Thant Myint-U - The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF BURMA

ALSO BY

THANT MYINT-U Z

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Where China Meets India:

Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia

The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma

The Making of Modern Burma

This edition published by arrangement with W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Thant Myint-U, 2019

The moral right of Thant Myint-U to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-787-1

E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-789-5

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-788-8

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-790-1

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For Sofia

B URMA OR M YANMAR? Around a millennium ago, the word Myanma first appeared in inscriptions, apparently describing a people living in the valley of the Irrawaddy River and their language. Over the centuries, kings began referring to themselves as Myanma kings, and their kingdom as the Myanma pyi(the Myanma country) or Myanma naing-ngan(the Myanma conquered lands). By the 17th century, the word was colloquially pronounced Bama. Both Myanma and Bama are adjectives.

Around the same time, the first Europeans arrived, and called the country some variant of Burma: it was Birmania to the Portuguese, Birmanie to the French. These names are almost certainly derived from Bama. Under British rule, Burma was the countrys official English name. The name in Burmese remained Myanma pyi.

None of this caused much of a fuss until 1989, when the ruling army junta officially changed the name of the country in English to Myanmar (the final r was meant to lengthen the vowel, as it would when spoken in the southeast of England, and not be pronounced). The justification offered was that the name Myanmar incorporated all the countrys indigenous peoples. This was untrue. Few minorities, if any, would claim that the word historically applied to them. The real reason for the change was that the government of the time was moving in a nativist direction and looking for easy wins to burnish its ethno-nationalist credentials. An equivalent would be Germany insisting on being called Deutschland in English, or the Italians insisting on Italia. Many in the West continued to use Burma, either out of habit or to show disdain toward the junta dictatorship.

I use Burma throughout this book out of habit, because as a Burmese speaker its awkward to refer to the country using an adjective, because I think Burma sounds far better in English, and because of the nativist underpinnings of the name change.

I use Burmese to refer either to the ethnic majority people, who speak the Burmese language and are overwhelmingly Buddhist, or to the state. There is no satisfactory term, at least not yet, for referring to all the peoples of the country.