Blood, Dreams and Gold: The Changing Face of Burma.

AuthorTurnell, Sean
PositionBook review

Blood, Dreams and Gold: The Changing Face of Burma. By Richard Cockett. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Hardcover: 275pp.

Blood, Dreams and Gold is a history of modern Burma/Myanmar, a primer on the country's political and economic present, and a guide for thinking about its likely future. Timely, accessible, critical and insightful, it is the best of all the recent monographs on Myanmar. Richard Cockett was the Southeast Asia correspondent for the The Economist from 2010 to 2014, and the book has that breezy self-confidence, yet seriousness of purpose, of that newspaper. Accordingly, it is a very agreeable read.

About half of Blood, Dreams and Gold is an account of the country's modern history. Beginning at the dawn of the colonial era, and the incorporation of Burma into the British empire as a consequence of (Randolph) "Churchill's great adventure", the book acknowledges the "bad hand" dealt by British colonialists, while asserting that independent Burma's subsequent decline was nevertheless home-grown, an act of "self-immolation" (p. xi).

A motif running throughout the book is the country's ethnic diversity, too often the domain of conflict, exploitation, bitter relations and cynical wedge politics, but at times also a story of promise, hope, and of a country with the "remnants of what used to be one of the most cosmopolitan societies in the world" (p. 16). These remnants include the decaying grandeur of Yangon's old colonial buildings, the physical manifestation of the commercial diversity left by the British. As Cockett notes, this commercial cosmopolitanism was derided by the famed colonial official, anthropologist and later adviser to the government of independent Burma, J.S. Furnivall, as a "plural society". A largely positive label nowadays, Furnivall's meaning was of a society in which individuals "do not combine", but:

Each group holds by its own religion, its own culture and language, its own ideas and ways. As individuals they meet, but only in the market-place, in buying and selling. There is a plural society, with different sections of the community living side by side but separately ... (p. 25). In contrast to Furnivall's (antediluvian) analysis, Cockett posits that Burma's ethnic diversity was the sinew of its past economic strength, and he details the way in which the suppression of this diversity brought about the country's economic undoing. The 1962 coup that installed General Ne Win brought with it...

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