Economic History: Agriculture

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Description: This article examines unusual features of various religious buildings located at Pagan, such as below-ground monasteries and brick-lined water-catchment basins, to establish that low rainfall of less than 24 inches annually was a constant in the local climate throughout the Pagan period. Confirming this fact sheds light on the critical role the construction of religious structures played in linking the inadequately watered capital to outlying irrigated agricultural lands, thus ensuring the necessary provision of food to the city. As the population of Pagan grew, the need to increase food supplies from the outlying areas created an incentive for focusing the practice of the Merit Path to Salvation on the erection of still more religious buildings, thus creating the "forest of temples" seen at Pagan today.
Creator/author: Richard Cooler
Source/publisher: Journal of Burma Studies Vol. 1 (1997)
1997-00-00
Date of entry/update: 2010-07-10
Grouping: Individual Documents
Language: English
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Description: This compilation covers fifty articles and twenty-six township records published in the Journal of the Burma Research Society between 1911 and 1970. The selected articles all shed light on the economic life of the peasantry and have been divided as follows: Part I) Translations of relevant sources or commentaries on the peasantry, Part II) Geographic and other background information necessary for understanding peasant life, and Part III) Analyses or descriptions of the traditional, colonial, and early modern economy, of which the peasants were an important part. The articles are arranged by theme and date of publications within each section and sub-section.
Creator/author: Maria Serena I. Diokno
Source/publisher: Journal of Burma Studies Vol. 5 (2000)
2000-00-00
Date of entry/update: 2009-03-10
Grouping: Individual Documents
Language: English
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Description: The political economy of Shan tea under British colonial rule. "...Tawngpeng State, the major tea-producing area in the Federated Shan States, contained an area of 938 square miles. As of 1939 the population of Tawngpeng was 59,398 and it had a revenue of Rs. 645,634. The State was divided into 16 circles which corresponded as closely as possible to clan-divisions. Geographic features were characterised by hills ranging from five to seven thousand feet in height interspersed with valleys that averaged approximately ten miles in length and from a few hundred yards to a few miles in width. Maurice Collis, a former Burma civil servant, noted that upon approaching Namhsan, the capital of Tawngpeng which lies at the centre of the State at a height of six thousand feet, ?there is a vale and in the midst, ten miles away, is a ridge, on one end of which stands the town of Nam Hsan with the palace over it on a circular hill....The vale is one vast tea garden?. On the lower levels of the hillsides, Palaungs and Shans grow tea whilst higher up Kachins and Lisus practice shifting agriculture. Shans predominate in the valleys where rice is the staple crop..."
Creator/author: Robert Maule Department of History, University of Toronto
Source/publisher: Thai-Yunnan Project Newsletter No. 14, September 1991
1991-09-00
Date of entry/update: 2003-06-03
Grouping: Individual Documents
Language: English
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