Statecraft in Myanmar, previously referred to as Burma, has a lineage going back ten centuries or more. While the state today is expected to provide many other services for a vastly larger population than were its pre-modern predecessors, its basic functions of maintaining order, controlling economic distribution, and ensuring the perpetuation of itself and its elite managers, remain much the same. The tools available now to do so may be different, and the challenges it faces may have grown, but the issues it addresses would be familiar to the predecessors of the modern rulers of Myanmar.