Armed and bureaucratic violence in the formation of British governance in Southeast Asian contested tracts

Abstract This article focuses on the British annexation of the Dai territories in the border zone of Qing China and Burma in the late nineteenth century. It investigates the coercive force used by the British to secure control of the territory and its people, which was asserted on the basis of having had tributary relations with the earlier kingdom of Burma. In this case, I argue that the use of violence as a means to an end is better understood when separated into the mutually reinforcing forms of armed and bureaucratic violence. In these two forms, violent force shaped a practice—a mode of operation—that facilitated and secured British governance in the large territories separating the Chinese Qing state from British Burma. The article is part of a larger investigation that connects British operations on the empire’s much-varied northeastern frontier from the Brahmaputra eastwards into Yunnan, in two periods of its expansion in the early and late nineteenth century.