This book explains how Burma's booming drug production, insurgency, and counter-insurgency interrelate—and why the country has been unable to shake off thirty years of military rule and build a modern, democratic society.

In 1948, Burma was a promising young democracy with a bustling free market economy and a standard of living that surpassed nearly all of its other Asian neighbours. Fifty years later, Burma is one of the poorest nations in the world, with a military dictatorship in Rangoon and 50,000 armed rebels from a myriad of ethnic insurgency groups. In this well documented and detailed account, well-known Burma journalist Bertil Lintner explains the nexus between Burma’s booming drug production and its insurgency and counter-insurgency, providing an answer to the question of why Burma has been unable to shake off thirty-five years of military rule and build a modern, democratic society. Lintner’s lively account is interspersed with numerous anecdotes gleaned from personal research and interviews. Individuals are given features and personality in the complicated “jigsaw” of Burma’s modern history. Beginning with the shock of Aung San’s murder in 1947, Lintner retraces events from the 1920s that led to this disastrous event and continues his narrative up to the present, navigating the reader through webs of intrigue involving power, politics and drugs. Key players are the Rangoon government, the ethnic resistance, the Communists, the Kuomintang, and the US government. This revised and updated edition includes five extensive appendixes for serious readers and Burma scholars alike: a list of acronyms, a chronology of events, a who’s who of important figures in Burma’s insurgency, an annotated list of rebel armies, and biographical sketches of the Thirty Comrades. “Bertil Lintner, one of Burma’s (Myanmar’s) closest and most incisive observers, has written an important book. It is more than a study of the drug trade and the minority rebellions. It is in a sense a history of Burma since independence. No one concerned with Burma, with Southeast Asia, or with international narcotics affairs can neglect this work”. — David I. Steinberg, Georgetown University

Burma was conquered by Britain in the course of three wars fought in 1825, 1852 and 1885, and colonial rule was to last until 1948, when Burma regained independence. Throughout this period there were several armed uprisings against foreign rule and its social and economic ramifications. In Brave Men of the Hills Parimal Ghosh explores how peasant militancy was first generated and then crystallised into an open challenge to the colonial state. He focuses on two types of uprisings: the nineteenth-century resistance that followed the three wars of conquest, and Saya San's revolt of 1930-1933. Rather than seeing such Burmeses responses as being the symptom of a colonial "pacification" process, he argues that they were organic expressions of a momentum of resistance originating among a grassroots peasant base.

In late 1930, on a secluded mountain overlooking the rural paddy fields of British Burma, a peasant leader named Saya San crowned himself King and inaugurated a series of uprisings that would later erupt into one of the largest anti-colonial rebellions in Southeast Asian history. Considered an imposter by the British, a hero by nationalists, and a prophet-king by area-studies specialists, Saya San came to embody traditional Southeast Asia’s encounter with European colonialism in his attempt to resurrect the lost throne of Burma. The Return of the Galon King analyzes the legal origins of the Saya San story and reconsiders the facts upon which the basic narrative and interpretations of the rebellion are based. Aung-Thwin reveals how counter-insurgency law produced and criminalized Burmese culture, contributing to the way peasant resistance was recorded in the archives and understood by Southeast Asian scholars. This interdisciplinary study reveals how colonial anthropologists, lawyers, and scholar-administrators produced interpretations of Burmese culture that influenced contemporary notions of Southeast Asian resistance and protest. It provides a fascinating case study of how history is treated by the law, how history emerges in legal decisions, and how the authority of the past is used to validate legal findings.

Gives an account of Burma's pro-democracy movement and Aung San Suu Kyi's prominent leadership role

“Craig wields powerful and vivid prose to illuminate a country and a family trapped not only by war and revolution, but also by desire and loss.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Miss Burma tells the story of modern-day Burma through the eyes of Benny and Khin, husband and wife, and their daughter Louisa. After attending school in Calcutta, Benny settles in Rangoon, then part of the British Empire, and falls in love with Khin, a woman who is part of a long-persecuted ethnic minority group, the Karen. World War II comes to Southeast Asia, and Benny and Khin must go into hiding in the eastern part of the country during the Japanese occupation, beginning a journey that will lead them to change the country’s history. Years later, Benny and Khin’s eldest child, Louisa, has a danger-filled, tempestuous childhood and reaches prominence as Burma’s first beauty queen soon before the country falls to dictatorship. As Louisa navigates her newfound fame, she is forced to reckon with her family’s past, the West’s ongoing covert dealings in her country, and her own loyalty to the cause of the Karen people. Based on the story of the author’s mother and grandparents, Miss Burma is a captivating portrait of how modern Burma came to be and of the ordinary people swept up in the struggle for self-determination and freedom. “At once beautiful and heartbreaking . . . An incredible family saga.” —Refinery29 “Miss Burma charts both a political history and a deeply personal one—and of those incendiary moments when private and public motivations overlap.” —Los Angeles Times