Alaungmintaya’s rise from village headman to kingship offers probably the best documented case of a king’s reign in pre-colonial Burma (ie, Burma before 1824). But the history of this reign has been written both in Burma and in the West...
moreAlaungmintaya’s rise from village headman to kingship offers probably the best documented case of a king’s reign in pre-colonial Burma (ie, Burma before 1824). But the history of this reign has been written both in Burma and in the West essentially in the terms of its military history. The question of the making of the king, ie, the transformation of a royal subject into a self-conscious monarch, has been either neglected or left unquestioned with a superficial reference to its Buddhist cultural context. One should understand his king-making as a complex process bearing psychological, practical, ideological, religious and political dimensions. Alaungmintaya’s metamorphosis was conditioned as much by himself as by his surroundings.
