In mainland Southeast Asia in this period war was fought principally for people rather than land, and both the Konbaung dynasty of Burma and the Siamese kingdoms of Ayutthaya and Bangkok systematically deported the populations of defeated states to repopulate their own core regions. Burmese armies sacked Ayutthaya in 1767 and marched captives, including royalty, monks and artisans, to Upper Burma; the Manipur valley was repeatedly raided in the campaigns Manipuris remember as the Seven Years' Devastation; and the conquest of Arakan in 1784-85 was followed by deportations to Burma and by a large refugee flight into British-held Chittagong, which East India Company officials put at around 200,000 by the late 1790s and which became a source of Anglo-Burmese friction. Siam did the same in the other direction, resettling Mon, Lao, Khmer and Malay communities in its own provinces, most drastically after the destruction of Vientiane in 1827-28, when much of the Lao population of the middle Mekong was moved to the Khorat plateau. Numbers rest on royal chronicles, which use conventional figures, and on East India Company correspondence; they should be read as orders of magnitude. The transfers reshaped the ethnic map of Burma, Thailand and Laos in ways still visible.
Konbaung Burmese and Siamese armies fought wars whose object was the capture and forced resettlement of populations, alongside Manipuri, Arakanese, Mon and Lao victims
There are no censuses before the nineteenth century. Lieberman's reconstructions in 'Strange Parallels' and McEvedy and Jones's estimates put Burma at roughly 4-5 million around 1800, Siam at 2-3 million, and the Lao principalities and Manipur together under a million, giving an order of magnitude of 8 million for the region the deportation wars covered. The first Burmese administrative counts under British rule and the Siamese corvee registers are the only direct evidence, and both post-date most of the wars.
No defensible range. Chronicles and later accounts describe heavy mortality in the sack of Ayutthaya, in the Manipur raids, in Arakan and on the forced marches themselves, but the only quantities available are conventional chronicle figures and colonial estimates of survivors.
Burmese, Siamese and Lao chronicles and contemporary British East India Company reports describe deportees held as royal service manpower, the burning of captured capitals and the removal or destruction of royal and religious objects.
Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Laos