Demographic Growth, Agricultural Expansion, and Livestock in the Lower Chindwin in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

In one way or another, an ecological approach to premodern Burmese history is not new. Indeed, the two main American historians of premodern Burma, Victor B. Lieberman and Michael A. Aung-Thwin, have made ecology central to their arguments of dynastic rise and collapse. Aung-Thwin, for example, has argued that the fall of the Kingdom of Pagan (ca. 1300) was due to imbalances between royal and monastic reserves of human and agricultural resources in a society that had reached the limits of possible agricultural expansion. Lieberman likewise demonstrated that the fall of the First Taung-ngu Dynasty (sixteenth century) and the subsequent political hegemony of Ava were due to the agricultural and demographic superiority of Upper Burma over its more ecologically challenged neighbor. Numerous other scholars working on premodern Burma have found ecological change impossible to ignore as a major factor in Burma’s political fate. Riggs, for example, has identified the loss of agricultural resources as a key factor in the slow death of Burma’s last dynasty.2 Certainly, there can be no suggestion that ecological factors have been ignored in assessing causality for premodern historical change in Burma.