Racial Capitalism and Peasant Insurgency in Colonial Myanmar

The Hsaya San Rebellion swept through colonial Myanmar between 1930 and 1932. It took eighteen months and over seven thousand Indian Army troops to suppress. Triggered by acute pressures in the agrarian economy that were compounded by a global fall in rice prices, the violence of the revolt cannot be fully explained by this crisis alone. Bands of peasant rebels massacred Indians; not only moneylenders but cattle-herders, who were themselves a precarious and marginal rural community. These massacres are not easy to interpret. Revisiting the insurgency through the growing literature on racial capitalism provides a framework for a understanding peasants’ racialized violence.