ABSTRACT
Conquered from British India in three stages in the nineteenth century, partly in order to ensure the security of Britain’s empire in India, Burma fell to the Japanese in the Second World War. ‘It was terrible to be ruled by a Western power,’ said a delegate to Nehru’s Asian Relations Conference in 1947, ‘but it was even worse to be ruled by an Asian power.’1 Under the leadership of Aung San and the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, Burma negotiated its independence outside the Commonwealth during 1947, the year in which India and Pakistan became dominions. At the British Foreign Office, B.R. Pearn, an old Burma hand in the Research Department, brooded on its future as an independent state. Some thought, he wrote, that despite the paper constitution, its government would ‘take the form of an inefficient dictatorship, enlivened by frequent coups d’état and revolutions’. The administration would be even more chaotic and law and order weak. There would be serious trouble with the minorities, especially the Karens, and probably a final breach between the AFPFL and the Communists.
