Since the abortive 1988 pro-democracy uprising, when Myanmar was thrust into the world’s headlines, both scholars and the general public have paid greater attention to the country’s history and culture. There had been occasional forays into Myanmar’s past and its unique customs before then, but outside Myanmar (then known as Burma) these fields were relatively unknown to all but a small number of dedicated researchers. As David Steinberg wrote in 1981, it was terra incognita. Due largely to a xenophobic government, and a quarter of a century of isolation, Myanmar was not attractive to postgraduate students intent on establishing an academic career. After 1988, this changed, but even then foreign attention was focused mainly on Myanmar’s traditional culture and the country’s more recent political convulsions.

Over the past 30 or so years, there has been what the French author and philosopher Michel Foucault once described (albeit in a different context) as a “veritable discursive explosion”. A flood of new books has been published on different aspects of Myanmar, notably its politics, history and culture. The quality and value of these books have been highly variable, with travelogues and memoirs perhaps the most open to criticism. There have also been some dreadful novels set in Myanmar. However, this was probably inevitable given the kind of over-correction in the literature that was taking place. There were some notable exceptions, but relatively little serious attention was given to the pre-colonial and colonial period. Even then, the focus of books and articles tended to be on the impact of the West on Myanmar and its people, rather than the impact on Western populations of contacts with Myanmar.