It will be clear from this that, as with much else that bears the label of “modern,” the development of the oil industry in Burma was a profoundly hybrid process, involving local rulers, officialdom, and businessmen, not to speak of technologies that dated back many centuries. Yet, as the historian Marilyn Longmuir notes, “Most oil historians give the date 28 August 1859 as the commencement of the modern oil industry when ‘Colonel’ Edwin L. Drake organized the first successful drilling of an oil well at Oil Creek near Titusville, Pennsylvania.”
Sivasundaram!
