Myanmar was previously called Burma. The Burmese were defeated by the British in the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826) and in 1852, during a Burmese palace power struggle, the British attacked Burma which by then was seriously weakened. After the 3 month long Second Anglo-Burmese War, the British seized the remaining coastal provinces. Although a separate, remote entity, Burma was largely managed as part of the Imperial British Raj, with officials, soldiers and businessmen from British India playing the major role in its governance.

A number of early British photographers worked in Burma, including John McCosh (1852-54), Linnaeus Tripe, Philippe Klier and Felice Beato, one of the foremost early photographers of Asia who settled in Burma after a long stint in Japan.

D.A. Ahuja was the most prominent Indian photographer - likely from Punjab - to work in Burma, and his postcards dominated images of the state in popular media at the turn of the century. He took great care to have superb German printers turn his images into deeply colored, textured images. As fluent as he was with landscape and temple images, his many portraits of individual Burmese people set him in a class by himself among early Asian image publishers.

Postcards from Raphael Tuck & Sons are also prominently featured. Tucks cards usually make use of soft colors, many kinds of styles and a concentration using early color printing technology well. Photographs were not the sole source of these postcards. In fact, the originals were often paintings or artwork specially produced for postcard printing.

Sir Joseph Causton & Sons, originally in Finch Lane, London, was also a prominent British printing establishment whose origins reach into the early 1700s. It was only acquired and merged into another firm in 1985.