rule through “traditional rulers” in peripheral areas (e.g., the Shan States, the
Outer Islands) where natural resource extraction predominated. Both, moreover, were “plural societies” in which the emerging market economies of the
core zones were strictly segmented along ethnic lines, with segregated and stigmatized immigrant minority groups—Chettiar “Indians” and largely Hokkienspeaking “Chinese”—serving as “pariah capitalist” merchants, moneylenders,
and middlemen between Western firms and the indigenous peasantry.