"As Myanmar continues its transition from a military state to a quasi-democratic one, its eco- nomic growth rates have risen concomitantly (World Bank Group 2014, 7). Given the penury to which the country descended over the military period, Myanmar's masses would appear poised to reap benefits from this growth, as the rising tide lifts all boats (Farrelly 2016). How- ever, closer examination of the structure of the political economy (see Chapter 18; Nyo Tun 2016) dampens enthusiasm: average Myanmar people face four interlacing challenges - a highly resource-extractive growth model; agrarian displacement; few good jobs to reabsorb displaced labourers; and inadequate or eroding safety nets - that may leave them materially worse off. First, Myanmar's growth model remains dependent on natural resource extraction (Bissinger 2012; World Bank Group 2014, 16), a phenomenon which in comparative cases has led to marked increases in inequality (Gylfason & Zoega 2002). Such extractive sectors, which in Myanmar include the illicit drugs trade (Winn 2015), have few economic linkages - meaning they create few jobs relative to the rents they generate. Current market liberalisation is merely facilitating an intensification of such resource exploitation, as foreign investment skews mas- sively towards the extractive sector (World Bank Group 2014, 16). Myanmar's exceedingly thin political-economic elite (only 7.5 per cent of the population is middle class or afiluent - see Shein Thu Aung 2013) has benefited by illicitly capturing resource rents, policing entrance to this rarefied stratum by requiring personalised connections to a military-elite clique (Larkin 2015); by entrenching themselves as the only viable businesses (Ford et al. 2016) they potentially crowd out non-aligned prospective entrants. Second, legal 'reforms' have made land an alienable asset, providing an alluring investment opportunity for agribusinesses, industrial zone managers, narcotics money launderers (Meehan 2011) and land speculators. These reforms together with the aforementioned land-intensive resource extraction put immense pressure on the livelihood base of Myanmar's poor: land is being stripped from both peasants and urbanites through means both 'legal' (evictions and debt dispossession) and extra-legal (violent land grabs). Third, infrastructure and logistics deficits - not to mention a global political-economic structure that provides barriers to economic 'structural transformation' for such a late 'late developer' (Waldner 1999) - mean that displaced masses are not reabsorbed into any bourgeoning high productivity economic sector such as manufacturing. 404 Class and inequality Finally, meagre public services do not provide the marginalised with opportunities to break the cycle of underemployment: education and health in particular are sectors in which the wealthy consume high-quality private services (often outside Myanmar), while the poor survive on underfunded and under-qualified public options. Further, resource rent management pro- cesses remain inscrutable (World Bank Group 2014, 42) and hence revenues may be siphoned off rather than being allocated to those starved public good sectors. Added to this, traditional networks of care and support may be eroding: increasingly necessary migration (ILO 2015) disrupts village life and horizontal community bonds therein (Boutry 2013), while an ascendant bourgeois ethos celebrating individual accomplishment combined with elite reorientation to a now-accessible global consumptive marketplace means that vertical patronage bonds may degrade. Myanmar is hence rapidly becoming a visibly unequal place, as a military-business elite asserts itself, flaunting luxuriant lifestyles (Mahtani 2014) that flourish in the interstices of the country's largely destitute environment. This is a moment of explicit class consolidation - complete with the ideological succour provided by self-help gurus justifying accumulation as available to all with 'positive' attitudes. How will the excluded respond: will the pullulating protests roiling in Myanmar today mobilise broader movements? Or will the poor feel placated by the country's ubiquitous 'development' discourse, believing broad benefits (either material or only symbolic) will trickle down to them (Prasse-Freeman 2014)? This chapter will proceed by sketching Myanmar's political economy over the past two centuries, focusing on facets that prevented both grossly unequal conditions from developing and class-consciousness from forming. It will then tum to the current political economy, further elaborating the four challenges sketched above. The chapter will then conclude with a discus- sion of perceptions of class and inequality in the country. Historical equality in shared exploitation As elaborated by scholars of dynastic Myanmar and Southeast Asia (Scott 2009, Aung-Thwin 1990, and Lieberman 1984, inter alia), Myanmar's pre-colonial political economy revolved around the control of rice paddy production. Authorities built decentralised systems of taxation and regulation through which they garnered tribute from regional leaders, who in turn extracted resources from those further away institutionally and physically. Critical for our purposes, within this political economy key institutions helped peasants manage exploitation. Aung-Thwin (1984) outlines the way subjects sought out bonded relationships to patrons or institutions that secured their lives and livelihoods, while Scott (1972) describes how the political-economic 'terms of trade' were relatively decent for a peasant producer who could nonetheless rely on kin and village to mitigate shocks. In later work, Scott (2009) posits that if elites violated the terms of these bonds, the hills and swamps surrounding Myanmar's lowlands provided areas to which subjects could flee (c( Lieberman 2010, 339-342). While more research is necessary to assess whether this compelled any concessions by rulers, at the very least the evidence suggests that conditions eroded for peasants during the colonial period. The British colonial project (1824-194 7) generally undermined village risk manage- ment mechanisms (by enclosing common resources and inducting peasants into the perilous cash economy - see Scott 1972, 25-26), and in particular radically transformed the Delta areas of the Ayeyawaddy river into an enormous rice producer by inducing peasants to clear swamps and plant paddy. While this turned Myanmar into 'the rice bowl of Asia', historian Ian Brown describes the ultimately disastrous effects of this colonial rice-export economy: by continually rejecting legal and policy protection schemes for farmers (such as conditional debt forgiveness laws or crop diversification policies), the colonial administration made peasants vulnerable to 405 Elliott Prasse-Freeman and Phyo Win Latt cycles of dispossession. The British themselves noted the way they were undermining the long- term health of the Burmese political economy, and yet chose to only deepen their extraction practices (Brown 2013, 37-44). Moreover, this myopic focus on rice retarded the development of any non-rice sectors (including more human capital-intensive ones); further, by importing Indian clerks to run the administration, and by promoting Indian (and Chinese) capital to lubri- cate the economy, the colonial period systematically excluded Burmese from the state and the few advanced sectors of the economy. Hence, external shocks such as the Great Depression and World War II decimated the brittle economy, and Burma staggered into independence with little capital (Indians had fled or been expelled), rice fields destroyed, infrastructure cut, without domestic manufacturing, with few experienced administrators and facing a country-wide insur- gency exacerbating those challenges. Against conventional wisdom about Burma's bright post- independence future, the country was hardly poised to be a successful economy before the mismanagement of the military period. The military era further exacerbated Myanmar's decline. In the context of economic and administrative ruin, and numerous insurgencies mobilised along ideological and ethnic lines, Burma's military emerged as an ambitious and capable actor (Callahan 2003), ultimately able to build a hybrid rentier state (Prasse-Freeman 2012): while fighting off those many insurgencies, the military-state apparatus extracted the country's natural resources and cut a set of 'bargains' with the populace. Rural dwellers got land, but were compelled to give up much of their rice yield to the state; urbanites got cheap rice, but there was no competent industrialisation and no growth. Both groups were denied political freedoms. The military was able to violate those bargains at whim - as in the Delta area where thousands of farmers were dispossessed of their land after not delivering their rice yield quotas (GRET 2015). Yet, such expedient violations bring into question claims such as Brown's that the military governments of this era 'stressed equity rather than increased productivity' (Brown 2013, 185); when read through the lens of the military's interests, low inequality was less a policy goal - less a choice for which 'produc- tivity' was sacrificed - than a secondary effect derived from the military's prosecution of its organisational objectives. As Brown himself notes, the military never addressed landlessness (in fact, scholars at GRET show that the military created it), and by 2000 'nearly ten million people [were) largely dependent on laboring wages alone' {Brown 2013, 185). Unlike other so-called late-developers in the greater region (such as Taiwan and South Korea - see Waldner 1999), the rents extracted by the military were not reinvested into the building of an advanced manu- facturing sector (hence structurally transforming the economy), but were rather directed at maintaining a system of political domination through an ever-growing apparatus of organised violence. As we will elaborate on below, the military's self-interests subverted any rhetorical pretence for equality and socialism; people were equal in their poverty (Khin Maung Kyi et al. 2000, 130--131). As the military continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s to consolidate its position within the state, it relinquished some direct control of the economy, pivoting towards market experi- mentation by encouraging an improvisational quasi-entrepreneurial form of wealth extraction, one that resulted in two significant transfers of productive resources. The first saw the dispos- session of average Burmese people: various state agencies were encouraged to embrace the market economy by serting up their own 'development' projects, meaning that ill-equipped ministries grabbed land from farmers and attempted to establish industrial projects (sugar pro- duction, etc.), with predictably disastrous results (see Woods 2014); as the military continued to win wars against ethnic and other various non-state armed groups, it collaborated with those vanquished elites for shared resource exploitation (Woods 2011), resulting in marginalisation of ethnic masses (Brenner 2015)..."