Colonial Policy and Practice

"It’s called Colonial Policy and Practice by J S Furnivall. Today it doesn’t pay to praise the British Empire, but it many ways it was an incredibly liberal institution. Many individuals within it were extraordinarily impressive, and upheld the interests of the people they ruled over, very often against London. Furnivall is an absolute classic of this genre. He went out to Burma in the early 20th century, and falls in love with the place. He stays there right up to the 1950s and only disappears from the Burma scene just as the military are starting to become agitated. Yes, several within what finally became the Burma civil service, but by the 1940s he became an informal adviser to the imperial authorities in Burma, and once independence is achieved he’s appointed principal adviser by the independence government, which shows the regard in which he was held. He’s just an incredible spokesperson, and an incredible example of that great liberal tradition of the British Empire. For all of its faults, it left Burma with a really good economic and financial system, and part of that comes from people like Furnivall, who were there also with that wonderful feature of being great collectors of information, writing reports, and having an obsession with finding things out: what worked, what took place in this village, among that ethnic community. It’s part memoir, part handbook, part comparative study, with lots of the prejudices of the time, but it can be read profitably today."