INTRODUCTION
This is a study of the intermingled tribes in
one administrative district in the Northern Shan
States of Burma, now Myanmar, covering the
Mongmit and Tawngpeng States and the
Kodaung Hill Tracts gleaned from the surviving
monthly reports of the British administrator to
the Resident, Northern Shan States at Lashio in
the two years prior to Burmese political
independence(Bristol Museum Records).
It endeavours to show that the most
influential factors in this political scene was the
history of the Burmese relationships with the
frontier peoples antedating the British occupation
accompanied by the Shan accommodation to and
use of Kachin bellicosity, the British partial
misunderstanding of these inter-tribal
relationships and how these balances were upset
by the Japanese invasion. The phrase ‘divide and
rule’ would seem to be a facile explanation of a
situation better rephrased as ‘ we want to be
divided under your rule’.
In the final period of British suzerainty, the
British administrator was possibly a tolerated
pawn in Kachin thinking rather than a tool of nonexistent
British post-Imperial designs.