G. E Harvey

This is a slim book packed with excellent information on the colonial rule of Burma. The author was in the ICS for twenty years and had access that many historians did not. He is sympathetic to the people's struggles but makes the point that at the start of WWII the majority of the population in Burma who lived outside the main cities were living a feudal life with feudal attitudes. This has made Burma's road to independence difficult. What he could not have known, as the book was published in 1946, is the legacy of that feudal attitude helped the oppressive military government keep its stranglehold on the country.
What is happening in Burma now is riveting, because the automatic respect for monks, ministers, politicians and teachers that the poorly educated have has not disappeared in the last 70 years, or been altered by better education and independent thinking.
Burma has been like a country in aspic with no fluid change. The rich and powerful control everything and are terrified of Western knowledge 'contaminating' their happy, smiling, poor, ground down populace. Unfortunately, the leaders' greed has been their undoing, as they needed the rest of the world's money to invest in the country, after squandering her natural resources to line their pockets. The seeds of that future mis-management are noted in this book. Prophetic.… (más)