4 State power and identification schemes in Rakhine From the British colonial period to Burma’s independence Introduction In the previous chapter, I explored how international policy frameworks relating to statelessness have largely approached state bureaucracies and ID systems as being inherently neutral or benign. Meanwhile, Rohingya participants for this research overwhelmingly experienced Myanmar’s ID schemes as oppressive and violent. This chapter builds on notions from the work of Torpey (2000; Torpey 2001) and Scott (1998) that state categorisation, registration, and IDs are key to consolidating and legitimising the power of states. It considers key developments in the history of registration and IDs in Rakhine from the British colonial period to the early independence period after 1948. Registration and ID systems provide a useful window through which to consider state power, resistance, and the changing social structures of citizenship (Hull 2012; McConnell 2013). The chapter considers the role of IDs during the British colonial period in establishing and reifying race and class hierarchies as well as extracting labour and quelling dissent and the significance of documenting foreigners in Myanmar’s struggle for independence. In this chapter, I draw parallels between the tiered ID systems of the British colonial period and associated ethnic and class hierarchies and Myanmar’s contemporary ID system. This chapter also establishes how citizenship and national identities were organised in the lead-up to independence and in post-independence Myanmar. This provides context to the ways in which the militarised state was to later reorganise identities and social relations through the citizenship framework. This reorganisation involved the destruction and erasure of the Rohingya as a group belonging to Rakhine, Myanmar (covered in Chapters 7 and 8). In this chapter, I draw on four main categories of sources. First, I draw on Indian and Burmese scholarship on IDs and citizenship in the region. Second, I draw on official sources such as accounts of British colonial administrators including reports of the Anglo-Burma wars, narratives from census documents, and ‘riot inquiries’ which reported on pro-independence rebellions; official British correspondence, meeting notes, and other documents relating to constitutional relations between Britain and Burma in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003494539-4 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license.