by Baker Chris
Some people were able to escape forced labour in various ways. Some melted away to song, fugitive villages in the forests and remote areas. The court occasionally sent out expeditions to round them up, but more often contacted them to buy forest goods for the export trade. Some sought the protection of undemanding patrons. Others simply bribed officials to be reclassified in the registers. In one local register from 1867, three-fifths of the adult males were exempt from corvée as officials, monks, slaves, disabled, destitute, mentally ill, or possessed by evil spirits. By Prince Damrong’s estimate in the 1870s, four-fifths of males evaded the corvée.
Those members of the elite engaged in the market economy encouraged the development of more free or semi-free labour. From the 1830s, people began to commute their annual corvée obligation into a money payment. By the 1840s, so many took this option that government had to use hired Chinese labour rather than corvée for public works. By the 1850s, the returns from commutation had become the largest item of royal revenue. Nobles with commercial interests urged Mongkut to abolish conscription. Around the capital, debt slavery rose steeply. The resident French Bishop Pallegoix estimated that ‘at least a third of the population’ held this status.27 By selling themselves into slavery, freemen could raise some capital and escape corvée obligation. Some debt slaves repaid their creditor in labour, while others worked in the market economy and repaid in cash. Ironically, this massive expansion of ‘slavery’ in and around the capital was a way of releasing labour from traditional servitude for use in the market economy.
Gender relations also began to reflect this division within society. In the new market society, the position of women as the legal property of men faced challenge. Suphasit son ying (Sayings for Ladies), a mid-19th- century manual probably authored by Sunthon Phu, differed from earlier such manuals which taught wives how to minister submissively to their husbands. It recognized that more upper-class women wanted a say in selecting a husband and advised them how to choose wisely. It instructed them in how to contribute to the family business activity, which was increasingly important for women of this class. The manual suggests that many women were not quite as dependent as the law implied. Perhaps for this reason, in 1868 Mongkut abolished a husband’s right to sell his wife or her children without her permission because ‘the stipulation treats a woman as if she were a water buffalo’.28
But while Mongkut accommodated new attitudes in market society, at the same time he strengthened the rights of traditional upper-class families to treat women as assets. He ruled that it was acceptable for women of low or middle class to choose a husband, but not those of high birth because their choice might affect the prestige of the family. The 1868 amendment specifically noted that a man could still purchase a slave as a wife and resell her later. Specifically among families with over 400 sakdina, Mongkut strengthened the father’s legal authority over wives and daughters. In the same vein, Thiphakorawong, one of the foremost advocates of ‘progress’, wrote a defence of polygamy. The deployment of daughters was still critical to the influence of the great households.
The Bowring treaty
Approaching mid-century, there was growing tension within the elite over the linked issues of the economy, social order, and handling of the west. Traditionalists wanted to keep the west at arm’s length and preserve the old social order, especially traditional controls on unfree labour. Under King Nangklao, this faction remained strong. The king shifted from royal trading monopolies to tax-farming, but refused westerners’ entreaties for more liberal trading. He relied heavily on traditional conscription for his eastern campaigns.
Reformers believed that more western trade, freer labour, and access to new technologies would stimulate economic growth to the benefit of both government revenues and private fortunes. The leaders of reform were the patriarchs of the Bunnag household and the group of aristocratic intellectuals around Prince Mongkut. In 1842, Britain humbled China in the Opium Wars, showing the consequences of defying British demands for ‘free trade’. The impact of the war ruined the Siam–China junk trade and persuaded Siam to look to westerners for a substitute. The British victory also meant that both India and China, sources of so much of Siam’s old culture, had fallen under western domination. Increasingly, the elite’s gaze swivelled westwards.
In 1851, the Bunnag manoeuvred Mongkut’s succession to the throne. Members of the reform faction were rewarded with promotions and increased power. They argued that it was senseless to continue defending the junk trade by differential duties in the face of the economic superiority of western shipping. They also urged that earlier attempts to block opium imports had only created super-profits and gang wars. In 1855, Mongkut invited John Bowring, the governor of Britain’s opium capital of Hong Kong, to negotiate a trade treaty. This treaty abolished the remnants of royal monopolies, equalized the dues on western and Chinese shipping, granted extraterritorial rights to British citizens, and allowed the British to import opium for sale through a government monopoly. Bowring promoted his career by claiming a victory for the principle of free trade. The court made the opium monopoly into the single largest source of revenue.
The treaty marked Siam’s reorientation away from China, which had been the focus over the prior 150 years, and towards the west.
Conclusion
The long wars against Burma in the late 18th century initially froze the trends of social and economic change, and brought back the traditions of militarism and control of people. But from the early 19th century, the pace of change resumed. The aristocracy now became much more dominant. In the capital and provinces they established virtually hereditary shares in the practice of government and its profits. The monarchs were reduced to a more limited role.
With growing Chinese trade and immigration, the market economy expanded in the Chao Phraya heartland and down the peninsula. Under its impact, the social order began to shift. More people slid free of old systems of labour control. A new cadre of great Chinese jao sua families joined the ranks of the elite. Within old elite families, more turned to enterprise. Mentalities changed in parallel.
The return of westerners brought apprehension about colonial designs, but also intrigue about their science, gadgets, and ideas of progress. By mid-century, reformers within the elite wanted to turn to the west, increase Siam’s trade, and free more labour. The enthronement of Mongkut by the Bunnag in 1851, and the Bowring treaty four years later, signalled the reformers’ rising influence.
After the treaty increased Siam’s exposure to the west, the critical issue for the elite changed: how to reform the polity to cope with the social changes of the market economy and the threat of colonialism.
3 Reforms, 1850s to 1910s
At the end of the 19th century, Siam was remade as a nation-state. The ‘nation’ constructed by this process was novel. The areas collected within the borders had very different histories, languages, religious cultures, and traditions. The Thai language seems to have been spoken in the lower Chao Phraya river system and down the upper peninsula, but in practice local dialects varied greatly, and the languages of Bangkok and Chiang Mai were mutually unintelligible. Over the prior century, the expansion of Bangkok’s political influence, the influx of war captives, and Chinese immigration had added to the social variety. The fragmentation of the administration gave scope for local difference.
The ideas of nation, unified nation-state, nationality, national identity, and centralized nation-governing bureaucracy were imposed from above. They were adapted from European models and adopted in part to parry the threat of colonial takeover. But they were taken up also to replace old systems of rule and social control that had become less effective as a result of social change and that could not satisfy the new demands of the market economy.
The decline of the traditional polity
By the mid-19th century, the combination of military expansion and the rising commercial economy had changed the demography of the core kingdom in ways that undermined the traditi
onal political order based on personal ties.
By the 1850s, there were around 300 000 resident Chinese, many of whom had immigrated over the prior two generations. The government initially tried to manage them by the traditional method of absorbing their community leaders into the bureaucracy and making these leaders responsible for their conduct and welfare. But this method did not fit the new facts. The Chinese did not form a ‘community’ with established leaders who could be co-opted by the court. They were too many, too varied, too mobile, and too scattered for this old technique to work. In the port, rice mills, sugar factories, and tin mines, they worked together in bigger concentrations than ever seen before. Many were far from Bangkok and difficult to control, particularly in the expanding tin mines down the peninsula. Occasionally they ran riot. Several times in the 1840s and 1870s, troops had to be sent to the sugar tracts east of Bangkok to restore order. The southern town of Ranong was ‘almost lost to the government’ during a miners’ riot in the 1870s. When a gunboat was sent to restore order, the mob reacted by burning and looting Phuket. The ability of striking workers to paralyse the Bangkok port gave the rulers nightmares about a Chinese takeover of the city. In 1889, rival Chinese gangs fought a pitched battle in the centre of the capital for three days.
As with immigrants everywhere, the Chinese formed self-help and self-defence societies. The authorities saw these as angyi or samakhom lap, secret societies – a term that betrayed their trepidation. The government feared these organizations were smuggling opium, distilling local liquor, and running gambling rackets. They were also armed. Attempts to police illegal opium trading and illegal distilling were occasionally defied by gunfire and even cannon. While Chuang Bunnag was dominant in the government at mid-century, he adopted a policy of liang angyi, ‘nurturing the secret societies’ and entrusting them to keep the peace.
Besides the Chinese, many other people had escaped the old systems of personal control. Some were drawn off to a new agrarian frontier, especially to grow rice for feeding the growing urban population, for export to China, and for supplies for the armies on campaign. In the 1830s, canals were built east and west from Bangkok to serve as highways for trade and military movements. These canals drained areas of swamp, which were immediately settled by people seeking rice land.
This new frontier allowed peasant settlers to flee beyond the reach of labour controls and policing. For the most part, the government made no objection, while gradually increasing the range of taxes on production, commerce, and entertainments. But from mid-century, it became worried about ‘banditry’ in the rural areas, and over following decades this worry expanded into an obsession. Some of the bandits were peasants who had suffered a bad harvest or other misfortune. Some were running opium, liquor, and gambling rackets. Some were professional cattle rustlers. Some were just nakleng, local toughs who defended their village against predators, including moneylenders and tax collectors. These bandits ambushed convoys carrying tax returns back to Bangkok, looted government granaries, and seized land. Some became instant folk heroes, celebrated in ballads for their defiance of authority. In some places, peasants copied the example of the angyi to form associations for the same mix of self-protection and defiance of the law. Farther afield, in the Lao areas brought under Bangkok influence since the late 18th century, people were occasionally attracted to the support of phumibun, men of merit who promised to turn the world upside-down and usher in a millenarian age of justice and plenty.
The 1855 Bowring treaty, and parallel agreements concluded with other western nations soon after, further stimulated the market economy, and increased the strain on the old administrative system in a specific way. They gave extraterritorial rights to foreign citizens, especially the right to be tried by their consuls rather than Siamese courts. Traders who arrived from British Burma or French Indochina sometimes used this protection to defy Siamese officials, avoid taxation, and engage in illegal businesses. Some Chinese merchants secured protégé status or allied themselves with foreign protégés to avoid law and control. Other Chinese converted to Roman Catholicism as another way to appeal for colonial protection. Siamese official attempts to suppress these activities threatened to create the flashpoint for a typical colonial ‘incident’.
In addition, the demands on government became more complex as the economy changed. ‘Every day’, an official order noted, ‘the number of court cases increases, because people are trading and dealing with each other more and more’.1 The provinces, according to one European visitor, were full of ‘unsatisfied litigants, unsettled claims, and untried prisoners’.2
While Mongkut’s intellectual interests leaned towards the west, his approach to managing the increasingly disorderly kingdom was very traditional. He revived a great deal of royal ritual, which had been neglected since the fall of Ayutthaya, including the annual festival of the great swing. He travelled to upcountry centres where he gave funds for the repair and upkeep of prominent wat, which were adopted as ‘royal temples’. He enforced the biennial ritual of allegiance in which the provincial ruler and officials gathered, often at the royal wat, and drank the water of allegiance while facing towards the capital. To fortify the capital against enemies, he built six new forts, but also created a new city pillar, cast a new horoscope for the country, and invented Sayam Thewathirat, a protective spirit for the kingdom. Traditionally, most villages and mueang had such spirits as a focus of unity and identity, but not the domain of a king. When the ruins of Angkor were rediscovered, Mongkut sent an expedition to dismantle one of its temples to be reassembled in Bangkok and add to the capital’s sacred power, but had to abandon the idea because the temples were too large and the Siamese party was attacked.
Mongkut also issued large numbers of decrees and royal proclamations that were not administrative orders but statements of principle intended to guide the actions of officials and people – somewhat in the style of Chinese imperial rule. Several of these orders were attempts to increase the specialness of monarchy and its distance from the rest of society. He laid down rules on the use of rachasap, the heavily Khmer-derived language for use in addressing the king; forbade personal descriptions of the king; outlawed the adoption of consorts with a rural background; and ordered the use of regnal years for the calendar. He laid down a very precise hierarchy within the royal family based on age, the status of the mother, and genealogical distance from the reigning king, along with titles that publicised this fine gradation. He changed inheritance laws to limit the extent to which polygamy might disperse family wealth, especially in the royal family. His own historical sketches, and the chronicles revised in his reign, tried to prove that legitimate patrilineal succession was the norm in Thai history. He laid down forms of address for every level of the social hierarchy from king to slave. He forbade commoners who acquired a wat education from getting posts in the major ministries as these were reserved for ‘men of good family and background, the sons of nobles’.3 By using various traditional ways, Mongkut strove for a more hierarchically ordered kingdom under a more elevated monarchy.
Mongkut also looked to China. He sent a tribute mission to ask for formal confirmation of the succession in the usual way, but after the mission was waylaid by rebels, he did not repeat the attempt and later ridiculed the whole idea. He had himself and his son painted in the robes of senior Chinese mandarins. But increasingly he looked to the west. From 1860, he hired westerners as government advisers and set about bringing ‘progress’ to Siam. He tried to centralize tax revenues; issued codes of governance for the rulers of provinces and tributary states; encouraged citizens to make judicial appeals to the king; and imagined himself as a phramahakasat, a great king, ruling over an ekkarat, a unified and independent kingdom. He told Anna Leonowens, the governess hired to teach English and western manners to his sons, he would ‘doubtless without hesitation, abolish slavery…for the distinguishing of my reign’.4 In practice, the king’s powers were circumscribed by the power of the great noble families and the
limited scope of the administrative machinery. Mongkut’s reign was a time of transition, suspended between different eras and different worlds (Figure 2).
Figure 2: King Mongkut between different worlds: (left) in full Siamese regalia, photographed by Francis Chit in 1864; (right) imagined by an unknown artist in the robes of a senior Chinese mandarin; (bottom) sketched among the palace women by the party of the Comte de Beauvoir visiting in 1866.
The old administrative system based on personalized ties was increasingly ineffective. More people were free of the ties that bound them to the state. The elite’s efforts at mobilizing Buddhism as a basis of social discipline, and strengthening traditional hierarchies, were only partially effective. Rulers extracting revenue from the rising commercial economy, as well as entrepreneurs extracting profits, wanted new methods to discipline people, mobilize resources, and protect wealth.
Administering a country
King Chulalongkorn succeeded his father, Mongkut, in 1868, and over his 42-year reign the old political order was replaced by the model of the nation-state.