All posts tagged Myanmar

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women by Christina Lamb (2025)

Warning: This review contains details of really disgusting and evil sexual violence perpetrated against women and girls that goes far beyond rape. If you’re of a sensitive disposition or prone to nightmares, don’t read it.

The more places I went to, the more prevalent I found rape was.

‘It is an everlasting nightmare.’
(Lola Narcisa Claveria, Filipino survivor of Japanese sex slavery, page 351)

This is a deeply upsetting but profoundly important book, often devastatingly depressing but sometimes genuinely inspiring. Christina Lamb is an award-winning journalist who has covered a variety of warzones in her career as well as writing 10 factual books. From early in her career she realised just how prevalent rape was as a weapon of war, not just as random outrages, but used systematically to demoralise enemy forces and terrorise entire populations. What she learned about the vicious sexual abuse of women in conflict after conflict was sickening and disgusting. But she also came to realise that the scale of the violence and abuse against women was often overlooked in journalism and history books overwhelmingly written by men (p.459); and by international bodies and courts more often than not run by men.

Everything has to start with the evidence and this means the first-hand testimony of the survivors. Telling their stories not only offers some form of closure for the victims, and the psychological validation of knowing someone believes them. It is also the start of gathering evidence, for use not only in possible court proceedings but to begin to be used in larger historical narratives, to begin to redress the gaping silence about one of the most overlooked and neglected parts of war and conflict – the unspeakable crimes, violence and abuse directed against women and girls, often on an industrial scale.

‘When I saw them laughing and humiliating us, I decided we needed to break the silence. If we didn’t talk about what we went through, and if they were not punished, what could we expect from their children but the same or greater evil?’ (Bakira Hasecic, founder of Association of Women Victims of War in Bosnia, p.167)

And so this substantial book (474 pages) records Lamb’s odyssey, over a seven year period, to track down, interview and record the testimonies of women who have suffered unbelievable horrors in conflict after conflict around the world.

Destinations

Lamb goes to:

2016 August: Leros, Greece The Greek island of Leros was used to house refugees from war in the Middle East including Yazidis who had been enslaved and trafficked by Islamic State.

2016: Baden-Wurtenberg The German province which took in 1,100 Yazidi women and children who had been treated as sex slaves by ISIS.

2016: Northeastern Nigeria: On 15 April 2014 the brutal Islamic terror group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 mostly Christian schoolgirls from the town of Chibok and carried them off into sexual slavery. #BringBackOurGirls or #BBOG went viral. Hardly any of the girls have been recovered.

2017 December: Bangladesh: Kutupalong To interview survivors of the 2017 massacres and mass rapes of Rohynga women by Burmese soldiers. In three months more than 650,000 were driven out of the west Burmese state of Rakhine, two-thirds of the Rohynga population.

Every single shack had terrible stories and I had never come across such widespread violation of women and girls. (p.75)

Bangladesh: Liberation War Museum, Dhaka and Sirajganj Up to 400,000 were women raped by Pakistani soldiers in Bangladesh’s war of independence as official Pakistan military policy. Lamb learns that the survivors were called birangonas from the Bengali word bir meaning war heroine (p.92).

‘Often when the women were raped the soldiers had grabbed their babies and stomped on them to death or thrown them so hard their brains had come out.’ (Safina; p.110)

Rwanda Aftermath of the 1994 Hutu genocide of Tutsis, itself the sequel to the 1959 Hutu Revolution, and pogroms of 1963 and 1973.

‘Of course they raped me… Wherever you were hiding under a tree a man would find you and rape you and sometimes kill you. There were lots of different men doing this and they used sticks and bottles into the private parts of many women right up to their stomach…’ (Serafina Mukakinani, p.132)

2018, March: Yugoslavia: Sarajevo The appalling atrocities of the Serbs in Bosnia, and the heroic efforts of Bakira Hasecic and her Association of Women Victims of War, founded in 2003, to bring the Serb torturers, murderers and rapists to justice.

Yugoslavia: Srebrenica Dragana Vucetic, senior forensic anthropologist at the International Commission of Missing Persons. On 11 July 1995 Serb militias took away about 8,300 Muslim men and boys, drove them out into fields or football grounds, then massacred them, shooting or bludgeoning them to death. Dr Branca Antic-Stauber who runs a charity for rape survivors and uses horticulture therapy.

2018, October: Berlin Stories of the vast mass rapes of German women and girls during the Red Army’s conquest of eastern Germany and Berlin at the end of the Second World War. In towns and villages every woman from eight to eighty was raped multiple times. ‘It was an army of rapists’ (Natalya Gesse, Soviet war correspondent, p.194) It is estimated that up to 2 million women and girls were rapes and scores of thousands of Germans committed suicide, and killed their children, rather than fall into the hands of the Russians.

2018, November: Buenos Aires In 1976 a military junta seized control of Argentina and rules for 7 years during which up to 30,000 leftists, trade unions and activists were kidnapped off the streets and ‘disappeared’. Estela Barnes de Carlotta, president of the Grandmothers or Las Abuelas (p.214).

2018, March: Mosul Lamb attends the hurried trials of a handful of the 30,000 or so people charged with being members of ISIS. Justice is a farce. The court doesn’t consider rape as a separate offence, all offences are grouped together as terrorism.

2018, April: Iraq: Dohuk The prevalence of suicide among Yazidi survivors of ISIS sex slavery.

2019, February: Democratic Republic of Congo: Bukavu In 2010 Congo was called the rape capital of the world. Lamb interviews Dr Denis Mukwege, founder of the Panzi Foundation, who has treated more rape victims than any other doctor in the world.

In the Second Congo War stories of women who were not only gang raped but then shot in the vagina, or had bayonets shoved in their vagina, or sticks soaked in fuel which was then set alight. Lamb discovers that Dr Mukwege’s clinic is seeing more and more raped babies. Some men believe that raping babies will give them magical powers; they are told this by witchdoctors (p.337).

In a gruelling book this chapter (chapter 13, pages 300 to 334) contains probably the worst atrocities (the 86-year-old who was raped, women’s vaginas set alight or hacked off, the mother who was forced at gunpoint to eat her own baby); but also the most inspiring moments. Lamb meets the inspiring Christine Schuler Deschryver, founder of City of Joy, a safe haven for survivors in Congo.

‘It’s about giving a woman value… I hug them and then they are healed and people say I have magic hands but it’s just love… I’m convinced you can change the world only by love’ (p.330)

It also contains the most telling evidence of the way rape used as a weapon of mass terrorisation is tied into broader economic and political structures. Because Deschryver points out that 1) Congo contains more of the rare metals needed to create mobile phones and batteries (cobalt, coltan) than any other country on earth; 2) if you drew a map of the rapes you’d see they cluster around mining areas, and so 3) rape is used as a strategy of terror by the militias and groups who control the mines and the regions around them. Which leads her onto her fourth point, 4) if the international community really wanted to end conflict in the Congo it could but, in Deschryver’s view, it suits multinational corporations to preserve Congo as an unstable mess the better to plunder the country of its cobalt, coltan and gold (p.331).

Democratic Republic of Congo: Kavumu Village where scores of babies and very small girls have been abducted, raped and their genitals destroyed, allegedly by the ‘Army of Jesus’, a militia controlled by a local warlord whose members have been told by a witchdoctor that the blood from raped and mutilated babies will make them invulnerable in battle (p.339). Although the warlord was eventually taken to court and convicted, the case went to appeal and none of the villagers knows whether he and his henchmen are in prison or not. Meanwhile, having lost all faith in the justice system, they have started to take the law into their own hands with lynchings and beheadings of suspect young men (p.348). Thus, chaos.

Manila Lamb meets surviving ‘comfort women’, enslaved by the occupying Japanese Army during the Second World War. They prefer to the term lolas which means grandmother in the local Tagalog language and which they use as an honorific, hence Lola Narcisa and Lola Estelita.

Concluding chapter 2020

Sexual violence against men

  • in eastern Congo a quarter of men in conflict zones have experienced sexual violence
  • in Afghanistan bacha bazi or the abuse of boys is common
  • in Syrian prisons under Bashar al-Assad, men and boys were submitted to horrifying sexual violence

The challenge of achieving justice Lamb jumps between a number of cases, showing the dedicated work of investigators, researchers, lawyers, prosecutors and judges, but how gruellingly slow it is and how pitifully few convictions are achieved. The Yazidis wait, the Rohingya wait for justice.

Guatemala During the 36-year-long civil war over 100,000 women were raped, mostly Mayans in an attempt to exterminate their ethnicity (p.387). In 2016 11 Mayan women secured the conviction of a retired army officer for sexually enslaving them.

Peru Over 5,000 women raped during the 11-year-long civil war with Shining Path guerrillas.

Colombia Sexual crimes have been included in crimes heard by the tribunal set up at the end of the 52-year-long civil war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

Chad Successful conviction of Chad’s despicable sadist president, Hissène Habré, who ruled through a reign of terror till his overthrow in 1990. In 2000 he was arrested and put on trial in neighbouring Senegal. In 2016 he was convicted of crimes against humanity, torture and rape and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Women in charge Lamb makes the telling point that most of these convictions were only secured when women were judges or prosecutors in the case.

2025 update

2022, May, Ukraine: Berestianka The Russians are back and they’re raping again. And looting everything they can to take back to their pitiful slum of a country. Gang rapes, torture, rape in front of the rest of the family etc (p,409). Rewarded by Putin on their return home. According to Lamb domestic violence is not criminalised in Russia and widely accepted. Figures. Whenever I read about Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky despising the decadent West, this is what I think of. Russia, home of domestic violence, epidemic alcoholism and rapists.

For the first time Ukraine established a court and started prosecuting Russian war criminals while the war was still ongoing (as it is today).

2023, autumn, Tel Aviv On 7 October 2023 Hamas fighters broke through the wall dividing Gaza from Israel and went on a rampage at multiple sites, massacring 1,200 civilians and taking 251 others back to Gaza as hostages. Lamb meets survivors, and speaks to the many first responders, therapists and women’s activists regarding the widespread evidence of sexual violence against the women victims: gang rapes and sexual mutilation i.e. shooting women in the vagina. In her interviewees’ opinion the intention was the most primitive one imaginable of attacking your enemies’ procreative ability, plus the more modern one of spreading not just terror but horror. The barbaric cruelty was exemplary in the sense that it was intended to traumatise an entire nation (which, arguably, it did).

Hebron in the West Bank. Lamb meets Palestinians who live under extraordinarily tight Israeli supervision, and then survivors of sexual violence inflicted by the Israeli Defence Force, and lawyers and NGOs who have reported on it. Interestingly, the main targets have been men and boys, designed to cause maximum humiliation in revenge for 7 October. The accusations of sexual humiliation in captivity sound identical to the Americans at Abu Ghraib.

‘It was me and two other prisoners and three border police. They filmed us naked then began to touch our bodies and make jokes and insulted us. One of them had a metal detector which he tried to put in our anuses.’ (Palestinian Thaer Fakhoury, p.448)

Avignon, December 2024 Lamb is introduced to Gisèle Pelicot, the woman drugged by her  husband who then invited men from a website group to come to their home and rape her. The police found thousands of videos on her husband’s laptop clearly identifying the men which allowed a trial to go forward with 50 accused. The key thing is she waived her right to anonymity in order to speak out and so became a heroine to anti-rape activists, feminists and ordinary people around the world.

Summary When she completed the first edition in 2020 Lamb couldn’t imagine that sexual violence in conflict would return to Europe, in the form of Russian soldiers raping Ukrainian women, or the horrors of the Hamas attack on Israel, or the eruption of brutal civil war in Sudan. Every year the UN presents a report on conflict-related sexual violence. The 2024 report concluded that conflict-related sexual violence is increasing.

Historical retrospective

Spain The really systematic mass rape of large populations of women probably first occurred in the Spanish Civil War 1936 to 1939. It was carried out by General Franco’s Falangist forces. ‘Not just rape but appalling evisceration of peasant women of Andalucia and Estremadura’, including the branding of their breasts with fascist symbols (historian Antony Beevor, quoted p.203).

Nanking The rape of Nanking, December 1937 to January 1938, where the Japanese accompanied mass murder of Chinese civilians with mass rape of women and girls.

Comfort women Euphemism for the hundreds of thousands of women and girls, predominantly from Japanese-occupied Asian countries, who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces before and during World War II.

Vietnam War 1961 to 1973: My Lai massacre and Tet Offensive.

Khmer Rouge 1975 to 1979. Cambodians murdered 2 million other Cambodians accompanied by mass rape.

Turkish invasion of Cyprus 1974, triggered widespread Turkish soldier rape of Greek women.

Timeline

1863 Abraham Lincoln issues general order 100 making rape carried out by soldiers of the Union Army punishable by death.

1919 Commission of Responsibilities established with rape near the top of the list of 32 war crimes.

1946 but at the war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo not a single prosecution for sexual violence.

1949 Geneva Convention, Article 27:

Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.

1973 Bangladesh declares rape a crime against humanity.

1993 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY):

Men and women came forward to recount evils beyond imagining – women and girls locked up in schools and suffering repeated anal, oral and vaginal rape, people having their tongues cut off, or being burned alive as human torches as they ‘screamed like cats’ (p.160)

1994 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) established in Arusha in Tanzania: Lamb interviews raped Tutsi women who testified in the first rape-as-war-crime trial. It was the first time rape was recognised as an instrument of genocide and prosecuted as a war crime.

‘I was raped countless times. The last group that raped me were so many people and one man shouted, “I can’t use my penis in that dirty place so I’ll use a stick.” I know many women who died like that. They sharpened the sticks and forced them right through their vaginas.’
(Cecile Mukurugwiza, p.141)

1998 first conviction for rape as a war crime.

1998 Rome Statute which established the International Criminal Court defined rape as a war crime.

2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 was the first formal and legal document from the Security Council that required parties in a conflict to prevent violations of women’s rights, to support women’s participation in peace negotiations and in post-conflict reconstruction, and to protect women and girls from wartime sexual violence; for ‘the greater inclusion of women in peace and security’.

2008 UN Security Council passed Resolution 1820 stating that ‘rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide’.

2009 established the office of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict.

2010 Bangladesh sets up an International Crimes Tribunal. As of 2019 88 collaborators and party leaders had been tried for torture, murder and rape.

2011 In a video sent to a Nobel Women’s Initiative conference about sexual violence, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi said:

‘Rape is used in my country as a weapon against those who only want to live in peace, who only want to assert their basic human rights. Especially in the areas of ethnic nationalities, rape is rife. It is used as a weapon by armed forces to intimidate the ethnic nationalities and to divide our country.’

2014 then UK Foreign Secretary William Hague organised a four-day conference calling for the end of sexual violence in conflict.

2016 International Criminal Court convicts Pierre Bemba of murder, rape and pillage carried out by his men during the 2002-3 war in the Central Africa Republic.

2018 Nobel Peace Prize awarded jointly to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”

2019 first conviction by the International Criminal Court for rape in wartime.

2019 report of the UN Special Representative listed 19 countries where women are being raped in war, by 12 armies and police forces and 41 non-state actors.

2019 Gambia took Myanmar to court over the Rohingya genocide, the first time one state had taken another to court over war crimes it had committed. Tried at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, resulting in orders against Myanmar carrying out any further genocide.

2020 first criminal trial of a member of Islamic State for crimes against the Yazidi, held in Germany, resulting in conviction and life imprisonment.

Learnings

Systematic mass rape, sexual violence, sexual torture and sexual mutilation are far more widespread than the bleakest pessimist could ever have expected.

Rape in conflict is rarely ad hoc, random and incidental. More often it is the result of encouragement or orders from the highest levels of military and political leadership, as in: mass rapes in Germany; mass rapes in Rwanda; mass rapes in Bosnia; mass rapes in Syria, and so on.

These kinds of mass rapes are now recognised, not as accidental by-products of the chaos of war, but as conscious war strategies, and as such, defined as war crimes. They are also associated with genocide, the conscious attempt to wipe out a people or group.

The genocidal intent is demonstrated in cases like the mass rape of Bangladeshi women and girls by the army of Pakistan, or the mass rapes of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs, or the mass rape of Rohingya women by Burmese soldiers. In each instance the intent wasn’t sexual per se, the intent was to wipe out the victims’ ethnic group by breeding a new generation with the blood of the conquerors in them. In Bangladesh:

‘They had orders of a kind from Tikka Khan [Pakistan’s military governor in the East]… What they had to do was impregnate as many Bengali women as they could… so there would be a whole generation of children in East Pakistan that would be born with blood from the West.’ (p.97)

In Bosnia:

The victims ranged from between six to seventy years old and were raped repeatedly and often kept captive for several years. Many women were forcibly impregnated and held until termination of the pregnancy was impossible. The women were treated as property and rape was used with the intent to intimidate, humiliate and degrade. (p.156)

This same motive – ethnic triumphalism – explains why foetuses were cut out of pregnant women, babies were bludgeoned to death, and children were shot or had their throats cut.

Speaking about it helps. Sharing their stories in safe, supportive environments helps the survivors.

‘It’s all about giving them respect and them owning their stories. After a month, when they begin to tell their stories, sometimes OMG… and the transformation after six is huge. We turn pain into power and give victims strength to be leaders in their communities.’ (Christine Schuler Deschryver, founder of City of Joy, Congo, p.327)

But it never goes away. These women are profoundly damaged forever, as are their families, all their relationships, and their wider communities. And that was the intention.

‘That’s why rape really was a calculated weapon. The fellows who raped them and planned to rape them: they knew you either die now or die later but you’ll never be human again after this ordeal.’ (Rwanda Justice Minister Johnston Busingye, p.153)

As much or more healing comes from having the state formally recognise their plight, a formal recognition that it happened and that it was a crime.

‘It’s not possible to heal from this forever but it helps to speak about it as soon as possible and to share the story with someone compassionate. What I have seen definitely helps their healing is when perpetrators get punished because that gives the victim confirmation by authority she was not the one at fault for what happened to her and that she’s innocent.’ (Dr Branca Antic-Stauber, p.190)

‘Talking to the judges was the beginning of my rehabilitation. For so many years society did not want to listen… But now we could tell our side of the story… Seeing the life sentences at long last, after all they did to us, truly, it gives you your life back.’ (Graciela Garcia Romero, p.238)

In conservative societies state recognition can support recognition at local, village and family level. A striking example is the way the first president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who recognised the horrific scale of the mass rapes carried out by the Pakistan army and coined a term of praise for the victims, calling them Birangona, or ‘war heroines’.

Better still, though, is the healing effect of watching their perpetrators brought to justice, tried and convicted of their crimes. This validates the victims’ experiences and assures them that the world around them understands and values their suffering.

‘Their actions changed the law and criminal justice for every woman. The women showed you can take the worst trauma and turn it into a story of strength and victory.’ (Erica Barks-Ruggles, US ambassador to Kigali, on the rape survivors who travelled to the Rwanda genocide tribunal to testify against the perpetrators, p.149)

The only problem is it happens pitifully rarely.

Meanwhile, many of the women interviewed wanted their perpetrators to be killed (p.119).

‘I want the worst things to happen to the men that did this to me. I want them to die not in a quick or humane way but slowly, slowly, so they know what it’s like to do bad things to people.’ (Naima, a Yazidi enslaved by ISIS, p.264)

‘I feel so angry at what those Japanese did to me and my family, that if I saw them today I would kill them.’ (Lola Narcisa Claveria, Filipino woman enslaved by the Japanese p.357)

‘I hate them so much and wish death to all of them and Putin.’ (Vika, Ukrainian woman raped by Russian soldiers, p.403)

Charities have discovered that a good way to draw survivors out of their often disastrous mental suffering is to give them tasks, jobs, skills training and agency. Like the farm bought by Christine Schuler Deschryver, to be run by rape survivors in Congo (p.329) or Dr Branca Antic-Stauber’s idea of setting up a rose-growing business to employ survivors in Bosnia (p.185)

No index

There’s no index. Why?

Similarly no list of the organisations mentioned in each country, or organisations addressing sexual violence generally. I supply my own list below.

Human history

Well, I’ve explained my view of human history in a separate blog post:

History is an abattoir. What was written down is a tiny fraction of what happened, and it was written by the educated and privileged, mostly sucking up to kings and khans. The reality of human existence for most humans for most of human history has been unspeakably brutal.

Last thought

In his brilliant series of books about conflict and international order in the 1990s, Michael Ignatieff divides the world into zones of conflict and zones of safety. Every day I thank my lucky stars that I was born and lived all my life in what he calls a ‘zone of safety’. Way before you get to my white privilege or my male privilege, I give thanks for my safety privilege.

Credit

‘Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women’ by Christina Lamb was first published by William Collins in 2020. I read the updated 2025 paperback edition.

Organisations mentioned in the text

Support organisations

At the end of the Unsilenced exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, the curators give a list of support organisations, which I repeat here:

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Burma to Myanmar @ the British Museum

Burma to Myanmar is the first major exhibition in the UK to give a good cultural history of the country widely known as Burma until the military junta changed its name to Myanmar in 1989. Burma achieved independence from the British Empire in January 1948, so the exhibition marks the 75th anniversary of Myanmar’s independence.

Seated Buddha, acquired by Captain Frederick Marryat during the First Anglo-Burmese War, 1824 to 1826. Made of lacquer, wood, gold, textile and shell. From central or lower Myanmar. British Museum. Photo by the author

It’s a smallish exhibition, by British Museum standards, up in the Rotunda exhibition space, and bringing together some 130 objects – but it still manages to be pretty confusing. This is for at least two reasons. As with other countries we don’t hear much about in the news and whose cultural products we almost never see, almost everything about the exhibition is UNFAMILIAR. Therefore, there’s a lot of information to take in and process.

The second reason is that the history of Burma is genuinely complicated and confusing. To be very simplistic, you can divide Burma’s history into four parts.

4. Post-independence

Working backwards, there’s the period from independence in 1948 to the present day, mostly marked by military dictatorship, rebellions and repression. This is reasonably understandable because we’re talking about one defined country with fixed borders, and the pattern of military dictatorship is familiar from countless other developing countries, while the rise of Aung San Suu Kyi as leader of the opposition and a sort of Nelson Mandela figure, is reasonably familiar from the news.

3. Second World War

The Second World War devastated the country, loosened colonial control and hastened independence from Britain in 1948. Japan seized Burma from the British and the latter only slowly fought back, fighting with many Burmese nationalists who were promised independence, in what at the time and ever since has often been dubbed ‘the forgotten war’. This, also, is fairly familiar from British wartime books, histories, memoirs etc.

2. British colonial period

Before that came the colonial period, from Britain’s first involvement in 1826 through to the granting of independence in 1948. There were three Anglo-Burma Wars:

  • First Anglo-Burmese War (March 1824 to February 1826)
  • Second Anglo-Burmese War (April 1852 to January 1853)
  • Third Anglo-Burmese War (November 1885)

In each of these small wars Britain seized control of more territory (the exhibition features about a dozen wall labels with useful maps, including one showing Britain’s steady encroachment through the nineteenth century).

For most of that period Burma was not a separate political entity but was ruled as a province of British India. During that long period the British invested in developing the Burmese economy, encouraging arts and crafts to be made for the international market etc.

The British abolished the monarchy and imposed new administrative systems. For the kinds of artists and craftsmen represented here, the British introduced new techniques and materials and encouraged new clienteles. The introduction of the census led to ethnic stereotyping that helped set the stage for the conflicts of today.

Again, this all follows a recognisable pattern and invokes ideas familiar from all the other colonies we managed.

1. Pre-1826: rising and falling ethnic kingdoms

What makes the exhibition challenging is what came before the Brits, the 2,000 years or more from the earliest recorded artefacts through to the first British war. Burma sits at a sort of crossroads of India to the west, China to the east, Thailand to the south and, over its long history, has absorbed influences from all these countries and ones further afield.

But the biggest factor or reason, which I struggled to get my head around, is that the final borders of Burma were only settled at independence in 1948 (even under the British not all the territory within the nominal borders was effectively ruled by the Brits, with the mountains in the north never fully pacified) –and that for over 2,000 years before that, there was no country called Burma, there was a succession of kingdoms and empires which rose and fell, some entirely in the borders of modern Burma, some straddling them, kingdoms based on ethnic groups which fought among themselves or with Indian kingdoms to the west, Chinese peoples to the East, Thai and Laos people to the east, and so on.

From the 14th century numerous kingdoms jostled for power. These kingdoms extended fluctuating control over resources, people and religious authority, and expanded their links with Thailand, China, Sri Lanka, and traders from the Middle East and Europe, creating a fertile ground for diverse cultures to flourish.

Nowadays there are reckoned to be over 100 languages and dialects spoken in Myanmar, a legacy of its extraordinarily complicated, shifting, kaleidoscopic history. There is also religious variety. Although nearly 90% of Myanmar’s inhabitants practise Buddhism, the country is also home to many Christians, Hindus, Muslims and animists.

Examples

Here are some examples from the exhibition wall labels which indicate the detail and complexity of Burma’s changing kingdoms and peoples.

In the 1300s and 1400s, other political centres appeared, including the Hanthawaddy kingdom in lower Myanmar, and Mrauk U in present-day Rakhine State. Shan states dominated regions in the north and east. Highland chiefdoms, linked by complex kinship networks, existed between these various centres. Frontiers and cultures were fluid and political control depended on personal loyalties.

The earliest urban centres in Southeast Asia were occupied by the Pyu peoples from about 200 BC. They had cultural links to Indian kingdoms, the Himalayas, Sri Lanka, China and Dvaravati in Thailand. The Pyu peoples were succeeded in central Myanmar by the Bagan (Pagan) kingdom, which flourished from the 11th to the 13th centuries.

After Bagan’s decline, central Myanmar’s kingdoms (with capitals at Ava, Amarapura, Toungoo and Mandalay), waxed and waned until the late 1800s. Their political sway could stretch from Ahom (Assam) and Manipur in the west, to Ayutthaya, Lan Na and Lan Xang in the east, and extend down the Thai-Malay peninsula, periodically making successive kingdoms the largest empires in mainland Southeast Asia. Warfare and the colonisation of surrounding regions led to the relocation of people into central Myanmar. These population influxes brought new ideas and skills and produced a diverse cultural environment.

Lower Myanmar’s kingdoms: associated with the Mon peoples, kingdoms emerged in lower Myanmar at Thaton, Mottama (Martaban) and Bago (Pegu). Made wealthy from trade, the region’s ports teemed with Chinese, Indian and Southeast Asian traders, and later European, Persian and Abyssinian (Ethiopian) merchants. The area had strong links with Thai kingdoms and Sri Lanka. Invasions from Arakan, Ayutthaya (central Thailand), and central Myanmar resulted in the frequent movement of peoples. Bago briefly defeated the central Burmese kingdom in the 1740s, but was quickly reconquered and its distinct history marginalised.

The kingdom of Bago’s ‘Golden Age’ occurred under Queen Shin Saw Bu (reigned 1453 to 1472) and her successor King Dhammazedi (reigned 1472 to 1492). During this time, the kingdom developed strong ties with Sri Lanka and became an important Buddhist centre.

You get the idea. A blizzard of peoples, kingdoms, maps and history to process and understand, all of which is completely new to the average visitor.

Natural resources

Early on the exhibition shows us that Myanmar has always been rich in natural resources including jade, rubies and teak, cotton and oil. Thus the opening room or space has an impressive teak ‘steering chair’, a heavily lacquered mirror, and some amber earplugs (!).

That’s why the exhibition features, early on, an oil worker’s helmet – not because it is a beautiful object but it symbolises Myanmar’s abundance of resources. Myanmar is one of Southeast Asia’s oldest oil producers, with Chinese records dating Burmese oil wells to the 1200s (!). Originally monopolised by Burmese kings, oil became a major export under British colonial rule. During the Second World War, the retreating British army destroyed oil fields to prevent them from falling into the hands of the invading Japanese. The oil industry has still not recovered from this damage.

Talking of teak, the exhibition has been beautifully designed to convey a Burmese vibe, with each ‘room’ or exhibition space separated not by solid walls but by bannister partitions of dark brown teak wood. Not very obvious in my photo is the way empty parts of wall have projected onto them abstract patterns and designs of, presumably, Burmese origin. Then there’s the tinkling of the zither (see below) – all contributing to a gently subtle Burmese vibe.

Installation view of Burma to Myanmar @ the British Museum. Photo by the author

The name

Before British colonial rule (1826 to 1948), what we know as Myanmar today consisted of many different kingdoms, one of which was called ‘Myanma’ or ‘Bama’. ‘Burma’ became the country’s official unified name under the British. In 1989 the new military regime adopted the name ‘Union of Myanmar’.

Selected objects

King Dhammaraja Hussain’s coin

For instance, a coin shown in the exhibition issued by King Dhammaraja Hussain (reigned 1612 to 1622) of the Mrauk U kingdom in Arakan (now Rakhine State), is inscribed in Arakanese, Bengali and Persian and so shows the wide reach of that kingdom’s trade and political networks.

Silver coin issued by Dhammaraja Hussain, Myanmar (1612 to 1622) © 2023 The Trustees of the British Museum

King Alaungpaya’s golden letter

Rulers in central Myanmar came to dominate parts of the region between the 16th and 19th centuries, founding the largest empire in mainland Southeast Asia. King Alaungpaya (ruled 1752 to 1760) was the founder of the last Burmese dynasty in the Konbaung kingdom. Alaungpaya sent this letter to King George II of Great Britain as a royal diplomatic gesture between equal heads of state. It is made of gold, set with 24 rubies, and was housed in an elephant-tusk case, indicating the power and wealth of his expanding empire. It also graciously permits the British to use a local coastal port. Despite the importance the letter’s sumptuous materials conveyed, George viewed it as a curiosity and never replied, causing great offense. Today this is the only known letter of its kind. The letter is now a UNESCO ‘memory of the world’ object.

The Golden Letter of Alaungpaya (Konbaung period, 18th century) © Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek – Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, Hannover, Ms IV 751a

Ramayana wall hanging

Wall hanging (shwe-chi-doe or kalaga) illustrating scenes from the Ramayana The vibrant scenes exquisitely embroidered on this wall hanging are episodes from the Ramayana, an epic tale that originated in India and was adapted in parts of Southeast Asia. The Ramayana became popular at the Burmese court after the forced relocation of Thai theatre troupes there in 1767 and was performed around the country. Panels like this would have been hung as room dividers or backdrops.

Scenes from the Ramayana, Myanmar (detail) early 1900s © 2023 The Trustees of the British Museum

Shell letter

A shell ‘letter’ requesting the development of local infrastructure from 1907 written to the colonial government. The letter, written on pages of silk bound in a large shell and held in place by silver supports, is from the townspeople of Myeik (Mergui) to Lieutenant-Governor Herbert Thirkell White, asking for better infrastructure, including clean water, improved transport links, a bi-lingual science school and a hospital.

Buddhist reliquary

A gold Buddhist reliquary from the 1400s that demonstrates the religious connections between the kingdom of Hanthawaddy in lower Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

Blanket

An exceptional late 19th or early 20th century blanket from the Nung-Rawang people (one of the Kachin groups) of northern Myanmar. Its materials, patterning and weaving techniques demonstrate both the Nung-Rawang’s links with other Kachin groups, as well as their distinct cultural attributes.

Court robes

In a big display case are two striking court robes. One is the high-ranking Burmese military robe for the Atwinwun (Secretary of State). Its ‘cloud collar’ is an adaptation of Thai theatrical costumes based on court dress. In turn, the Thai court had based this collar on Chinese formal robes. The gold and silver embroidery seen here was a technique adapted from Indian textiles, which were a popular luxury import in Myanmar.

The other one dates from the period when kings from central Myanmar repeatedly attacked the kingdom of Ayutthaya (central Thailand), beginning in the 1560s. In 1767 the Burmese destroyed Ayutthaya, and thousands of people were forcibly relocated to central Myanmar, including artists, musicians, and dancers. At the Burmese court, Thai theatre troupes’ performances were greatly admired. Their costumes were copied as a new type of formal court dress, like this robe which includes Thai-style swags on the front-piece and flourishes at the shoulder.

You can see the second of these, along with numerous other examples, on this Pinterest page.

Shan map

A stunning map of several Shan states from the 1880s made to assist the British in the process of drawing hard borders with China. The states of Selan (black) and Nam Kham (red) became part of British Burma, while China’s Yunnan province absorbed Mong Mao (yellow).

Shan Map (about 1889) Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

Modern green Burmese python

This iridescent ceramic serpent was produced by Soe Yu Nwe (born 1989), a Chinese-Myanmar artist, during her residency at the famous Jingdezhen kilns in China. The sculpture combines the artist’s Chinese zodiac sign with the Burmese belief that pythons are protectors of the Buddha, visually symbolising her unified identity.

Green Burmese Python (2018) © 2023 The Trustees of the British Museum courtesy of the artist, Soe Yu Nwe

A bust of General Aung San

General Aung San (1915 t o1947), was leader of the Burma Independence Army. He initially supported Japan to hasten independence from Britain, but after Japanese colonial intentions became clear, he agreed to fight with the Allies, provided talks for independence began after the war. Aung San is regarded as the founder of modern Burma, although he was assassinated by a political opponent just before independence.

Cartoons

In the colonial section is a selection of the kinds of crafts the British encouraged local craftspeople to make with a view to a steadily more international, globalising market, chairs and such. I was much more intrigued by a sequence of more modern works:

  • some watercolours by U Ba Nyan (1897–1945)
  • a poster advertising Sunlight Soap from an original painting by U Ba Nyan

And some Burmese cartoons! Apparently, cartooning became a highly appreciated art form in Burma in the early 20th century. Two of the main cartoonists were U Ba Gyan and the Muslim artist U Bagale, who satirised British and Burmese alike, while commenting on the unsettled period of the 1920s and 30s which saw rebellions against colonial rule, strikes and boycotts.

Find out more about Ba Gyan on Wikipedia.

Crocodile zither

The Mon people of lower Myanmar had strong cultural links with central Thailand, one expression of which is the crocodile zither. Although zithers exist across Southeast Asia, the reptilian shape is mostly found from lower Myanmar across to Cambodia. In Thailand and Cambodia, these zithers are highly stylised and abstracted. Only in lower Myanmar do they realistically resemble crocodiles. The zither would have had strings that ran the length of the crocodile’s back.

You can see it on the Royal Collection Trust website.

The exhibition features a one-minute audio loop of someone playing one of these zithers accompanied by a clapper and cymbals – the instruments that usually accompany it – performed by Saya Nai Kon Ha Ti from Duya Village, Ye Township, Mon State. To be perfectly honest, after about an hour in the presence of this endlessly looping 1-minute snippet, it began to get on my nerves.

Standing Buddha

Because of religious changes across the Buddhist world, the appearance, hand gestures and body positions of Burmese Buddha images shifted from about the 1840s. They became less elaborate and more naturalistic, and many were inlaid with coloured glass. Seated images in the gesture of enlightenment remained important, but new standing and reclining poses recalled other events in the Buddha’s life.

Standing Buddha (late nineteenth century) © 2023 The Trustees of the British Museum

Storage jar

The kingdom of Bago’s ports handled products like gems, teak, sugar, cotton, rice and cloth from across the region. By the 1500s, their trade networks had extended to Europe and Japan. Sturdy ceramic jars like this, produced for export in lower Myanmar, were used on trading ships, including Middle Eastern and European ones, to store goods, water and food. Major kilns making such stoneware were based at Mottama (Martaban) and Twante near Yangon.

Ceramic storage jar, Myanmar (1200 to 1500) © 2023 The Trustees of the British Museum

Thoughts

Challenging if not impossible to follow the convoluted pre-colonial history, but a fascinating and worthwhile overview of a country which remains a mystery to most of us in the West. Well done, British Museum.

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Posted by Simon on December 16, 2023

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The Square Egg and Other Sketches by Saki (1924)

Eight amusing short pieces by Hector Hugh Munro (pen name Saki) who was shot dead by a sniper while serving on the Western Front during the First World War. These last few pieces were collected and published posthumously in 1924.

The Square Egg: a badger’s eye view of the mud war in the trenches

The first few pages are a humorous description of life in the First World War trenches, whose main points can be summarised as:

  • snuffling around in the mud is like being a badger
  • though engaged in a titanic struggle against one of the greatest armies in the world, the average soldier thinks about the enemy relatively little
  • the subject which does consume the soldier’s every waking minute is the mud and how to avoid it; now the narrator knows what it’s like to be one of those animals you see at the zoo wallowing in muddy enclosures
  • he describes the nature of the many estaminets just behind the front lines, a cross between coffee houses and bars, and the way they always manage to have small children running round and getting in the way

At which point the text morphs into an anecdote about a chap he met in such an estaminet, a shifty French bloke who talked to him about eggs, specifically the way he’s noticed one of the many hens kept by his aunt lays eggs with the hint of angles. Consider how, through a programme of selective breeding, one could eventually create hens which produce only square eggs! Well, this guy claims to have done just that!! (Saki’s narrator makes wry, sardonic references under his breath).

The shifty Frenchie then explains how he had set up a thriving square-egg business but then came the war, he has been sent to the Front and his aunt is now selling his square eggs without any special consideration about keeping the breeding line secure and keeping the money she owes him. Therefore he has decided to take her to court to stop her, but the law is so expensive, monsieur. So, could Saki please lend him a small sum towards his legal fees, 80 francs should do it! The whole thing is, in other words, a scam.

This was a mildly amusing story which confirmed my sense of how many Saki’ stories are set on farms or involve farmyard animals.

Birds of the Western Front

These texts written at the Front highlight, almost exaggerate, Saki’s characteristic upper class nonchalance; everything is cast into an ironical manner which, for example, amuses itself by making elaborate and ironic comparisons. Thus, since the war began:

Rats and mice have mobilized and swarmed into the fighting line, and there has been a partial mobilization of owls, particularly barn owls, following in the wake of the mice, and making laudable efforts to thin out their numbers. What success attends their hunting one cannot estimate; there are always sufficient mice left over to populate one’s dug-out and make a parade-ground and race-course of one’s face at night.

Crows and rooks have become habituated to shellfire and machine guns. Drolly, Saki describes observing a pair of crows fighting a pair of sparrowhawks while above them the same number of English and German airplanes were fighting. Nature red in tooth and claw. He observes that magpies have been bereft of the poplar trees they used to love to nest in, and so on with further observations about buzzards, kestrels, larks and a hen-chaffinch which he noticed unaccountably hanging around a wrecked woodland, even during the most intense bombardment.

He ends with the sardonic observation that English gamekeepers as a breed believe their precious gamebirds and pheasants and whatnot must be protected from the slightest disturbance. They should come to the Western Front and learn how hardy birds are in face of even the most ruinous disruption.

The Gala Programme: an unrecorded episode in Roman history

The scene shifts abruptly from the present war, jumping back in time 2,000 years to ancient Rome.

It is the birthday of the Roman Emperor Placidus Superbus who has arrived at the Circus Maximus to enjoy the games, but just as the first entertainment is about to begin – a thrilling chariot race – hundreds of shouting women are lowered by ropes into the track and completely prevent the race taking place.

‘Who are these furies?’ the emperor demands. ‘The dreaded Suffragetae,’ his miserable Master of Ceremonies explains. The emperor has a brainwave. ‘Skip the chariot race,’ he tells the MC, ‘let’s go straight to part two, the combat of wild animals.’ And so a horde of beasts are let loose among the protesting women, to really very entertaining effect :).

Takes its place with the other 3 or 4 Saki stories entirely dedicated to commenting on / ridiculing the suffragettes.

The Infernal Parliament

Bavton Bidderdale (a typically Sakian preposterous name) dies, but the medical authorities contest the exact cause of death etc and so, although his soul has gone down to hell, the officials there keep it in a kind of limbo until the paperwork is sorted out.

While he’s waiting, the officials offer to show him round and suggest taking a tour of the infernal Parliament, a relatively new innovation. As he arrives the infernal Parliament is having a debate to lodge a formal complaint with the human race for describing events or activities as ‘devilish’ or ‘fiendish’ when they are, in fact, nothing of the sort, but entirely human.

Other details obviously mock contemporary parliamentary debates (and, in the final passage, mock a living playwright, possibly George Bernard Shaw) but these references are lost without some kind of annotation. You can see the comic intention but it would have more bite if included in my dream idea of an ‘Annotated Saki’.

The Achievement of the Cat

A wonderfully suave and ironical tribute to the qualities of the domestic cat:

It is, indeed, no small triumph to have combined the untrammelled liberty of primeval savagery with the luxury which only a highly developed civilization can command; to be lapped in the soft stuffs that commerce has gathered from the far ends of the world; to bask in the warmth that labour and industry have dragged from the bowels of the earth; to banquet on the dainties that wealth has bespoken for its table, and withal to be a free son of nature, a mighty hunter, a spiller of life-blood. This is the victory of the cat.

The Old Town of Pskoff

Not a story at all, but a straightforward description of how this city in west Russia, now referred to as Pskov, represents a kinder, quainter, more colourful and older Russia than the unpleasantly nouveau riche style of Petersburg. Sounds like it’s based on a real visit and the real views of Hector Munro who had been a foreign correspondent in Russia and, indeed, wrote a history of it.

Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business

The last appearance of Clovis Sangrail, the witty, ironic, ‘languidly malicious’ young man who embodies key aspects of Saki’s droll, langorous, ironic humour.

This one is a short squib, a return to the format of his early Reginald ‘stories’, and amounts simply to a 2-page speech by Clovis, declaiming, fairly predictably, against the so-called Romance of business. In his view, business is deadly dull, which is why all the best adventures have been written about the young men who ran away from it:

The romance has all been the other way, with the idle apprentice, the truant, the runaway, the individual who couldn’t be bothered with figures and book-keeping and left business to look after itself.

The Comments of Moung Ka

Moung Ka is a wise man who lives by the banks of the River Irrawaddy (whichm, upon looking it up, I discover is the longest river in modern Burma).

The opening description of the landscape and birds where Moung Ka lives is a final reminder that, although people routinely describe Saki as a deliciously malicious critic of Edwardian upper class society, he was also obsessed with animals, and wrote a lot of vivid descriptions of landscapes and the wild animals living in them. A collection of excerpts titled ‘Saki’s nature and animal writing’ would be surprisingly extensive.

In the tall reed growth by the riverside grazing buffaloes showed in patches of dark slaty blue, like plums fallen amid long grass, and in the tamarind trees that shaded Moung Ka’s house the crows, restless, raucous-throated, and much-too-many, kept up their incessant afternoon din, saying over and over again all the things that crows have said since there were crows to say them.

Anyway, the story, such as it is, is another political satire. Old Moung Ka reads the paper which is brought up the river and then interprets its contents for his village followers. He comments on two related pieces of news. The recently announced division of Bengal by the (British-run) government of India has been cancelled. In 1905 Lord Curzon divided Bengal along sectarian lines, into a Hindu and Muslim province. The policy was a disaster, leading to an outburst of terrorism and sectarian violence and so was reversed in 1911. This is the news Moung Ka reads out to his followers.

And contrasts with the fact that the newspaper tells him that the United Kingdom itself is about to be partitioned. It isn’t explained what he means so it took me a moment to realise he must have been referring to the granting to Ireland of home rule, which led to vehement protests from Protestant Ulster and a serious crisis which dominated Edwardian politics from 1911 up to the outbreak of the Great War.

The very last joke in this, Saki’s very last published story, is a satirical and political one. Earlier Moung Ka had explained to his followers that Britain is what is called a Democracy. One of the followers doesn’t understand how come, if Britain is a Democracy, it can enact such a big and impactful decision  (the partitioning of Ireland) without consulting its people.

Moung Ka clarifies – and this, one imagines, is the point of the whole ‘story’ – that he didn’t say Britain was a democracy; he said Britain is what is called a democracy. The implication being that its alleged democracy is in fact a sham. The implication being that Saki is a Unionist and considers the prolonged political haggling about granting Ireland independence to be squalid and destructive.

There’s plenty of meat in this short text to chew over, it confirmed my sense of Saki as an unrepentant Unionist and conservative and anti-suffragette reactionary, and review in my mind the reactionary views which crop up periodically through the short stories and underpin the entire novel When William Came.

Then again, the world is more full than ever before of division, dispute and angry argument. For my part, I like to take leave of this long journey through Saki’s complete works by remembering the grazing water buffalo like plums fallen amid long grass, and the eternal crows in the tamarind trees.

Saki’s works

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by Simon on July 7, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 7, 2021

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Sir Stamford Raffles: collecting in Southeast Asia 1811 to 1824 @ the British Museum

As it is in just one room upstairs at the back of the British Museum, and is FREE, I thought this would be a relatively light and small exhibition to enjoy, but I was wrong. It’s a surprisingly packed exhibition which gives a panoramic view of Indonesian, and particularly Javanese, culture – at least through the eyes of one of its earliest European collectors.

Puppet of the comic character Sabda Palon, one of Damarwulan’s servants (Central Java, probably Surakarta, 1700s) © Trustees of the British Museum

Stamford Raffles, a potted biography

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781 to 1826) started working for the East India Company when he was 14, and spent most of his life as an East India Company official in Southeast Asia. In 1811 he was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Java when the British seized it from the Dutch, but in 1815, when we gave it back to the Dutch at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, he was forced to stand down and returned to England.

Raffles arrived back in Britain with a substantial collection, almost 450 puppets, over 700 coins, more than 350 drawings, over 130 masks, more than 120 small metal sculptures and five small stone sculptures. His collection quickly became the talk of academic London and Raffles settled down to write what became a massive two-volume History of Java. On its publication in 1817 he dedicated it to the Prince Regent and was rewarded with a knighthood. That’s how to make friends and influence people!

Portrait of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles by James Thompson (1824)

In 1817 Raffles went back out East when he was chosen to be Lieutenant-Governor of Bengkulu (Bencoolen), in southwest Sumatra, where he served until 1824. It was during this period that he took advantage of a succession dispute between local rulers to seize the small village of Singapore, as the perfect location for a trading post for the British East India Company half way between India and China.

This ‘foundation’ of Singapore took place in 1819, and this explains why this exhibition has been mounted – indirectly to mark the bicentennary of what went on to become one of the most vibrant commercial cities in the world.

Post-imperial reappraisal

But, as you might expect of any leading figure in the British Empire, Raffles is nowadays frowned on by academics, by historians and curators (not to mention the inhabitants of Java and Indonesia, or those who are interested enough in their history to have heard of him).

Raffles has become, in other words, a controversial figure, one of thousands of similar controversial imperial figures, once revered in their European homelands for deeds of derring-do and seizing territory from foreigners – now undergoing reappraisal from academics and curators who are, because of their positions, more than usually aware of the need for respect and diversity in our modern multicultural societies.

A demon, Buta Kimul, Cirebon, Western Java, late 1700s to early 1800s

The Raffles collection

Anyway, the exhibition explains that Raffles was an avid collector of objects from the region, particularly from Java but also from China, Sumatra (now part of Indonesia), India, Burma (Myanmar) and Siam (Thailand). He had the true collector mentality, he was fascinated with bargaining and bartering for obscure objects, and then categorising them and arranging them.

Eventually he accumulated some 2,000 objects which provide us with a vital record of the art and court cultures of Java from approximately the 7th century to the early 19th century.

This exhibition presents the cream of Raffles’ personal collection and adds some loan objects from the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, seen here in the UK for the first time. So it’s a collaborative exhibition and will transfer to the Singapore museum next year.

The exhibition is divided up into quite a few sub-sections, each devoted to a specific type of artefact. These include:

  • Hindu and antiquities
  • bronze Buddhas and bodhisattvas
  • protective amulets
  • theatrical puppets
  • theatrical masks
  • musical instruments
  • stone sculptures
  • metal sculptures

In all there are 130 objects, many of them very beautiful. I think the curator was wise to begin with a dramatic display of theatrical face masks and stick puppets from across Java, since these are by far the most colourful and attractive objects.

Javanese theatre masks

We learn that Java and the nearby islands were home to a combination of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, until Islam arrived around 1400. This explains the number of Hindu and Buddhist statues on display.

It also explains another particular thread of Raffles’s collection, which was the organised visits he paid to a series of famous Hindu and Buddhist archaeological sites. Each of these is given its own section in the display cabinets, with a label explaining its location (and a map), a photo of the modern site, and then examples of drawings made at the locations. Often these drawings are not by him; he bought them off Dutch antiquarians who had visited and sketched the various sites.

To be honest, I found these worthy but a bit boring – one for the specialist in the religious architecture of medieval Java, maybe.

Pair of drawings showing a temple covered in foliage (right), and as imagined in a complete state (left), with commentary by G. P. Baker. H. C. Cornelius (1774–c.1833), around 1807

The curator makes the interesting point that what’s interesting about many of these drawings is the way they have been ‘beautified’ i.e. touched up to appeal to the late-eighteenth century taste for ruins, especially ruined temples, churches etc. Most of the buildings remain today and don’t look remotely as weathered and picturesque as these stylish drawings.

Raffles’ colonial motivation

Raffles had an ulterior motive for making such an extensive collection. The British had seized Java from the Dutch when the latter allied with Napoleon during the Napoleonic Wars. However, we gave it back to the Dutch with the peace of 1815, but Raffles thought this was a mistake. He thought Indonesia ought to be a British colony. According to the curator this was based not only on straightforward mercantile considerations, but also on a particular view of history.

Raffles subscribed to one of the many theories of history floating around during the Enlightenment, in his case the view that civilisations rise and fall in a continual ebbing and flowing.

He thought the impressive ruins which he visited, and the highly crafted artifacts which he bought, showed that Java had once had a great civilisation… and could do so once again, if carefully tutored and supported by a benevolent patron, namely the British.

Therefore Raffles made his extensive collection, at least in part, to persuade his British masters that the island was worth taking over as a British protectorate. Same goes for the enormous two-volume History of Java which contains a monumental survey and history of the island state. In it Raffles provides a comprehensive ethnographic description of the island’s society, describing its economy, trade, languages and dialects, and religious and social customs, together with a detailed history of the island, including a discussion of the introduction of Islam.

He was a true collector and early ethnographer, but also a man of his time and a thorough colonialist. This exhibition is a truly fascinating insight, less into the man, than into the history of the place whose artifacts and objects he collected so assiduously.

Finally, from the whole collection of masks and puppets and statues and swords and ceramics and drawings, I thought by far the most winning object was one of the ‘additional’ objects on loan to the exhibition and not actually collected by Raffles himself, but from a much later generation – this wonderfully intricate model ship made entirely out of cloves!

Model boat from the Maluku islands, made of cloves and fibre, late 19th century

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Other British Museum exhibitions

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by Simon on November 12, 2019  •  Permalink
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Ring of Steel by Alexander Watson (2014) and multi-ethnic societies

Mutual suspicion, brinkmanship, arrogance, belligerence and, above all fear were rife in the halls of power across Europe in the summer of 1914. (p.8)

I’m very surprised that this book won the ‘2014 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History’ and the ‘Society of Military History 2015 Distinguished Book Award’ because it is not really a military history at all.

It’s certainly an epic book – 788 pages, if you include the 118 pages of notes and 63 pages of bibliography – and it gives an impressively thorough account of the origins, development and conclusion of the First World War, as seen from the point of view of the politicians, military leaders and people of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

More social than military history

But I found it much more of a sociological and economic history of the impact of war on German and Austro-Hungarian society, than a narrative of military engagements.

Watson gives a broad outline of the German invasion of Belgium and northern France, but there are no maps and no description of any of the vital battles, of the Marne or Aisnes or Arras or Ypres. Instead he spends more time describing the impact on Belgian society of the burning of villages and the atrocities carried out by the Germans – in retaliation for what they claimed were guerrilla and francs-tireurs (free-shooter) attacks by civilian snipers.

I was specifically hoping to learn more about the famous three-week-long battle of Tannenberg between Germany and Russia on the Eastern Front, but there is no account of it at all in this book.

Instead Watson gives a detailed description of the impact on society in Galicia and East Prussia of the ruinous and repressive Russian advance. Little or nothing about the fighting, but a mass of detail about the impact on individual villages, towns and cities of being subject to Russian military administration and violence, and a lot about the impact of war on the region’s simmering ethnic tensions. I hadn’t realised that the Russians, given half a chance, carried out as many atrocities (i.e. massacring civilians) and far more forced movements of population, than the Germans did.

Watson does, it is true, devote some pages to the epic battle of Verdun (pp. 293-300) and to the Battle of the Somme (pp. 310-326), but it’s not what I’d call a military description. There are, for example no maps of either battlefield. In fact there are no battlefield maps – maps showing the location of a battle and the deployment of opposing forces – anywhere at all in the book.

Instead, what you do get is lots of graphs and diagrams describing the social and economic impact of war – showing things like ‘Crime rates in Germany 1913-18’, ‘Free meals dispensed at Viennese soup kitchens 1914-18’, ‘German psychiatric casualties in the First and Second Armies 1914-18’ (p.297) and so on. Social history.

Longer than the accounts of Verdun and the Somme put together is his chapter about the food shortages which began to be felt soon after the war started and reached catastrophic depths during the ‘Turnip Winter’ of 1916-17. These shortages were caused by the British naval blockade (itself, as Watson points out, of dubious legality under international law), but also due to the intrinsic shortcomings of German and Austro-Hungarian agriculture, compounded by government inefficiency, and corruption (all described in immense detail on pages 330-374).

So there’s more about food shortages than about battles. Maybe, in the long run, the starvation was more decisive. Maybe Watson would argue that there are hundreds of books devoted to Verdun and the Somme, whereas the nitty-gritty of the food shortages – much more important in eventually forcing the Central Powers to their knees – is something you rarely come across in British texts. He certainly gives a fascinating, thorough and harrowing account.

But it’s not military history. It’s social and economic history.

A lot later in the book Watson gives a gripping account of the German offensive of spring 1918, and then the Allied counter-offensive from July 1918 which ended up bringing the Central Powers to the negotiating table.

But in both instances it’s a very high-level overview, and he only gives enough detail to explain (fascinatingly) why the German offensive failed and the Allied one succeeded – because his real motivation, the meat of his analysis, is the social and political impact of the military failure on German and Austrian society.

Absence of smaller campaigns

Something else I found disappointing about the book was his neglect of military campaigns even a little outside his main concern with German and Austro-Hungarian society.

He gives a thrilling account of the initial Austrian attack on Serbia – which was, after all, the trigger for the whole war – and how the Austrians were, very amusingly, repelled back to their starting points.

But thereafter Serbia is more or less forgotten about and the fact that Serbia was later successfully invaded is skated over in a sentence. Similarly, although the entry of Italy into the war is mentioned, none of the actual fighting between Austria and Italy is described. There is only one reference to Romania being successfully occupied, and nothing at all about Bulgaria until a passing mention of her capitulation in 1918.

I had been hoping that the book would give an account of the First World War in the East, away from the oft-told story of the Western Front: the war in Poland and Galicia and the Baltic States he does cover, but in south-eastern Europe nothing.

The text – as the title, after all, indicates – is pretty ruthlessly focused on the military capabilities, mobilisation, economy and society of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Ethnic tension

If there’s one theme which does emerge very clearly from this very long book it is the centrality of ethnic and nationalist divisions in the Central Powers themselves, and in the way they treated their conquered foes.

Throughout its examination of the impact of war on German and Austro-Hungarian society – on employment, women’s roles, propaganda, agriculture and industry, popular culture and so on – the book continually reverts to an examination of the ethnic and nationalist fracture lines which ran through these two states.

For example, in the food chapter, there are not only radical differences in the way the German and Austro-Hungarian authorities dealt with the crisis (the effectiveness of different rationing schemes, and so on) but we are shown how different national regions, particularly of Austria-Hungary, refused to co-operate with each other: for example, rural Hungary refusing to share its food with urban Austria.

What emerges, through repeated description and analysis, is the very different ethnic and nationalist nature of the two empires.

Germany

Germany was an ethnically homogeneous state, made up overwhelmingly of German-speaking ethnic Germans. Therefore the fractures – the divisions which total war opened up – tended to take place along class lines. Before the war the Social Democrat Party (much more left-wing than its name suggests) had been the biggest socialist party in Europe, heir to the legacy of Karl Marx which was, admittedly, much debated and squabbled over. However, when war came, Watson shows how, in a hundred different ways, German society closed ranks in a patriotic display of unity so that the huge and powerful SDP, after some debate, rejected its pacifist wing and united with all the other parties in the Reichstag in voting for the war credits which the Chancellor asked for.

Watson says contemporary Germans called this the Burgfrieden spirit of the time, meaning literally ‘castle peace politics’. In effect it meant a political policy of ‘party truce’, all parties rallying to the patriotic cause, trades unions agreeing not to strike, socialist parties suspending their campaign to bring down capitalism, and so on. All reinforced by the sense that the Germans were encircled by enemies and must all pull together.

Typical of Watson’s social-history approach to all this is his account of the phenomenon of Liebesgaben or ‘love gifts’ (pp.211-214), the hundreds of thousands of socks and gloves and scarves knitted and sent to men at the front by the nation’s womenfolk, and the role played by children in war charities and in some war work.

He has three or four pages about the distinctive development of ‘nail sculptures’, figures of soldiers or wartime leaders into which all citizens in a town were encouraged to hammer a nail while making a donation to war funds. Soon every town and city had these nail figures, focuses of patriotic feeling and fundraising (pp. 221-225).

Watson is much more interested by the impact of war on the home front than by military campaigns.

Austria-Hungary

The spirit of unity which brought Germany together contrasts drastically with the collapse along ethnic lines of Austria-Hungary, the pressures which drove the peoples of the empire apart.

The Empire was created as a result of the Compromise of 1867 by which the Austrians had one political arrangement, the Hungarians a completely different one, and a whole host of lesser ethnicities and identities (the Czechs, and Poles in the north, the Serbs and Greeks and Croats and Bosnians in the troublesome south) jostled for recognition and power for their own constituencies.

Watson’s introductory chapters give a powerful sense of the fear and anxiety stalking the corridors of power in the Austro-Hungarian Empire well before the war began. This fear and anxiety were caused by the succession of political and military crises of the Edwardian period – the Bosnia Crisis of 1908, the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1911 and 1912, the rising voices of nationalism among Czechs in the north and Poles in the East.

To really understand the fear of the ruling class you have to grasp that in 1914 there was a very clear league table of empires – with Britain at the top followed by France and Germany. The rulers of Austria-Hungary were petrified that the collapse and secession of any part of their heterogenous empire would relegate them to the second division of empires (as were the rulers of Russia, as well).

And everybody knew what happened to an empire on the slide: they had before them the examples of the disintegrating Ottoman and powerless Chinese empires, which were condemned to humiliation and impotence by the Great Powers. Austria-Hungary’s rulers would do anything to avoid that fate.

But Watson shows how, as soon as war broke out, the empire instead of pulling together, as Germany had, began dividing and splitting into its component parts. Vienna was forced to cede control of large regions of the empire to the local governments which were best placed to mobilise the war effort among their own peoples.

This tended to have two consequences:

  1. One was to encourage nationalism and the rise of nationalist leaders in these areas (it was via wartime leadership of the Polish Legions, a force encouraged by Vienna, that Józef Piłsudski consolidated power and the authority which would enable him to establish an independent Poland in 1918, and successfully defend its borders against Russian invasion in 1920, before becoming Poland’s strongman in the interwar period).
  2. The second was to encourage inter-ethnic tension and violence.

The difference between homegeneous Germany and heterogeneous Austria-Hungary is exemplified in the respective nations’ responses to refugees. In Germany, the 200,000 or so refugees from Russia’s blood-thirsty invasion of East Prussia were distributed around the country and welcomed into homes and communities all over the Reich. They were recipients of charity from a popular refugee fund which raised millions of marks for them. Even when the refugees were in fact Polish-speaking or Lithuanians, they were still treated first and foremost as Germans and all received as loyal members of the Fatherland (pp. 178-181).

Compare and contrast the German experience with the bitter resentment which greeted refugees from the Russian invasion of the Austro-Hungarian border region of Galicia. When some 1 million refugees from Galicia were distributed round the rest of the empire, the native Hungarians, Austrians or Czechs all resented having large number of Poles, Ruthenians and, above all, Jewish, refugees imposed on their communities. There was resentment and outbreaks of anti-refugee violence.

The refugee crisis was just one of the ways in which the war drove the nationalities making up the Austro-Hungarian empire further apart (pp. 198-206).

Two years ago I read and was appalled by Timothy Snyder’s book, Bloodlands, which describes the seemingly endless ethnic cleansing and intercommunal massacres, pogroms and genocides which took place in the area between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s.

Watson’s book shows how many of these tensions existed well before the First World War – in the Balkans they went back centuries – but that it was the massive pan-European conflict which lifted the lid, which authorised violence on an unprecedented scale, and laid the seeds for irreconcilable hatreds, particularly between Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians and Jews.

The perils of multi-ethnic societies

Although I bet Watson is a fully paid-up liberal (and his book makes occasional gestures towards the issue of ‘gender’, one of the must-have topics which all contemporary humanities books have to include), nonetheless the net effect of these often harrowing 566 pages of text is to make the reader very nervous about the idea of a multinational country.

1. Austria-Hungary was a rainbow nation of ethnicities and, under pressure, it collapsed into feuding and fighting nationalities.

2. Russia, as soon as it invaded East Prussia and Galicia, began carrying out atrocities against entire ethnic groups classified as traitors or subversives, hanging entire villages full of Ukrainians or Ruthenians, massacring Jewish populations.

3. The to and fro of battle lines in the Balkans allowed invading forces to decimate villages and populations of rival ethnic groups who they considered dangerous or treacherous.

Austro-Hungarian troops hanging unarmed Serbian civilians (1915)

Austro-Hungarian troops hanging unarmed Serbian civilians (1915) No doubt ‘spies’ and ‘saboteurs’

In other words, everywhere that you had a mix of ethnicities in a society put under pressure, you got voices raised blaming ‘the other’, blaming whichever minority group comes to hand, for the catastrophe which was overtaking them.

Unable to accept the objective truth that their armies and military commanders were simply not up to winning the war, the so-called intelligentsia of Austria-Hungary, especially right-wing newspapers, magazines, writers and politicians, declared that the only reason they were losing must be due to the sabotage and treachery of traitors, spies, saboteurs and entire ethnic groups, who were promptly declared ‘enemies of the state’.

Just who was blamed depended on which small powerless group was ready to hand, but the Jews tended to be a minority wherever they found themselves, and so were subjected to an increasing chorus of denunciation throughout the empire.

Ring of Steel is a terrible indictment of the primitive xenophobia and bloodlust of human nature. But it is also a warning against the phenomenon that, in my opinion, has been ignored by generations of liberal politicians and opinion-formers in the West.

For several generations we have been told by all official sources of information, government, ministries, and all the media, that importing large groups of foreigners can only be a good thing, which ‘enriches’ our rainbow societies. Maybe, at innumerable levels, it does.

But if you import several million ‘foreigners’, with different coloured skins, different languages, cultures and religions into Western Europe – and then place the societies of the West under great economic and social strain thanks to an epic crash of the financial system, well..

You get the rise of right-wing, sometimes very right-wing, nationalist parties – in Russia, in Poland, in Hungary, in Germany, Sweden and Denmark, in Italy, in France, in Britain and America – all demanding a return to traditional values and ethnic solidarity.

I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, I’m just saying the evidence seems to be that human beings are like this. This is what we do. You and I may both wish it wasn’t so, but it is so.

In fact I’d have thought this was one of the main lessons of history. You can’t look at the mass destruction of the Napoleonic Wars and say, ‘Well, at least we’re not like that any more’. You can’t look at the appalling suffering created by industrialisation and say, ‘Well, at least we’re not like that any more’. You can’t look at the mind-blowing racist attitudes I’ve been reading about in the American Civil War and say, ‘Well, at least we’re not like that any more’. You can’t look at the mad outbreak of violence of the First World War and the stubborn refusal to give in which led to over ten million men being slaughtered and say, ‘Well, at least we’re not like that any more’. You can’t look at the Holocaust and say, ‘Well, at least we’re not like that any more’.

We cannot be confident that human nature has changed at all in the intervening years.

In just the last twenty years we have all witnessed the savagery of the wars in former Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide, the genocide in Darfur, the 9/11 attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the failure of the Arab Springs and the civil wars in Syria and Libya, the rise of ISIS, the war in Yemen, the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, renewed civil war in Sudan and now the war in Ukraine.

If all these conflicts prove anything, they prove that —

WE ARE STILL LIKE THAT

We are just like that. Nothing has changed. Given half a chance, given enough deprivation, poverty and fear, human beings in any continent of the world will lash out in irrational violence which quickly becomes total, genocidal, scorched earth, mass destruction.

In the West, in Britain, France, Germany or America, we like to think we are different. That is just a form of racism. In my opinion, we are not intrinsically different at all. We are just protected by an enormous buffer of wealth and consumer goods from having to confront our basest nature. The majority of the populations in all the Western nations are well off enough not to want, or to allow, any kind of really ethnically divisive politics or inter-ethnic violence to take hold.

Or are they?

Because creating multi-ethnic societies has created the potential for serious social stress to exacerbate racial, ethnic and nationalist dividing lines which didn’t previously exist. When I was growing up there was no such thing as ‘Islamophobia’ in Britain. 40 years later there are some 2.8 million Muslims in Britain, some 5% of the population – and I read about people being accused of ‘Islamophobia’, or Muslims claiming unfair discrimination or treatment in the media, almost every day.

It’s not as if we didn’t know the risks. I lived my entire life in the shadow of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland which were based entirely on ethnic or communal hatred. And now not a day passes without a newspaper article bewailing how Brexit might end the Good Friday Agreement and bring back the men of violence. Is the peace between the ethnic groups in Northern Ireland really that fragile? Apparently so. But British governments and the mainland population have always had an uncanny ability to sweep Ulster under the carpet and pretend it’s not actually part of the UK. To turn our backs on 40 years of bombings and assassinations, to pretend that it all, somehow, wasn’t actually happening in Britain. Not the real Britain, the Britain that counts. But it was.

Anyway, here we are. Over the past 40 years or so, politicians and opinion makers from all parties across the Western world have made this multicultural bed and now we’re all going to have to lie in it, disruptive and troubled though it is likely to be for the foreseeable future.

Conclusion

Although it certainly includes lots of detail about the how the societies of the Central Powers were mobilised and motivated to wage total war, and enough about the military campaigns to explain their impact on the home front, overall Watson’s book is not really a military history of the Central Powers at war, but much more a social and economic history of the impact of the war on the two empires of its title.

And in the many, many places where he describes ethnic and nationalist tensions breaking out into unspeakable violence, again and again, all over central and eastern Europe, Watson’s book – no doubt completely contrary to his intentions – can very easily be read as a profound historical argument against the notion of a multicultural, multi-ethnic society.

First World War reviews

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by Simon on September 13, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Communism, European History, France, Great War, History, Politics, Russia, War
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Posted by Simon on September 13, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/ring-of-steel-alexander-watson-2/