Looting and commissioning indigenous maps: James G. Scott in Burma

Based on indigenous maps collected in British Burma by James George Scott (1851–1935) and kept at the Cambridge University Library, this paper offers an alternative history of the first years of British colonisation in Upper Burma in the 1880s and 1890s. The entangled scripts – Chinese characters, Shan, Burmese and English – as well as the materiality and the visual codes of these documents bring into view forms of contact that did not last long. Contextualising these maps with other kinds of sources – including Scott’s diaries and administrative reports – allows us to reconstruct their production as part of processes of intelligence gathering and frontier settlement. By tracing the more or less willing role of Burmese clerks, notables, guides and interpreters in the cartographic processes implemented by the English on the ground, we can reintroduce these actors into a history of cartography that has long been Eurocentric. Doing so reveals how the British had to rely on indigenous knowledge to control a territory quite unknown to them during the early years of colonisation. •Traces the constitution of the Scott collection in the late nineteenth century.•Considers looted or commissioned Burmese and Shan maps in the early colonial period.•Explores the colonial encounter in British Burma through indigenous mapping.•Investigates intelligence gathering and frontier settlement as situations of encounter.•Demonstrates how degrees of commensurability were achieved through indigenous mapping.