Before explaining the results, it would be useful to know how this type of research contributes to the current extent of knowledge on the following question: to what extent can we attribute the current patterns of development in Myanmar to the policies of the past? Existing studies address the question from two fronts. The first front consists of scholars, who, driven to explain the contemporary Burmese politics and economy, emphasize colonial history as the moment that defined the present political and economic development (Myint-U, 2001). Some examples from this front are Thawnghmung’s analysis of land management policy under military regime (Thawnghmung, 2010), and Taylor’s (1985) account on village administrative reforms. On the other hand, the second front represent scholars who, motivated to achieve a richer understanding of early modern history, have produced valuable insights into the origins of modern Myanmar, such as administrative reforms of Konbaung Kingdom (Lieberman, 2014), and the intellectual history of monastic community and lay literati (Charney, 2006). While such studies have enriched our understanding of Myanmar’s political and economic history, I highlight in this article two related problems that limit our understanding. First, most scholars too easily assume that colonial rule fundamentally reshaped pre-existing political and social organizations. Both fronts of research suffer from this problem, as those emphasizing colonial rule argue that social and political organization before colonial rule was erased and rewritten by colonial history (Cady, 1958), while those interested in early modern history do not make a strong case for its persistence over time to the present. As a result, there is little inquiry into how earlier history may influence the events and outcomes under colonial rule and post-independence regimes. While a few scholars relax this assumption to some extent, such as Steinberg’s argument on the role of earlier history on the mindset of post-independence rulers, it remains unclear whether such persistence occurs and whether there is support from the available quantitative data from the time. Second, most of the historical analyses, as seen in many of the aforementioned works, use the state as a unit of analysis, whether it is Konbaung Kingdom, colonial Burma, or present-day Myanmar, masking important variations in local history. Given that a number of important works have been produced on rich and detailed history of specific locations, an example being Konbaung-era money-lending contracts (Hla, 1989) or shifts of political power between Lower and Upper Burma, few explore causal explanations of the observed history by comparing different locations (Lieberman, 1996). A key implication of this is that we lack theories that not only describe but also explain the local variation of history within the state of Myanmar, among many reasons for this being the scarcity of fine-grained economic and political data beyond state level before independence, and lack of quantitative analyses on economic history. This is not to say that there are no available data sources on colonial Burma, which could be easily pushed back by numerous reports on colonial administration and economic activity. However, there are few attempts to construct from these sources theories that can explain variations within the colony in the outcomes of interest. We can see an example of how these two problems appear in the existing discussion on local village headmen, who, under the Konbaung dynasty, took on multiple roles, such as tax collection, land distribution, and judicial administration. Several studies on the topic argued that reforms in colonial administration erased the headman position and fundamentally reshaped the Burmese village organization. Michael Aung-Thwin and Maitrii Aung-Thwin (2012), for example, note that due to the diminishing roles of local headmen under colonial rule, “the practices that had been associated with patron-clientelism were now reclassified as ‘bribery’ and ‘corruption’ in the world view, language and laws of the state” (pp. 201). Thant Myint-U (2001) makes an even stronger claim that removal of the hereditary position in the late 19th century “dealt the final death blow to the old system of local government” (pp. 215). In both accounts, there is no continuity from Konbaung rule to colonial rule once the latter came in control, masking the possible ways of how earlier history may have reacted with the new form of administration. However, in my research project, I show some evidence that such arguments ignore the linkages between periods of early modern history and colonial history in Burma, as well as local variation in such interaction. Specifically, I examine how one particular administrative action by the Konbaung state in the 18^th century may explain some of the subsequent patterns of development in Bago, a region of Southern Myanmar.^[1] I focus on the appointment of new village headmen in place of former hereditary headmen by the Konbaung kingdom, the last Burmese kingdom before colonial rule. This early co-option of the local elite reduced the future state’s need for the monopoly of violence, and affected its developmental strategies for coercive and social welfare (or social control) investments. I should note two caveats before providing more details on this article. First, the absence of a monopoly of violence does not equate to an absence of violence, this article cannot say if one location was ever less violent than the other. While some may argue, as James Scott did in his observation of Southeast Asian history, that being independent from centralizing states may imply flatter social structures and lower levels of state-imposed coercion, it could easily be true that lack of centralized arbiter may imply vulnerability to expropriation by neighbors and other violent non-state organizations. What this article can say, however, is the logic of the state in local administration after it has established control over violence in a given location. Second, I should clarify that the project compares locations that had weaker state control under the Konbaung dynasty throughout the late 18^th and 19^th centuries, and which subsequently came under British colonial rule. Because the entire region in the study came under colonial rule regardless of their earlier history, the project cannot explain the counterfactual where there was no colonial rule. It is important to emphasize this point because studies that make comparisons of changes under colonial rule can be easily misconstrued as showing the ‘positive’ effects of colonialism. This happened recently in political science literature, where several scholars misinterpret an article showing local variation in development due to Dutch industrial investments (Dell and Olken, 2019) in Indonesia as support for positive effects of colonialism. Therefore, the results are only meaningful as the interaction between Konbaung administrative changes and British colonial rule and not as each of the factor alone.