About this Event
Speaker: Dr Jonathan Saha, Associate Professor of South Asian History at Durham University.
The Hsaya San Rebellion swept through colonial Myanmar between 1930 and 1932. It took eighteen months and over seven-thousand Indian Army troops to suppress. While it was triggered by acute pressures in the agrarian economy compounded by a global fall in rice prices, the violence of the revolt cannot be fully explained by this crisis alone. Bands of peasant rebels massacred Indians; not only moneylenders but cattle-herders, who were themselves a precarious and marginal rural community. These massacres are not easy to interpret. Revisiting the insurgency through the growing literature on racial capitalism provides a framework for understanding peasants’ racialized violence.
About the speaker
Jonathan Saha is Associate Professor of South Asian History at Durham University. His research focusses on the history of British imperialism in Myanmar (Burma) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the history of corruption, imperial masculinity, crime, medicine, and psychiatry. He is the author of Law, Disorder and the Colonial State (Palgrave, 2013), and Colonizing Animals: Interspecies Empire in Myanmar (Cambridge, 2021), and has been published in the American Historical Review. He is also a member of the editorial collective for History Workshop Journal and an editor for Bloomsbury’s Empire’s Other Histories series.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Dockrill Room (K6.07), Department of War Studies, King's College London, Strand, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00