Jacques LeiderBuddhism and trade have been Myanmar's most important interfaces with the outside world, but their importance in shaping external relations has varied greatly. Traders and missionaries were instrumental during the first millennium CE in expanding the teachings of Buddhism and laying the foundation for the country's mature civilization under the kings of Pagan, or Bagan. Exploring Buddhism in its practice and in its art and architecture, one is inevitably drawn in two directions: to the inside toward Myanmar's self-perception and cultural identity and to the outside toward the multiple genealogies from which the country's religious, ritual, and intellectual traditions are derived or have been connected over the centuries. Understanding and defining the inside seems to be the easier task. Buddhism has been the dominant cultural matrix of the country, and Buddhist markers—including artistic forms, concepts, ways of thinking, and social practices—outline a cultural and religious space that has structured Myanmar's historical trajectory throughout the geographical center of the Irrawaddy, or Ayeyarwady, Valley for the last thousand years and longer. This interest in Myanmar has therefore favored a scholarly perception of Buddhism as an intrinsic part of Myanmar's identity rather than being, by itself, a historical agent.
The conventional approach of western scholars has been to look at Myanmar and trade from the outside, in keeping with the perspective of archival sources that adopt the viewpoint of often malcontent Portuguese, Dutch, or English merchants trading Indian cloth, teak wood, rice, rubies, betel nuts, or elephants in Myanmar or Rakhine ports. In this it is too easy to forget the breadth of interests of Myanmar's kings, elites, and traders that nurtured trade relations with the outside world. As the people of Myanmar were neither seafaring nor were they running caravan trade through Inner Asia, historians have often argued that they did not pay much attention to foreign trade. Still, Myanmar's regions were integral parts of both land and maritime trade networks. Nor should one overlook that in the past Myan- mar was not a state with fixed borders but included, during most of its precolonial history, several political centers, con- ventionally known to precolonial Europeans as Rakhine, or Arakan, a coastal kingdom integrated in the Bay of Bengal maritime network; Ava, or Inwa, a place connected both to the riverine and the inland trade; and Pegu, or Bago, a long- time inland port connected to the sea ports of Martaban and later Syriam.
Nonetheless, while one could approach the topic of Myanmar and the outside worlds through themes of Indianization, colonization, or modernization, this would suggest that Myanmar people and their leaders were recipients of foreign influence rather than agents of their own historical destiny. They would confirm G. E. Harvey's perception, as he wrote in 1925, of the Myanmar people as "living in a world of their own," who did not "visit other lands" while "nobody from other lands came to them, except a few shipmen and some tribal immigrants." For this colonial historian, "Myanmar knew nothing of international affairs save through bazaar rumor and through the tales, usually anti-English. propaganda, of Armenian and Mahomedan merchants." The cliché of Myanmar's marginality seems to find further confirmation in the country's recent reputation gained through decades of outcast status and self-inflicted isolation under authoritarian regimes between 1962 and 2011. Moreover, common textbook characterizations of Myanmar as being a "part" of Southeast Asia or a land "between" India and China, convey no particular sense of homegrown developments. The old-fashioned colonial view that "the existence of the Burmese as a powerful and widespread race [was] due to Indian immigration," peremptorily stated in the Census of India of 1911, has long ceded its place to Paul Mus's insight that "Indian culture is complementary ... not imposed, [but] called for from within Southeast Asia." Postcolonial scholars have not only refined the concept of Indianization but have also integrated the archaeological and inscriptional evidence of the influence of Brahminist and Buddhist ideas within dynamic, local urban communities.
An excellent example of how Buddhism and trade gave essence to Myanmar's relations with the outside world is the territorial expansion under the early Konbaung kings (1782-1819) when, following a secular trend, external relations were at their peak. The second half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century were a crucial period in world history. It was an important time in Myanmar as well, when following seventeen years of internecine wars (1740-57), the country moved through a phase of territorial consolidation in the middle of the century toward a period of vibrant expansion. One hallmark of the early Konbaung dynasty was its aggressive policy of conquests that enlarged the king- dom considerably beyond the Irrawaddy Valley. Following the fall of the city of Pegu in 1757, King Alaungpaya, also known as Alaungmintaya, the dynasty's founder, reunified the northern and southern parts (the Myanmar-dominated Ava and the predominantly Mon kingdom of Hamsavati, or Pegu). The conquest of Manipur in 1758-59 gave the Myanmar king a foothold to intervene in Assam after 1805, while a well-prepared invasion of Thailand by land and sea in 1759-60 laid the ground for the conquest of Tenasserim, which would come under full Myanmar control in 1793. In 1785, a decisive campaign against Rakhine put an end to this old Buddhist kingdom on the border with Bengal that had enjoyed independence since 1430.
This vast territorial expansion was read in negative terms by colonial historians, who considered Myanmar's conquests barbarous and lacking inspiration in state building. Contemporary scholarship has nonetheless rehabilitated the statesmanship of early Konbaung kings from Alaungpaya (r. 1752-1760) to Bodawpaya (r. 1782-1819). Due to an increasingly centralized royal administration, Kon-baung capitals such as Ava or Amarapura boasted efficient political control over the country's river plains and their close, mountainous periphery. With the growing commercialization of the economy and the existence of an intricate money-lending system, this was, in historian Thant Myint-U's words, the time when "a common language, a common religion, a common set of legal and political ideas and institutions, and even a shared history existed throughout the core area. Myanmar was perceived by British geographers of the early nineteenth century as second only to China's military power in Asia. Still, this was not a territorially unified kingdom, as borders were largely undefined or rapidly changing. A set of maps of Myanmar, drawn in 1795 at the request of Dr. Francis Hamilton, conveys the idea of a central corridor of river valleys with strings of interconnected urban centers, surrounded by farflung outlying regions that were separated and divided by vast, sparsely inhabited zones. Under the early Konbaung kings, the kingdom's geo- graphical body was undergoing tremendous change, grow- ing toward the west and the south, receding in the northeast, and blocked from expanding toward the east.
Relentless warfare against Thailand between 1759 and 1812 overstretched Myanmar's human resources, but resulted in the conquest of Tenasserim and the control of its trade ports Mergui (together with the inland city of Tenasserim) and Tavoy, or Dawei, which had been key possessions of Ayutthaya's transpeninsular commercial network. Together with the control of Rakhine, the territorial expansion toward the south roughly tripled Myanmar's coastline on the Indian Ocean, unifying its maritime frontier and creating challenging new opportunities. The conquest of Rakhine facilitated contact with Bengal, and soon an inland trade road developed—crossing Rakhine by the Am Pass northward to Hsinbyugywan—which bypassed the long voyage up the Irrawaddy and its numerous tax posts. The often brutal eradication of local power that followed military conquest—a tactic to avoid losing these territories shortly after conquest—and the pressure on the conquered population to support Myanmar's warfare through providing recruits and provisions, often resulted in huge demographic losses. Subjected people would flee en masse to more peaceful areas; for example, numerous Mon fled to Thailand, and the people of Rakhine resettled in Chittagong. Thai historians have shown that, starting with King Alaungpaya's 1759 campaign against Ayutthaya, or Yodaya (Myanmar), Myanmar's southward expansion was motivated by the rapidly growing exports of tin and pepper produced in the Malay peninsula. The lucrative export of Bengali opium to the peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago, as well as the trade of bird nests controlled by the sultan of Kedah, fit into the same picture of expansion fueled by trade, where Myanmar competed not only with the Thai, but also with the British, who had opened a port at Penang in 1786. Successive Myanmar attacks against Thalang, or Phuket, failed, while the Thai, in turn, consolidated their possessions on the eastern side of the Malay peninsula, taking possession of Pattani and reasserting their control over the sultan of Kedah.
British sources testify to the existence of royal trade at the beginning of the Konbaung Dynasty. In an exquisite golden letter adorned with twenty-four rubies sent to King George II in 1756, King Alaungpaya declared that he was keen to seal friendship with the British and made friendly overtures for stable business relations with the East India Company. King Alaungpaya founded the port of Yangon, or Rangoon, in 1754 and heavily lobbied both French and English traders to move their trade from Pegu's Syriam, or Thanlyin, to his new port. The damage his own ship suffered at the hands of Thai authorities in Tavoy was allegedly one of the events that triggered the invasion of Thailand in 1759.
The conventional approach of western scholars has been to look at Myanmar and trade from the outside, in keeping with the perspective of archival sources that adopt the viewpoint of often malcontent Portuguese, Dutch, or English merchants trading Indian cloth, teak wood, rice, rubies, betel nuts, or elephants in Myanmar or Rakhine ports. In this it is too easy to forget the breadth of interests of Myanmar's kings, elites, and traders that nurtured trade relations with the outside world. As the people of Myanmar were neither seafaring nor were they running caravan trade through Inner Asia, historians have often argued that they did not pay much attention to foreign trade. Still, Myanmar's regions were integral parts of both land and maritime trade networks. Nor should one overlook that in the past Myan- mar was not a state with fixed borders but included, during most of its precolonial history, several political centers, con- ventionally known to precolonial Europeans as Rakhine, or Arakan, a coastal kingdom integrated in the Bay of Bengal maritime network; Ava, or Inwa, a place connected both to the riverine and the inland trade; and Pegu, or Bago, a long- time inland port connected to the sea ports of Martaban and later Syriam.
Nonetheless, while one could approach the topic of Myanmar and the outside worlds through themes of Indianization, colonization, or modernization, this would suggest that Myanmar people and their leaders were recipients of foreign influence rather than agents of their own historical destiny. They would confirm G. E. Harvey's perception, as he wrote in 1925, of the Myanmar people as "living in a world of their own," who did not "visit other lands" while "nobody from other lands came to them, except a few shipmen and some tribal immigrants." For this colonial historian, "Myanmar knew nothing of international affairs save through bazaar rumor and through the tales, usually anti-English. propaganda, of Armenian and Mahomedan merchants." The cliché of Myanmar's marginality seems to find further confirmation in the country's recent reputation gained through decades of outcast status and self-inflicted isolation under authoritarian regimes between 1962 and 2011. Moreover, common textbook characterizations of Myanmar as being a "part" of Southeast Asia or a land "between" India and China, convey no particular sense of homegrown developments. The old-fashioned colonial view that "the existence of the Burmese as a powerful and widespread race [was] due to Indian immigration," peremptorily stated in the Census of India of 1911, has long ceded its place to Paul Mus's insight that "Indian culture is complementary ... not imposed, [but] called for from within Southeast Asia." Postcolonial scholars have not only refined the concept of Indianization but have also integrated the archaeological and inscriptional evidence of the influence of Brahminist and Buddhist ideas within dynamic, local urban communities.
An excellent example of how Buddhism and trade gave essence to Myanmar's relations with the outside world is the territorial expansion under the early Konbaung kings (1782-1819) when, following a secular trend, external relations were at their peak. The second half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century were a crucial period in world history. It was an important time in Myanmar as well, when following seventeen years of internecine wars (1740-57), the country moved through a phase of territorial consolidation in the middle of the century toward a period of vibrant expansion. One hallmark of the early Konbaung dynasty was its aggressive policy of conquests that enlarged the king- dom considerably beyond the Irrawaddy Valley. Following the fall of the city of Pegu in 1757, King Alaungpaya, also known as Alaungmintaya, the dynasty's founder, reunified the northern and southern parts (the Myanmar-dominated Ava and the predominantly Mon kingdom of Hamsavati, or Pegu). The conquest of Manipur in 1758-59 gave the Myanmar king a foothold to intervene in Assam after 1805, while a well-prepared invasion of Thailand by land and sea in 1759-60 laid the ground for the conquest of Tenasserim, which would come under full Myanmar control in 1793. In 1785, a decisive campaign against Rakhine put an end to this old Buddhist kingdom on the border with Bengal that had enjoyed independence since 1430.
This vast territorial expansion was read in negative terms by colonial historians, who considered Myanmar's conquests barbarous and lacking inspiration in state building. Contemporary scholarship has nonetheless rehabilitated the statesmanship of early Konbaung kings from Alaungpaya (r. 1752-1760) to Bodawpaya (r. 1782-1819). Due to an increasingly centralized royal administration, Kon-baung capitals such as Ava or Amarapura boasted efficient political control over the country's river plains and their close, mountainous periphery. With the growing commercialization of the economy and the existence of an intricate money-lending system, this was, in historian Thant Myint-U's words, the time when "a common language, a common religion, a common set of legal and political ideas and institutions, and even a shared history existed throughout the core area. Myanmar was perceived by British geographers of the early nineteenth century as second only to China's military power in Asia. Still, this was not a territorially unified kingdom, as borders were largely undefined or rapidly changing. A set of maps of Myanmar, drawn in 1795 at the request of Dr. Francis Hamilton, conveys the idea of a central corridor of river valleys with strings of interconnected urban centers, surrounded by farflung outlying regions that were separated and divided by vast, sparsely inhabited zones. Under the early Konbaung kings, the kingdom's geo- graphical body was undergoing tremendous change, grow- ing toward the west and the south, receding in the northeast, and blocked from expanding toward the east.
Relentless warfare against Thailand between 1759 and 1812 overstretched Myanmar's human resources, but resulted in the conquest of Tenasserim and the control of its trade ports Mergui (together with the inland city of Tenasserim) and Tavoy, or Dawei, which had been key possessions of Ayutthaya's transpeninsular commercial network. Together with the control of Rakhine, the territorial expansion toward the south roughly tripled Myanmar's coastline on the Indian Ocean, unifying its maritime frontier and creating challenging new opportunities. The conquest of Rakhine facilitated contact with Bengal, and soon an inland trade road developed—crossing Rakhine by the Am Pass northward to Hsinbyugywan—which bypassed the long voyage up the Irrawaddy and its numerous tax posts. The often brutal eradication of local power that followed military conquest—a tactic to avoid losing these territories shortly after conquest—and the pressure on the conquered population to support Myanmar's warfare through providing recruits and provisions, often resulted in huge demographic losses. Subjected people would flee en masse to more peaceful areas; for example, numerous Mon fled to Thailand, and the people of Rakhine resettled in Chittagong. Thai historians have shown that, starting with King Alaungpaya's 1759 campaign against Ayutthaya, or Yodaya (Myanmar), Myanmar's southward expansion was motivated by the rapidly growing exports of tin and pepper produced in the Malay peninsula. The lucrative export of Bengali opium to the peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago, as well as the trade of bird nests controlled by the sultan of Kedah, fit into the same picture of expansion fueled by trade, where Myanmar competed not only with the Thai, but also with the British, who had opened a port at Penang in 1786. Successive Myanmar attacks against Thalang, or Phuket, failed, while the Thai, in turn, consolidated their possessions on the eastern side of the Malay peninsula, taking possession of Pattani and reasserting their control over the sultan of Kedah.
British sources testify to the existence of royal trade at the beginning of the Konbaung Dynasty. In an exquisite golden letter adorned with twenty-four rubies sent to King George II in 1756, King Alaungpaya declared that he was keen to seal friendship with the British and made friendly overtures for stable business relations with the East India Company. King Alaungpaya founded the port of Yangon, or Rangoon, in 1754 and heavily lobbied both French and English traders to move their trade from Pegu's Syriam, or Thanlyin, to his new port. The damage his own ship suffered at the hands of Thai authorities in Tavoy was allegedly one of the events that triggered the invasion of Thailand in 1759.