University of Nottingham Malaysia
University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute-Malaysia (UoNARI-M)
     
  

A Romance of Industry

Date(s)
30th January 2019
Contact
For more information on the event, kindly e-mail Gaik Cheng Khoo.
Description
Mining, Migration, and the Company Town in British Burma, 1906-1935

This paper, adapted from my dissertation entitled A Burmese Wonderland: British World Mining and the Making of Colonial Burma, focuses on the Burma Corporation, a transnational mining company located in Burma’s Northern Shan States during the late colonial period. I argue that this company, which by the 1920s had become one of the largest industrial mining enterprises in the world, provides a unique vantage point to explore the complexity of Britain’s Empire during the early twentieth century. Founded and managed by foreigners from the United States, Canada, and Australia, and primarily staffed by migrant laborers from China, Nepal, and India, my paper examines how an international commercial firm like the Burma Corporation created a company town on the edge of Britain’s Empire and, in doing so, became integral to the workings of the colonial state.

Although reporters and visiting colonial officials labeled the mining operations a “romance of industry” owing to its large and diverse workforce and the company’s construction of hospitals, schools, and modern sanitation, this paper particularly examines why migrant workers traveled to the mine and how, over time, they crafted their own vision of a company town. With upwards of 20,000 migrant workers employed on site annually at its peak of operations, this paper highlights how the operations at Bawdwin became a nexus of migration between South, Southeast, and East Asia during the early twentieth century, and the relationship these workers had with the company and the British colonial state at this time.

Details
Date: 30 January 2019, Wednesday
Time: 16:00 to 17:30
Venue: EA28
              University of Nottingham Malaysia
              Jalan Broga 43500 Semenyih Selangor Darul Ehsan

About the speaker:
David Baillargeon is an ERC Research Fellow in the European Research Council-funded Cultures of Occupation in Twentieth Century Asia (COTCA) project at the University of Nottingham. David completed his PhD in Modern British History from the University of California – Santa Barbara in 2018. His dissertation, entitled A Burmese Wonderland: British World Mining and the Making of Colonial Burma, focuses on the Burma Corporation, a transnational mining corporation whose operations were located in the Northern Shan States of British Burma during the early twentieth century. The dissertation, which utilises a place-based global historical approach, reveals how transnational and global business networks were critical to the expansion and administration of the British Empire during the late colonial period. His work has been supported by a Mellon Fellowship from the Institute of Historical Research in London, a Dissertation Fellowship from the University of California Center for New Racial Studies, and a Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Council for European Studies. Recent publications include an article in the journal Slavery & Abolition (September 2018) and a book chapter in the edited volume, Global Racialty: Empire, PostColoniality, Decoloniality (Routledge, 2019).

University of Nottingham Malaysia

Jalan Broga, 43500 Semenyih
Selangor Darul Ehsan
Malaysia

telephone: +603 8924 8000
fax: +603 8924 8001
email: enquiries@nottingham.edu.my