Christianity,Colonialism,and Burmanization

Abstract

In contesting the popular, but misleading, discourse that American missionaries and British colonialists deliberately created the ethnic problem of Burma, this essay argues that colonialism and Christianity had not generated ethnic divide, but only intensified the long existing resentment between the Burman and minorities, and that consecutive governments of postcolonial Burma, monopolized by the Burman, escalate the troubled race relations as they refuse to accommodate minorities. It also adds that in the name of decolonization, they started and have perpetuated Burmanization.