Introduction

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century, among the dense network of streams and tributary waterways of the Irrawaddy River’s tidal delta, tens of thousands of migrants mostly from Upper Burma settled to cut back the vast mangrove forests and replace them with lucrative paddy fields producing rice to be sold on the world market. It was a rapidly expanding agricultural frontier the scale of which was entirely unprecedented in the history of Southeast Asia.1 Villages swelled into towns more than five times their original population in under a decade.2 Steamships linked the new settlements moving goods and people across the watery landscape.