New Roads in the Study of Buddhism and Empire: The Konbaung Dynasty and Buddhist Imperial Formations

This paper draws on recent work on religion and empire to consider how the study of Buddhism can be advanced through careful and creative attention to imperial formations. Scholars working outside of Asia have been publishing new findings on how religion has structured and resisted imperialism (Wenger and Johnson 2022); however, scholarship on Asian history, especially in Southeast Asia, has been less attentive to entanglements between Buddhism and empire. This paper takes up the case of Burma’s Konbaung Empire, which ruled from 1752 until the country was colonized in its entirety by the British Empire in 1885. This empire developed innovative ways to use canonical Buddhist theories of land ownership, karma, and kingship to expand its realm to become the largest in mainland Southeast Asia. Buddhist doctrine, practices, and material culture were central in the Konbaung Empire’s commandeering of borderlands, where it exploited natural resources and human and non-human beings in order to fund its intertwined political and religious campaigns. 

Burma specialists have paid good attention to the role the British empire played at the end of the Konbaung period. They have revealed the creative ways Burmese communities mobilized Buddhist traditions to resist British cultural violence, even into after total colonization (Turner 2014, Braun 2013). Less understood, however, is the role of the Burmese empire in fashioning the particular forms of subjectivity that led to this resistance as well as to violence toward the country’s many marginalized communities. This paper explores conflicts between the Burmese and British empires in order to parse the changing Buddhist formations that affected and were affected by these conflicts. 

The particular imperial conflict this paper will investigate centers on Burmese assertions of royal monopolies. As the southeast Asian country became more involved in international trade, it had to restructure its management of natural resources and their commodification. 

In 1867, the Burmese and the British signed the Treaty for the Further Protection of Trade, which established timber, earth-oil, and precious stones as Burmese royal monopolies. This important treaty came be the last commercial treaty between the Burmese kingdom and the British government. This paper investigates how the negotiators of this treaty used Buddhist history, literature, and practices to assert the Burmese sovereign’s right to corner the increasingly valuable teak, ruby, and oil markets. The Burmese court combined key Burmese traditions of karma theory, righteous kingship (chakravartin), and ownership of the earth (bhūmisāmika) to justify its control of extractive industries. At the same time, the British drew on their new knowledge of Buddhism as a respectable world religion as well as on their Victorian policy of not interfering with religion in their concessions to the Burmese. The resulting wealth and power amassed by the Burmese court established Mandalay as a thriving Buddhist capital and empowered Burmese diplomacy with other Theravada counties, especially Lanka and Siam. Not only did this exercise in Buddhist imperialism uphold the Burmese kingdom in its final decades, but it also facilitated the exploitation of uplands and marginalized communities where timber, oil, and gems were extracted.

The Burmese case explored in this paper is an example of what Charles Hallisey’s essay in the Curators of the Buddha volume called “intercultural mimesis.” In that essay, Hallisey cautions scholars against absolute divisions between the “West” and the “Orient” by considering the varied interests of both European and Asian communities. Charles Hallisey qualified Edward Said’s work on Orientalism to advise scholars to consider relations between “the Orient” and “the West” as representing “a kind of ‘intercultural mimesis,’” by which he means “occasions where it seems that aspects of a culture of a subjectified people influenced the investigator to represent that culture in a certain manner” (1995: 33). In other words, Hallisey pressed us to see the significant role that Asian Buddhists themselves played in portrayals of Buddhism coming out of colonial contexts. Following Hallisey, Buddhist studies scholars have been eager to show the agency of Buddhist leaders and communities played in conveying ideas about Buddhism being a noble and mighty religious tradition. A less common response, however, has been to consider how Asian actors subjectified others by wielding Buddhist traditions, and how their imperial practices mimicked and were mimicked by the practices of other empires. This paper seeks to complicate the histories we tell about empire and Southeast Asia to show how Buddhist traditions have participated in empire at multiple registers—from resistance to domination. Further, it urges global studies of empire, which tend to center European and American examples, to consider how they might be informed by scholarship on Southeast Asian history.

Works Cited:

Braun, Erik. 2013. The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Hallisey, Charles. 1995. “Roads Taken and Note Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism,” in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, edited by Donald S. Lopez, Jr., 31–61. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Turner, Alicia. 2014. Saving Buddhism: The Impermanence of Religion in Colonial Burma. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Wenger, Tisa and Sylvester Johnson (eds). 2022. Religion and US Empire: Critical New      Histories. New York: NYU Press.