Myanmar

The earliest known inhabitants of present-day Myanmar were Mon and Pyu peoples, whose city-states flourished in the central dry zone and the lower delta from roughly the second century BCE. The Pyu maintained a string of walled urban centres, of which Sri Ksetra and Halin are the best documented, and adopted forms of Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism transmitted through trade with India. The Mon, settled further south around Thaton and Pegu, played a comparable role in mediating Indic religion, script, and statecraft to later arrivals. From the ninth century, Bamar speakers migrating from the north gradually displaced or absorbed the Pyu and consolidated power around the Irrawaddy basin.

The first unified Burmese polity was the Pagan Empire, conventionally dated from the accession of Anawrahta in 1044, which fused Bamar political authority with Mon religious learning and produced the temple landscape still visible at Bagan. Pagan fragmented after Mongol incursions in the late thirteenth century, giving way to a long period of competing kingdoms, notably Ava in the dry zone, the Mon kingdom of Hanthawaddy in the south, and the Shan principalities to the east. Reunification came under the Toungoo dynasty in the sixteenth century, which under Bayinnaung briefly assembled one of the largest empires in mainland Southeast Asia. The Konbaung dynasty, founded by Alaungpaya in 1752, restored Burmese power, expanded into Arakan, Manipur, and Assam, and brought the kingdom into direct contact with British India.

Three Anglo-Burmese Wars, in 1824 to 1826, 1852, and 1885, progressively dismantled the Konbaung state. After the third war Britain abolished the monarchy, exiled King Thibaw, and in 1886 annexed the remaining territory as a province of British India. Colonial rule reorganised the economy around rice, teak, and oil, encouraged large-scale immigration from India, and administered the frontier highlands separately from the lowland heartland, a distinction that would shape later ethnic politics. Burma was detached from India in 1937, occupied by Japan from 1942 to 1945, and gained independence as a sovereign republic on 4 January 1948 under the leadership of U Nu, following the assassination of Aung San the previous year.

Parliamentary government lasted until 1962, when General Ne Win seized power and instituted the isolationist Burmese Way to Socialism under a single party, the Burma Socialist Programme Party. Mass protests in 1988 ended that system but were suppressed by a new military junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, which renamed the country Myanmar in 1989 and annulled the 1990 elections won by the National League for Democracy. Long-running insurgencies along the ethnic frontiers, among them Karen, Kachin, Shan, and Rakhine, continued throughout this period.

A 2008 constitution introduced a partially elected legislature, and from 2011 a quasi-civilian government under President Thein Sein oversaw a phase of liberalisation, followed by NLD electoral victories in 2015 and 2020 with Aung San Suu Kyi as State Counsellor. On 1 February 2021 the Tatmadaw detained the civilian leadership and declared a state of emergency, transferring authority to a State Administration Council and triggering renewed armed conflict with a parallel National Unity Government and an array of ethnic armed organisations. Myanmar today is constitutionally a unitary presidential republic with a heavily entrenched military role, governed in practice by the council established after the 2021 takeover.