyo: Iwata Shoin, 2006), 200–221; Kate McDonald, “Speaking Japanese: Language and the Expectation of Empire,” in Hanscom and Washburn, Affect of Difference, 159–179; Furukawa Noriko, “Kyōiku no seido to kōzō,” in Nihon shokuminchi kenkyū no ronten, ed. Nihon Shokuminchi Kenkyūkai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2018), 132–142.

36. Quoted in Kawamura Minato, Umi wo watatta nihongo: Shokuminchi no “kokugo” no kikan (Tokyo: Seidōsha, 2004), 108.

37. “Nanpō kyōeiken no kyōiku zadan kai,” Kōa Kyōiku 1, no. 3 (1942): 78–81; Kojima Masaru, “Nanyō ni okeru nihonjin gakko to dōtai,” Tōnan Ajia Kenkyū 18, no. 3 (December 1980): 460–475; Kojima Masaru, Dainiji sekai taisenzen no zaigai shitei no kyōikuron no keifu (Kyoto: Ryūkoku Gakkai, 1993), esp. 153–184.

38. Nihongo kyōiku shinkō kai, “Nanpō kensetsu to nihongo fukyū,” Nihongo 2, no. 5 (May 1942): 86–104.

39. Sekupan Kai, ed., Sekupan: Biruma nihongo gakkō no kiroku, 1942–1945 (Tokyo: Shudōsha, 1970), 10.

40. Burma Intelligence Bureau, Burma during the Japanese Occupation, vol. 1 (Simla, India: Government of Burma, 1943), 42.

41. Burma Intelligence Bureau, Japanese Occupation, 2:48.

42. Burma Intelligence Bureau, 2:46.

43. Ishii, “Nihon gunseika,” 69, 72.

44. Matsunaga Noriko, Nihon gunseika no maraya ni okeru nihongo kyōiku (Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 2002), 30, 60; Seki, Nihongo kyōikushi, 61.

45. Tani, Nihongo kyōiku, 200.

46. T. Ota, Biruma ni okeru, 190–191; Ishii, “Nihon gunseika,” 69–77.

47. Sekupan Kai, Sekupan, 23.

48. See Saya Shiraishi, introduction to Takao Fusayama, A Japanese Memoir of Sumatra 1945–1946: Love and Hatred in the Liberation War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1993); Ota Atsushi, “Kioku sareru Indoneshia: 1945–70 nen no Nihon shōsetsu ni egakareru senji senryō,” Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, no. 20 (February 2013): 121–136.

49. Sekupan Kai, Sekupan, 23.

50. Sekupan Kai, 242.

51. Sekupan Kai, 282.

52. Sekupan Kai, 163.

53. Sekupan Kai, 86.

54. Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 8, 21.

55. Sekupan Kai, Sekupan, 2.

56. Sekupan Kai, 429.

57. Sekupan Kai, 73.

58. Sekupan Kai, 24.

59. Jikkoku Osamu, Myanmā monogatari: Hitowa naze sensō o surunoka (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1995), 171.

60. Jikkoku, Myanmā monogatari, 168

61. Sekupan Kai, Sekupan, 232–233.

62. “Watashi jūroku manshū musume / haruyo san gatsu yukidoke ni / in shun hwa ga saitanara / o yome ni ikimasu tonarimura / Wan san mattete chōdai ne.”

63. Michael K. Bourdaghs, “Japan’s Orient in Song and Dance,” in Sino-Japanese Transculturation: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the End of the Pacific War, ed. Richard King, Cody Poulton, and Katsuhiko Endo (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 178.

64. Hla Pe, Narrative, 78.

65. Ba Maw, Breakthrough, 283.

66. Todd A. Henry, “Assimilation’s Racializing Sensibilities: Colonized Koreans ad Yobos and the ‘Yobo-ization’ of Expatriate Japanese,” in Hanscom and Washburn, Affect of Difference, 85.

67. Burma Intelligence Bureau, Japanese Occupation, 2:152.

68. Burma Intelligence Bureau, 2:139.

69. Hla Pe, Narrative, 40.

70. Burma Intelligence Bureau, Japanese Occupation, 1:23–25.

71. Ba Maw, Breakthrough, 186–192.

72. Theippan Maung Wa, Wartime in Burma: A Diary, January to June 1942, ed. and trans. from Burmese by L. E. Bagshawe and Anna J. Allott (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 179–180.

73. Sekupan Kai, Sekupan, 560.

74. Sekupan Kai, 566.

75. Burma Intelligence Bureau, Japanese Occupation, 1:26.

76. On the Japanese army’s persecution of Chinese people in Southeast Asia, see Hayashi Hirofumi, Kakyō gyakusatsu: Nihongun shihaika no marē hantō (Tokyo: Suzusawa Shoten, 1992).

77. IOR M/4/2964, B/F& FA 14/46(26), China: Kayan murder case, 1947.

1. Nakano, Japan’s Colonial Moment, 208.

2. Burma Frontier Service, “The War Effort of the Naga Hills District of Burma,” 5 February 1944, Scheduled Areas, 1943, NAD.

3. Barclay, Outcasts of Empire, 156. For an analysis of the tale of Sayon, also see Ching, Anti-Japan, 120–123.

4. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 95–98.

5. Kristin Roebuck, “Science without Borders? The Contested Science of ‘Race Mixing’ circa World War II in Japan, East Asia, and the West,” in Who Is the Asianist? The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies, ed. Will Bridges, Nitasha Tamar Sharma, and Marvin D. Sterling (Columbia University Press, 2022), 109–124.

6. Roebuck, “Science without Borders,” 112.

7. Oguma Eiji, Tan itsu minzoku shinwa no kigen—“Nihonjin” no jigazō no keifu (Tokyo: Shinyosha, 1995); Kawanishi, Teikoku nihon, 235–236, 244–245.

8. Naosuke Warabe, Biruma kō (Tokyo: Tōfūkaku 1938), 90.

9. Warabe, Biruma kō, 116–122.

10. Takami Jun, Biruma no inshō (1943), in Nanpō chōyō sakka sōsho, Biruma hen, vol. 2, edited by Kimura Kazuaki and Takematsu Yoshiaki (Tokyo: Ryūkei Shosha, 2010), 37.

11. Sakakiyama Jun, Biruma no asa (Tokyo: Nambokusha, 1963; originally published in 1943); also republished in Nanpō chōyō sakka sōsho, Biruma hen, vol. 5, edited by Kimura Kazuki and Takematsu Yoshiaki (Tokyo: Ryūkei Shosha, 2010).

12. Sakakiyama, Biruma no asa, 289.

13. N. A. Kwon, Intimate Empire, 200.

14. Yoshiichi Shigemitsu, Gunzoku Biruma monogatari (Tokyo: Ōshisha, 1973).

15. Yoshiichi, Gunzoku Biruma monogatari, 10.

16. See, for example, Itai Takeo, Kekkon kokusaku no teishō (Tokyo: Taiyōdō Shobō, 1939), 13–16; Matsuoka Juhachi, Dai tōa minzoku mondai (Tokyo: Showa Shobō, 1942), 357–363. For scholarship on the history of konketsuji, see the special issue “Rekishi no naka no ikokujin/nihonjin no kodomo,” Rekishi Hyōron 815 (March 2018), esp. Lee Jeong-Seon, “Naisen kekkon no kodomo tachi: naichi jin to chosen jin no hazama de,” 42–55; and Roebuck, “Science without Borders.”

17. Kiyono Kenji, “Dai nanyō ni okeru konketsu no mondai,” Nanyō Keizai Kenkyū 1, no. 7 (July 1942): 69.

18. Kamoto Itsuko, Kokusai kekkon no tanjō: “Bunmei koku nihon” e no michi (Tokyo: Shiyōsha, 2001).

19. Huang Chia-chi, “Nihon tōchi jidai ni okeru ‘uchidai-domo kon’ no kōzō to tenkai,” Hikaku kazokushi kenkyū 27 (March 2013): 129.

20. Endo Masataka, Kindai nihon no shokuminchi tōchi ni okeru kokuseki to koseki: Manshū, Chōsen, Taiwan (Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2010), 124.

21. See Endo, Kindai nihon; David Chapman and Karl Jakob Krogness, eds., Japan’s Household Registration System and Citizenship: Koseki, Identification, and Documentation (London: Routledge, 2014), 79–92; J.-S. Lee, “Naisen kekkon.”

22. Baba, “Policies, Promoters, and Patterns.”

23. Yamada Hidezo, Biruma no seikatsu (Tokyo: Hōun sha, 1944), 55–56.

24. Yamada, Biruma no seikatsu, 55–57.

25. Thet Tun, Than to amyin: Bilingual Essays of Retired Ambassador U Thet Tun (Yangon: Meik Kaung, 2000), 155–165.

26. See, for example, the story of Ma E in Nemoto Yuriko, Sokoku wo senjou ni sarete: Biruma no sasayaki (Fukuoka: Sekifusha, 2000), 13–29.

27. Burma Intelligence Bureau, Japanese Occupation, 2:164.

28. Government of Burma, Reconstruction Department, Simla, Letter from D. O. Leyden to T. L. Hughes, Public Adviser, Simla, dated 2 December 1944, forwarding a copy of Father D. McAlindon and Capt. O. H. Molloy’s joint note on the activities of the Kachins in the anti-Japanese campaign, Scheduled Areas, 1943, NAD.

29. DC CAO, IV Corps, Sd/J. F. Franklin, Reports from the Chin Hills, dated 3 January 1944 and 21 February 1944, Chief Civil Affairs Office (B), NAD.

30. Greg Dvorak, “Who Closed the Sea? Archipelagoes of Amnesia between the United States and Japan,” in ed. Lon Kurashige, Pacific America: Histories of Transoceanic Crossings (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017), 229–246.

31. Barclay, Outcasts of Empire.

32. ann-elise lewallen, “Intimate Frontiers”: Disciplining Ethnicity and Ainu Women’s Sexual Subjectivity in Early Colonial Hokkaido,” in Hanscom and Washburn, Affect of Difference, 24.

33. Kyaw Win Maung, Japan pet sit taw hlan ye ledi thama mya (Yangon: Thiha Yadana, 2008, originally published in 1967), chap. 33.

34. Kyaw Win Maung, Japan pet sit, chap. 12

35. At the behest of the Japanese, the Ba Maw administration organized a corps of laborers known as “the Great Sweat Army” (chwe tat gyi) to supplement the prisoners of war.

36. E. Bruce Reynolds, “History, Memory, Compensation, and Reconciliation: The Abuse of Labor along the Thailand-Burma Railway,” in Kratoska, Asian Labor, 329.

37. Lin Yone Thit Lwin, Yodayar myanmar mi yatha lan ko twe chwe tat hmattan (Yangon: Sape Beikman Apwe, 1991), 10.

38. Lin Yone Thit Lwin, Yodayar myanmar mi yatha, 478.

39. Maung Htin, Nga Ba (Yangon: Pyi Thu Sa Pe, 1957), 68, 85–87.

40. Maung Htin, Nga Ba, 146–157.

41. Jikkoku, Myanmā monogatari, 79; Kyaw Win Maung, Japan pet sit, chap. 31.

42. Burma Intelligence Bureau, Japanese Occupation, 1:67, 2:198.

43. P. D. Patel, “Just Fifty Years Ago,” The Guardian 5, no. 7 (July 1958): 15.

44. Kyaw Win Maung, Japan pet sit, 30–32.

45. Burma Intelligence Bureau, Japanese Occupation, 1:26.

46. For a review of these debates, see Edward Vickers and Mark R. Frost, “Introduction: The ‘Comfort Women’ as Public History—Scholarship, Advocacy, and the Commemorative Impulse,” in “The ‘Comfort Women’ as Public History,” ed. Edward Vickers and Mark R. Frost, special issue, Japan Focus: The Asia-Pacific Journal 19, no. 5 (March 2021). On a recent dispute over whether comfort women should be analyzed as contract labor, see J. Mark Ramseyer, “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” International Review of Law and Economics 65 (2021): 1–8; and the rejoinders in “Academic Integrity at Stake: The Ramseyer Article—Four Letters,” ed. Alexis Dudden, supplement to the special issue, Japan Focus: The Asia-Pacific Journal 19, no. 5 (March 2021).

47. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 383.

48. Katherine Moon, Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Sarah C. Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

49. For regional overviews of prostitution in colonial Southeast Asia, see Eric Tagliacozzo, “Morphological Shifts in Southeast Asian Prostitution: The Long Twentieth Century,” Journal of Global History 3, no. 2 (July 2008): 251–273; Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003).

50. For a recent summary of the voluminous literature on this gendered, sexualized, and racialized history of the colonial regulation of women’s sexuality and reproduction, see Françoise Vergès, The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

51. Kolsky, Colonial Justice; Saha, “Male State.”

52. Elaine H. Kim and Chungmoo Choi, eds., Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1998); Hyunah Yang, “Finding the ‘Map of Memory’: Testimony of the Japanese Military Sexual Slavery Survivors,” Positions: East Asia Cultures critique 16, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 79–107; Soh, Comfort Women; Chungmoo Choi, “The Politics of War Memories toward Healing,” in Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s), ed. Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 395–409; Katharine McGregor, “Emotions and Activism for Former So-Called ‘Comfort Women’ of the Japanese Occupation of the Netherlands East Indies,” Women’s Studies International Forum 54 (2016): 67–78.