ABSTRACT
In 1885 Upper Burma was invaded and its political and legal institutions destroyed. What possibilities thereby became lost to the world? The Indian civil servant who had lobbied most intensely for the invasion of Mandalay came to regret what he had done: ‘It was a pity – they would have learnt in time.’2 If Burma had avoided being annexed to British India, what might it have become? Thailand’s recent history offers some kind of clue. The constitutional monarch of Thailand has made himself astonishingly popular over the last sixty years. If Britain had chosen to rule Burma through a client king, then a newly independent Burma in 1948 would have inherited at least one of its traditional political institutions. In this alternative universe, might Burma’s political and legal institutions of the 1870s have embraced democratic and rule-of-law virtues by the 1970s? What might Burmese modernism have looked like, under a less destructive form of British imperialism? Although such hypothetical questions don’t lead to any determinate answer, we can only evaluate Burmese legal and political theory by imagining an answer.
