ABSTRACT
Before they quit Burma in 1948, British officials had confidently expected that their influence in the country would long outlast the transfer of power. Burma would continue to rely on British capital and British expertise in its economy, British financial aid and British political support; it may have elected to leave the Commonwealth, but this did not mean that the UK did not ‘retain a very special place in Burma as a result of her long and close association with the country and (we hope) the friendly and mutually satisfactory terms of the final transfer of power’. Some xenophobia was to be expected in the ‘first exuberant reactions of independence’, but overall Burma’s leaders understood the need for external backing ‘to assist their country to recover from the war and to avoid being sucked in by India or China’. As Burma found its feet, the country might perhaps have to rely on Britain less, but by then relations would have settled into ‘a position of instinctive friendship’.1
