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Arakan, Min Yazagyi, and the Portuguese :The relationship between the growth of Arakanese imperial power
Michael Charney , SOAS, University of London
One goal of the SBBR is to make available the unpublished M.A. theses that abound in university libraries but rarely reach the general academic audience. One concern might be that the thesis, especially if published many years after its submission will be taken and critiqued as a representation of the latest in one’s body of research. Clearly, understandings and abilities change over time. To offset this, the original month and year of submission in theses published in the SBBR will be included in the title in parentheses. Citation of a thesis so published in the SBBR must include “(as submitted in month + year)” to be considered a fair use of the material. Of course, this also requires that the thesis printed here must be in its original, unedited form (with the exception of minor spelling or format changes). I have included my M.A. thesis as the first, in order to encourage others to follow course.
The thesis was written in 1992-1993 under the supervision of William H. Frederick and Elizabeth Collins at Ohio University and defended in June 1993. By that time, I had only studied Thai, French, and Spanish at the university level and, using Spanish, proceeded to study Portuguese on my own. Thus, while Iberian sources are used here frequently, Burmese sources were not, save for in translation (my study of Burmese would not begin until SEASSI in the summer of 1994 at Wisconsin-Madison). Another piece, an article based again on Iberian sources was written in 1993 and published in the Journal of Asian History in 1994.1 Thereafter began a long struggle with Arakanese chronicles and revised interpretations of Arakanese history. The major problem in writing the thesis, however, was that other than several useful pieces by Pamela Gutman on art history, numismatics, and an inscription, and a study of Buddhist art by U San Tha Aung, all focused on a period far earlier than the one I was examining, almost nothing had been written on Arakan, aside from Burmese-language studies unavailable to me at the time, since 1967, or about twenty-six years earlier, and, moreover, very few items had been published since the 1920s. Without a strong body of secondary work to provide theory to bounce off of or a linear narrative to provide context, much of 1992 and early 1993 was spent charting unfamiliar waters. Readers interested in the Portuguese role in Lower Burma and Arakan are also directed to the work of Maria Ana Guedes who published a study on this topic in Portuguese in 1994.
