State and Society under the Konbaung Kings
Historical records of invasion and war tend to obscure the fact that for the average Burmese, the overwhelming majority of whom were peasants, life was reasonably stable and predictable. After the country was reunified by Alaungpaya, the political order was rebuilt from the top down, and the institutions of royal power intersected with the system of grass-roots leadership exercised by district chiefe and headmen on the local level.
At the apex of power was, of course, the monarch himself, residing in his palace, which represented symbolically the "center of the universe." He was advised by the Council of Ministers (Hluttaw), which was responsible for the administrative apparatus of the state and also functioned as the highest court in the land. Upper and Lower Burma were divided into administrative units, variously translated as districts, townships, or "circles." Their territory was rather extensive, particularly in regions at a distance from the capital, containing a main town and a large number of surrounding villages. Each district had its own governor, a royal appointee. The border regions consisted of small states that were in theory tributaries of the king, such as those ruled by feudal Shan sawbwas (hereditary chiefs) or the rajas of Manipur when it was subjugated.
Royal power was naturally stronger in the Burman heartland than in the periphery. Lower Burma was restive, as the frequent Mon uprisings at the end of the eighteenth century attest, and the Shan states were a region of chronic instability. Among the tribal or clan societies, such as the Kachins and the Chins, the king and his officials had little or no influence. Governors representing royal interests worked in cooperation with local district chiefs, who customarily inherited their offices. The chiefs' duties were broad: the collection of revenue from the district, the organization of corvee labor, the maintenance of law and order, the keeping of a district survey of families, and jurisdiction over petty criminal and civil cases.
Below them were village headmen, whose posts were also hereditary. As elites on the local level, the district chiefs and village headmen formed the bulwark of national stability. They were politically of great importance: the leaders of the Konbaung Dynasty in the eighteenth century and of the struggle against British colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from their ranks.
Society was in theory hierarchical, composed of six principal status groups: the king and royal family, Brahmins, officials, men of wealth, merchants, and commoners. Within the stratum of commoners there was a class of slaves, including pagoda slaves, who were often criminals or their descendants, persons enslaved for debt who could redeem their freedom, and prisoners of war. Titles of rank and sumptuary regulations were precisely defined, so that the manner in which a person was addressed, clothing, housing, and personal implements revealed an individual's position in society. Infractions of these usages were severely punished.
Society was also divided into two of what historian Frank Trager calls "functional groups": ahmudan, or "crown service" groups, who served directly the needs of the king and his court (the palace "guard and other military units, special classes of artsans, musicians, elephant tenders, boatmen, jailers, and the cultivators of fields where the king's own rice was grown) and were organized into liscrete units outside the regular system of administration; and the athi, persons who lived in a single locality and were not bound in special service to the monarch. The status of the latter was generally considered to be lower than that of the former, given the former's close association with the crown.
Traditional Burmese society was not particularly rigid, however, at least compared with the caste system of India. Persons of ability could earn high status and its appurtenances, particularly because war, revolt, and foreign invasion offered opportunities for advancement. Although hereditary in most cases, the posts of district chief or village headman could pass from an incompetent first son to a competent kinsman, or even outside the lineage. The sangha offered another avenue of advancement for commoners.
Most children were educated in monastery schools before the colonial period, and talented males could enter and rise high within the sangha. Moreover, the social position of women, as many observers have reported, was high, particularly compared to that of neighboring Asian countries. At the village monastery school they could learn, along with boys, reading, writing, and arithmetic, and many were active in running their own small businesses. They possessed property rights, and although cases of divorce in precolonial Burma were apparently rare, they could take their own property and half of the jointly owned property out of their former husband's household in such eventualities.
Land was, in theory, the property of the king, and part of his right to tax was based on the idea that all peasants were in fact his tenants. Certain lands, including those on which ahmudan cultivators grew rice for the palace, were his property in the ordinary sense of being at his disposal. Concerning other land, royal ownership entailed only the collection of revenue. Cultivators, in practice, could buy, sell, and inherit it. Given the large amount of territory in Burma and the small population, land tenure was not in general strictly defined. There was plenty of open land to be cleared, particularly in the river delta region of Lower Burma. A large amount of land was dedicated to Buddhist establishments by the king, and these were tax-exempt.
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