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British expansion in South-East Asia was shaped by the well-being of India, opportunities in China, and international, particularly Anglo-French, rivalry. From the late eighteenth century, British commerce in South-East Asia became enmeshed with British commerce in India; from the late nineteenth century, the development of agriculture and mining tied South-East Asian economies more closely to industrial and finance capitalism in Britain. The advances into ‘Further India’ during 1786–c.1830 are shown. It specifically addresses maritime South-East Asia and Britain in mainland South-East Asia. In addition, the free trade imperialism and turbulent frontiers in Malaya and Borneo, Burma, and Siam during c.1830–c.1870 are reported. It then considers imperialism and colonialism during c.1870–1914. As the British pursued their interests and extended their power in South-East Asia, the demarcation between those areas falling within Britain's formal Empire and those remaining outside it became indistinct.

This introductory chapter investigates the ways of drawing Siam/Thailand into potential comparative debate with a broader, global field via an engagement with postcolonial thought. It examines the issues at play in the ambiguous allure that the West has generated for Siam/Thailand in the development of new cultural identities post-1850.

This chapter examines the history of Siamese/Thai attitudes to the West in relation to the situation of both colonized and other nominally independent societies. Drawing on postcolonial understandings of power, culture, and knowledge, it argues that while Siam/Thailand occupied a subordinate position in the Western-dominated world order, it was never a direct colony. The chapter also argues that the notion of semicolonialism provides an avenue to open a dialogue with postcolonial studies while recognizing the ambiguities of Western power in the Thai context.

This chapter examines how Siam's modernity developed in relation to areas on the Malay Peninsula, focusing on the role played by King Chulalongkorn and his closest advisors. The catalyst for Bangkok's centralization of control over territory was nineteenth-century European imperialism. Siam's leaders felt that the country's autonomy was under siege by imperial Britain and France, so they centralized and strengthened its provincial administration. The chapter argues that the decision by Siam's rulers to incorporate certain territories on the Malay Peninsula but not others, and the particular reforms pursued, were imbued with motives that went far beyond the original concern for Siam's independence, let alone survival. It entailed the direct administration of autonomously ruled Malay Muslim states and involved several other measures that appear characteristically imperial.

This concluding chapter discusses postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity to delineate some of the main forms of Siamese/Thai responses to the West. It compares Nestor García Canclini's account of the hybrid mestizaje discourse of Latin American Hispanic elites as a mode of hegemonic rule to the nineteenth-century Siamese elite discourse of siwilai (“civilized”). In contrast, at the international level in which Siam's rulers were subordinate to the West, the chapter draws on Homi Bhabha to read siwilai as a hybrid discourse manifesting Thai elites' subaltern resistance to Western imperialism. Both Bhabha's and García Canclini's different accounts of postcolonial cultural hybridity are needed to explain all these patterns of Thai–Western cultural mixing.

This chapter shows how the political system detailed in the previous chapters responded to unprecedented challenges to its authority and integrity, beginning in the early 1680s. A rebellion led by its own soldiers at Bombay, a Dutch-backed coup at Banten in Java, and growing impositions on its jurisdiction from Asian powers led Company leadership to a much more aggressive posture in defense of its network of fortified settlements and the rights and privileges that network was intended to protect. The Company sought to secure its colonies and establish new settlements, ideally through diplomacy, most notably at Bengkulu in Sumatra, but also through two wars, one in Siam and another in Bengal, which ultimately resulted in the grant of zamindari rights for the government of Calcutta. Through all this, Company governors’ guiding concern was not territorial aggrandizement or imperial expansion, but the integrity of its rights and jurisdiction, particularly over English subjects in Asia.

Siam-Ratchaprasong is the major center of Thailand’s royalist-led capitalist development and of its inherent contradictions. A birds-eye view on its architecture reveals just how much orientations towards the monarchy have shaped this stretch of land in the heart of Bangkok. Case studies of Sra Pathum Palace, the private palace of the king’s family, and of the controversial destruction of Phetchabun Palace, the former residence of a prince from a family line rival to that of the king, illustrate how developers in the Siam-Ratchaprasong area have been working towards the monarchy through space. However, a third case study shows how local business owners have become religious patrons themselves by setting up Hindu shrines at Ratchaprasong intersection. Their popularity often outshines that of more established royal places of worship. The weakening of the royal monopoly over religious sponsorship is indicative of the threat posed to the monarchy by capitalists.

This introductory chapter briefly discusses the major themes of this book. It argues that the investigation of unnatural death was an early—and unlikely—site of direct interaction between the state and its subjects. Furthermore, the chapter illustrates how the emergence of a necropolitical regime at the turn of the twentieth century offered a troubling rebuke to the master narrative of modern Thai historiography: namely, the doctrine of Siamese/Thai exceptionalism. Thailand's status as the only nation-state in Southeast Asia to avoid direct control by European imperial power marks it as a singular state with an exceptional past. And it is within this context that the chapter addresses certain morbid subjects—alluding not merely to death but also to the social, cultural, and political lives of the dead.

This concluding chapter discusses the brief rise and fall of forensic medical authority in Siam and how it might have corresponded with the arrival of a new paradigm of state consideration for the dead. In the ensuing years, concerns over obtaining justice for Siamese subjects in the plural legal arena created by extraterritorial law gave way dramatically to a new fixation on the threat of contagious disease in an increasingly interconnected world. The chapter shows how the threat of such diseases helped the Siamese state to establish new procedures for recording every death within the capital city along with its cause. In the larger context, the chapter addresses the issue of sovereignty as foreign imperialism and Siamese political authority struggled to keep up with the complications surrounding the legal status of the dead. In doing so, the chapter reveals the Siamese capital to be a city crowded with actors and forms of agency that do not figure in normative accounts of Thai history.

Prince Vajiravudh left England in the early 1900s to return to Siam, including a month long tour of the USA. His refusal to pursue relationships with women distressed his mother the queen. At his palace of Saranrom, Vajiravudh would imagine and create his own island home populated by young men who were not from the royal family. At Saranrom, he would begin to deploy the strategy he would use to link the oppositional narratives he now needed both to write and to live.

From 1891 to 1895, the Pahang War disrupted Britain’s enclosure of territory on the Malay Peninsula. Fought in response to an uprising by up to 700 rebels in Pahang, the war was not only a means for controlling damage to British interests but also an arena for a subtle, geopolitical contest between Britain and Siam for the Siamese tributaries, including Kelantan and Terengganu. During this period Terengganu, sheltered by legal and territorial constructs that kept the Siamese frontier open until 1902, was becoming a hub for perang sabil (‘holy war’) against British and Siamese ‘competitive colonialisms’. Known to be providing discursive, human, and other political resources to the Pahang rebels, Terengganu came to be portrayed as a ‘wild’ and ‘benighted’ place by Pahang’s British Resident Hugh Clifford, an important broker of the colonial race-thinking deployed as a means for controlling and taming the frontier.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how counterinsurgency practices contribute to producing Thailand as an imperial formation: a modern state formation with roots in the premodern Buddhist empire of Siam that secures its survival by constructing the southern Muslim population as essentially and hierarchically different. Reinforcing notions of the racialized, religious, and gendered Otherness of Patani, counterinsurgency thus fuels the very conflict it has been designed to resolve. From this perspective, it is possible to understand the marginalization of the southern conflict in official discourse, the denials of obvious connections between the insurgency and the August 2016 bombings, and the culturalization of a deeply political conflict as integral parts of imperial policing practices. The counterinsurgency motto “Understanding, Reaching Out, Development” has guided military operations in the southern region under various governments and juntas, and it encapsulates how counterinsurgency discourse is predicated on and produces the essentialized differences of the southern population. Most conspicuously, the motto positions Thai military as the paternal caretaker of the South and relocates the causes of insurgent violence in the differences of the southern population.

This chapter examines a handbook produced for military officers stationed in the South, relating some of its central notions to an imperial construction of history in the modern Thai state formation that simultaneously erases the state's conquest of the Islamic sultanate while marking Patani as its Muslim feminized Other. The epistemological grounds on which the handbook rests are central to the whole military project of building understanding. In this narrative, Patani emerges as an ancient Buddhist land incorporated into Siam by mere administrative reform, Siam's crushing of the legal and political power of the former Islamic sultanate is elided, and the Patani population is characterized as adhering to a private Muslim culture. Based on this narrative, the handbook constructs state officers as paternal protectors of the southern population. The military aligning itself with objectivity is especially noteworthy in a conflict region where claims to knowledge — about history, in particular — are among the stated reasons for violence, and in a country where the government restricts open discussions about Patani's history.

At street level, Siam-Ratchaprasong becomes a site of artful engagement with urban space, a site where the disciplining measures of dominant institutions are contested and subverted but also accepted and supported. The slum community Chumchon Lang Wat Pathumwanaram demonstrates that people who are working towards or against the monarchy might live in the same neighborhood. Splits run deep not just between but through classes. Another case, that of illegal street vendors at Siam Square, illustrates that resistance does not necessarily challenge the status quo but may be marked by its intelligent manipulation. Some groups at Siam-Ratchaprasong, however, have started to actively work against the monarchy. Anti-royal graffiti drawn by red shirt protesters on a construction hoarding at Ratchaprasong intersection show how strong opposition to the monarchy has become at this site where the unequal distribution of charismatic benefits in Thailand assumes material form.

This chapter examines the continued evolution of land rights as the threat of colonization diminished with the outbreak of World War I, along with the emergence of Thai nationalism as a political force and the impact of the Great Depression on rural society. Before discussing the interaction between the parallel development of nationalism and property rights in land in Thailand, the chapter considers the role of Japan in the continued evolution of Siamese land policy and law. It also discusses the land-titling law passed by Parliament in 1936 and goes on to analyze how the new political forces and historical experiences reinforced rather than challenged the status quo in regards to rural land rights in Thailand. The chapter concludes by comparing the impact of the Great Depression in Burma and Siam to illustrate the significance of the legacy of institutional underdevelopment.