MALCOLM, Howard (1799-1879)

Travels in the Burman Empire

Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1840. 8vo. (9 5/8 x 6 1/8 inches). 82 pp. illlustrated with 1 engraved map of South Eastern Asia.

Contemporary half calf with marbled paper boards

An Edinburgh edition of Howard Malcom’s account of Burma in the 1830s, combining missionary travel narrative, regional description, and early British-era observations on the eastern Bay of Bengal.

Howard Malcom, an American Baptist minister and educator, travelled through South and Southeast Asia in the mid-1830s while examining missionary stations in India, Burma, Siam, and China. His larger Travels in South-Eastern Asia first appeared in Boston in 1839; this Chambers edition separated the Burman section for a British readership, presenting it as an independently useful account of a region newly important to British imperial, commercial, and missionary interests. The text covers Malcom's voyage, his arrival at Amherst and Maulmain, travel through British-held and Burmese territories, and descriptions of Rangoon, Ava, Chittagong, Arakan, Tenasserim, and neighbouring regions. It includes observations on Buddhist religious life, court ceremony, architecture, local commerce, agriculture, language, education, and missionary work, with particular attention to the American Baptist mission and to Karen, Shan, Arakanese, and Burman communities. Malcom wrote within the strong evangelical and colonial assumptions of his period, and his descriptions of Buddhist practice and local society are often sharply judgmental. The work remains a useful early nineteenth-century English-language account of Burma shortly after the First Anglo-Burmese War and the Treaty of Yandabo, when Arakan and Tenasserim had passed under British control and the political geography of the Bay of Bengal was being recast.

Item #42671

Price: $650.00