The Annexation of Burma: History, Order, and the Legal Enclosure of the World

This dissertation examines Britain's 1886 annexation of Burma, the "fact" upon which virtually all historical accounts of modern Burma are built, by positioning the decision to declare annexation within the institutional setting of late nineteenth-century international law and its attendant concerns of order and disorder. Annexation, therefore, was both an assertion of order and an attempt to negate the prior "traditional order"; yet the concrete terms of the new colonial order—whether in trade, borders, interstate relations, or administration—remained unstable for years after the original declaration. This dissertation shows how the "fact" of annexation achieved relative stability only by the end of the century and, further, how the concerns historically enfolded within this "fact" return to the foreground during later moments of social disorder.