This brief study attempts to outline the process of change of the Burmese traditional legal system through the impact of British law during the period from the first Anglo-Burmese war (1824-1826) to the end of the century. It focuses particularly on the extent to which the rules concerning marriage, divorce and inheritance in the Dhammathat law texts, which traditionally were the main source of law, were accepted in the Anglo-Burmese courts.
 This discussion concludes with the historical sequence in which the introduction of the English legal system into India and the wholesale transplantation of Indian codes, statutes and regulations into Burma considerably disturbed the Burmese idea of law. Such thoughtless disturbance resulted in the fact that British colonial law had not been fully accepted in Burma by the time of the British withdrawal in 1948.

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This note aims to trace the reformation of the land tenure system in Burma by the British colonial government in the period 1826-1876. All major forms of land tenure in Colonial Burma were introduced in this period and compiled into the Lower Burma Land and Revenue Act, 1876, which gave substance to the basic land policy of the British government in Burma.
 Many British administrators admitted that under Burmese rule, land in Lower Burma was cultivated by independent cultivators who were practically proprietors of the soil.
 The declared land policy of British government was to create a peasant-proprietor class. But the system actually introduced in Lower Burma in this period contained the seeds of destruction of peasant property in land.

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A rebellion led by a pongyi (Buddhist monk) named U Thuriya, who lived in a monastery at Mayinkaing near Zigon, broke out in July 1888 in the Tharrawaddy district. The monk's adherents, about 1,700 in all, were villagers from the northern part of this district, who were discontented with heavy land, capitation and punitive police taxation. The rebels were tattooed with four Burmese letters that meant invulnerable, and rallied round the Myingun Prince as their leader. From investigations of 14 other anti-colonial uprisings that took place in the late 19th century in Lower Burma, it appears that Myingun was merely a symbol. What is important about this and several other uprisings is that pongyis were the leaders and that tattooing, a traditional practice legitimized by Buddhism, was the means by which they obtained their followers. These two factors and the motive behind the rebellion can thus be understood in the context of fork Buddhism. The name of the Myingun Prince was used and the restoration of the Burmese Empire was proclaimed because leaders would not otherwise have been able to impose their concept of the ideal society on the people.

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Phrathammasāt, the first book of the Law of the Three Seals, enumerates 29 titles or types of lawsuits under the Pali name of ‘Ekūnatiṁsā Mūlagati Vivāda’, the authority of which is ascribed to the feat of Manu, discoverer of the eternal law of mankind. Compared with the Burmese law books, which, at least nominally, retain the traditional 18 titles, this seems to indicate an advanced stage of ‘Pali-ization’ of law in Theravāda Buddhist Asia, where the adopted Hindu law were transformed in a variety of ways.

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