Account of a missionary to Burma from 1782 until 1808.

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Vincenzo Sangermano (1758-1819) was a Roman Catholic priest, a member of the Barnabite religious order, who served as a missionary in Burma from 1783 to 1806. After initially going to the then-capital city of Ava, he settled in Rangoon, where he completed construction of a church and a college of missionaries. While heading the college, Sangermano undertook pioneering research on the political, legal, and administrative system of the Burmese Empire and on Burmese cosmography, science, religion, and manners and customs. Sangermano based his work on personal observations and inquiries, as well as on rare Burmese and Pali manuscripts that he analyzed and translated. In 1808, Sangermano returned to his native Italy, where he began preparing his research for publication, but he died in 1819 before he could complete his work. His manuscript remained in the hands of the Barnabite order and was published, with the support of the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, in 1833. Presented here is the second edition of Sangermano's book, published in London in 1893, which includes a detailed introduction by John Jardine, a British legal scholar and judge who served in a variety of posts in the British Empire, including that of Judicial Commissioner of British Burma. Sangermano's work remains a vital source for the study of pre-modern Burma.

This book examines the British colonial expansion in the so-called unadministered hill tracts of the Indo-Burma frontier and the change of colonial policy from non-intervention to intervention. The book begins with the end of the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26), which resulted in the British annexation of the North-Eastern Frontier of Bengal and the extension of its sway over the Arakan and Manipur frontiers, and closes with the separation of Burma from India in 1937. The volume documents the resistance of the indigenous hill peoples to colonial penetration; administrative policies such as disarmament; subjugation of the local chiefs under a colonial legal framework and its impact; standardisation of ‘Chin’ as an ethnic category for the fragmented tribes and sub-tribes; and the creation and consolidation of the Chin Hills District as a political entity to provide an extensive account of British relations with the indigenous Chin/Zo community from 1824 to 1935. By situating these within the larger context of British imperial policy, the book makes a critical analysis of the British approach towards the Indo-Burma frontier. With its coverage of key archival sources and literature, this book will interest scholars and researchers in modern Indian history, military history, colonial history, British history, South Asian history and Southeast Asian history.