Jonathan Saha's Law, Disorder and the Colonial State, part of Palgrave Macmillan's Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series, is an important contribution to our understanding of the making and the working of the colonial state in a changing colonial society. Saha, Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Bristol, draws our attention to the period around the turn of the twentieth century, when Burma was being transformed on a grand scale. These changes were driven by mass population movements that sought economic opportunity from the growing rice trade, improvements in the speed of transportation, and the swelling size of the colonial bureaucracy that created a hazy ground which permitted various kinds of misconduct and malpractice to take place.

Saha's focus is on the modality of the disorderly colonial state. Resonating with other works dealing with state, law, and crime, Saha views disorder in colonial Burma, the notoriously lawless corner of the Raj as “… not the result of a lack of legal state power. Instead, it might be said that the disorder in the delta had a symbiotic relationship with legal state power” (p. 2). This “symbiotic relationship” is what Saha investigates by examining 240 extant files that detail “cases of subordinate-level misconducts” investigated in Burma's Irrawaddy Division in the years between 1896 and 1909 (p. 4). What is refreshing about Saha's work is that his focus is not on specific events of anti-colonial violence and disorder, which provide obvious and easier showcases for demonstrating the coercive nature of the colonial state, but is instead on the everyday misconduct that took place in colonial Burmese society. By carefully reading a number of colonial legal cases of the misconduct committed by subordinates such as clerical staff, myo-oks (township officers), and European subordinate officers, Saha is successful in scooping up the ambivalence of the treatment of everyday crime that percolated quietly in the colony.

One of the most interesting points that Saha makes is the shift in the nature of misconduct from the pre-modern to the colonial periods in the country. Misconduct of a similar nature did occur in the pre-colonial period as Victor Lieberman, Michael Adas, and Thant Myint U have explained. The motivation of misconduct such as bribery and embezzlement in the pre-modern period was for the culprit to “develop their own reputation, build their local followings, and eventually mount a challenge to the authority of the ruling power” (p. 129). However, Saha points out that subordinate officers' misconduct in the colonial state, which enabled them to establish their personal authority, on the contrary, “did not threaten the centralized authority …” (p. 129). Instead, Saha convincingly argues “subordinate officials necessarily invoked the colonial state in order to commit their acts of misconduct and establish their personal authority. Through their acts, the state was not weakened, but enacted as a powerful and intrusive entity” (p. 129).

Saha raises an intriguing question in his conclusion. How can the nature of and the symbiotic relationship among misconduct, law, and the state during the colonial period, as discussed in this book, shed new light on the misconduct and criminality of the post-war period in Burma? This is an important question given the fact that the military junta, before more positive change in the last few years, had often made an argument that shifted blame for their own problems and misconduct onto the colonial past. Saha suggests that what corruption is, what it meant and how it was used as an issue politically changed over time. But Saha stresses that the colonial period he examines up to the present is a unique phase, peculiar to the emergence of the modern state. As he explains, it is a “period in which corruption has been intrinsic to how the modern state has been seen and performed in its various colonial and post-colonial forms” (p. 131).

Saha skilfully utilizes very rich and colourful archival sources he found in the Burmese National Archives in Yangon and the India Office Records at the British Library as well as contemporary journals and newspapers, such as the Times of Burma. Burmese sources might tell a different story and may reflect more raw Burmese feelings and their own understanding of each incident, and this reviewer would have liked to have seen more details about the sources themselves. For example, was the language of the testimony in Burmese with translation or in English originally? Nevertheless, the sheer volume of archival material Saha has dealt with and brought to our attention is impressive and holds the reader's interest through to the end of the book.

This reviewer highly recommends this important study for both academic researchers and as a text for undergraduate and graduate courses in colonialism and Southeast Asian history. The volume would also be valuable reading for research methods courses that include approaches to archival materials.