by Baker Chris
The Paknam Incident of 1893 dramatically increased the elite’s fear of a colonial takeover. Chulalongkorn repeatedly stressed the mystical importance of chat, and the overriding duty of the citizens to have samakkhi (unity), to defend it. In this era, the dissident Kulap was prosecuted, and Prisdang, the royal cousin who headed the 1885 memorial, was disgraced and went into exile. In 1904, Chulalongkorn stated that the king was the embodiment of the nation, that Siam needed ‘unity around the middle path of the king’, and that a parliament would only lead to ‘additional divisions and conflicts’.
At the very end of Chulalongkorn’s reign and thereafter, Damrong redefined the nature of Siamese kingship in a series of speeches and studies. In the past, the king provided protection that allowed the people to pursue the Buddhist path towards nibbana. Now the king’s role was to bring progress. Both Mongkut and Chulalongkorn had travelled round the country like monks on thudong (pilgrimage) to know the people’s problems. All the king’s actions were devoted to improving the people’s well-being. ‘The Thai way of government is like a father over a son, as is called in English paternal government.’ The result was a king ‘of the people’ and ‘for the people’, who derived his power from the people’s love. Damrong claimed that the new exposure of the royal body, especially through the massive equestrian statue and the innovation of allowing mourners to pay respects to Chulalongkorn’s corpse, created a new closeness so that ‘people began to have a feeling of love, which had not been felt for a king for a long time. After his death, people were truly sorrowful’.40
This style of kingship, Damrong implied, was intrinsic to the Chakri dynasty. His historical studies showed that (non-Chakri) Taksin had failed as a king, as a patron of traditional arts, and as a leader of Buddhism because he did not belong to this tradition. Damrong subtly edited the chronicles of the early Chakri reigns so that it appeared this style of kingship had been practised from the start of the dynasty. He argued that members of the royal family dominated the government because they were educated in statecraft, were devoted to an ideal of service that won popular respect, and were hence able to will their status to their heirs. Damrong’s portrayal of royal rule implied that constitutional rule was unnecessary and any departure from Chakri dominance would be a regression. ‘If there is no king’, Damrong wrote into the chronicle of Chulalongkorn’s reign, ‘the land will fall into disorder’.41
Conclusion
The last quarter of the 19th century saw massive changes arising from the social strains of the market economy, the new ‘bourgeois’ mentality of the elite, and the threats and opportunities of contact with the west. Siam avoided colonial rule. In part, this was due to geography and timing: Siam became a buffer between French and British ambitions as the era of colonial land-grabbing came to an end. In part, it was because the Ayutthayan-era practice of absorbing foreigners into the government could be adapted into a semi-colonial compromise. In part, the Siamese elite embraced the ideas of progress and history, and the technologies of mapping, colonial bureaucracy, law codes, and military conscription.
In the traditional framework, the king’s power extended over all ‘who sought the royal protection’. The duties of the royal state were to provide shelter against external enemies and allay internal disorder by policing and by settling disputes. The relations that structured the state were all personal ties – the phrai’s subordination to a nai, the patron–client links within the official bureaucracy, and the fealty of a subordinate ruler or provincial jao to the king, expressed in ritual displays, such as drinking the water of allegiance. Tax revenues, forced labour, and exotic goods flowed up this personalized pyramid to support and glorify the upper levels. People transacted with the court on a limited range of matters (tax, corvée, dispute settlement), and mostly through intermediaries, such as the tax-farmer and local recruiting agent.
The new political unit was defined by a territorial boundary. All those enclosed within the boundary, and granted ‘nationality’, were members of the nation and subjects of the state. The duty of the state was not only to provide protection but also to achieve ‘progress’. To that end it built telegraphs and railways, organized religion and education to improve the citizen’s mentality, and patronized public health to improve the citizen’s physical capability. This extended purpose of the state legitimized an enlarged interference in the life of the citizen. People dealt with centrally appointed officials who taxed, counted, taught, policed, recruited, examined, and much besides. They were submitted to programmes of religious instruction, schooling, and education in citizenship.
In practice, the scope of this new Leviathan was initially limited by funds and human resources to the major towns. Besides, old structures and ideas lingered. Personal connections and family networks remained important both inside and outside the new bureaucracy. Old attitudes of dominance based on social rank were reproduced in the relations between bureaucrat and peasant. But all such survivals now had to compromise with the power vested in the state. The principles were laid, and the reach of the state gradually expanded over future decades. The process was far from smooth. Throughout Chulalongkorn’s reign, there were rumours of coups in the capital by both traditionalists and disappointed reformers. Some parts of the Sangha showed quiet displeasure at trends of secularization and westernization. In the outer territories, some resistance continued after the turn-of-century revolts. In Lanna, Khruba Siwichai led opposition to the centralization and standardization of the Sangha down to the 1920s. But most resistance was passive – exploiting the lacunae of an uncompleted nation-state.
The people were bystanders at the creation of the Siamese nation-state. The territory of Siam was defined as a residual of colonial expansion. The nation was imagined to fit this space and encompass whoever was inside it. The administrative structure was adapted from colonial practice and imposed from above. The creation of the nation and nation-state went hand in hand with an increase in royal power and a reconceptualization of the monarchy’s ideological foundations. The nation was conceived, not as an expression of its people in all their variety, but as a mystical unity symbolized by the ruler – an absolutist nation.
4 Peasants, merchants, and officials, 1870s to 1930s
The nation-state was new. So too were its citizens, as a result of two sweeping social changes. Beginning in the early 19th century, the landscape and society of the lower Chao Phraya basin was transformed by a frontier movement of peasant colonization. Uniquely in Asia, new land was being opened up faster than population growth from the mid-19th century right through to the 1970s. As a result of political decisions in the late 19th century, this frontier society was characterized not by landlords but by peasant smallholders. Until urbanization accelerated in the last quarter of the 20th century, this smallholder peasant society represented four-fifths of the population and was the main driving force of the economy.
Much of the urban population was also new, especially in the capital city of Bangkok. Continuous immigration from southern China made Chinese a dominant element in the city’s economic life. Western merchants and advisers formed a new semicolonial segment of the elite. A fledgling commoner middle class began to form around the city’s new role as capital of a nation-state.
Transforming the rural landscape and society
Europeans who visited Siam in the 1820s thought much of the Chao Phraya delta was a ‘wilderness’. Plains of scrub forest inhabited by wild elephants merged near the coasts and rivers into marshes dense with reeds and teeming with crocodiles. Settlements clung to the banks of the main rivers. Even along the Chao Phraya River from its estuary past Bangkok and into the upper delta, most of these banks looked ‘deserted’ and densely wooded (Figure 6). In the Ayutthaya era, the only extensive tract of rice cultivation had been the narrow corridor of floodplain running south from Chainat in the centre of the delta. Here farmers grew floating rice on the annual monsoon flooding. Even after the economic expansion and exports to China in the early 19th c
entury, rice cultivation was still largely confined to this tract. Around 1850, three-quarters of the delta’s land area was still unused, and the total population of the Chao Phraya delta region (or ‘central plain’) was probably around 500 000 people.
Figure 6: Before the rice frontier. As sketched by Henri Mouhot in 1858, the banks of the Chao Phraya River were still dense jungle.
On average each year over the next century, another 7000 households settled in the delta region and brought an additional 200 000 rai (32 000 hectares) of land under the plough. By 1950, the triangle from the head of the delta to the coastal salt flats 250 kilometres to the south had become a lattice of canals with almost every square inch of land under cultivation.
The transformation of the delta landscape began in the early 19th century when immigrant Chinese brought expertise in growing vegetables, pepper, sugar, and other crops. From the 1810s, more Thai began to slip away from traditional controls to this agrarian frontier. At first they grew mainly sugarcane but in the 1870s sugar exports collapsed because beet-sugar in Europe and Dutch colonial sugarcane production in Java were more cost-efficient. From then, rice became the major crop and major export. The growth of cities and plantation populations in colonial Asia created a rapidly growing demand for food. The cheaper freight costs of western steamers made it more economic to transport such bulky crops. Rice exports averaged around 100 000 tons a year in the 1860s, and five times that amount by the turn of the 20th century.
The early expansion of frontier settlement took place along the raised areas at the eastern and western fringes of the delta, and along canals built as highways across the delta in the 1820s and 1830s. From the 1860s, the king seized on canal building as a way to create landholdings as support for the rapidly growing number of royal kin. The king cut several new canals and parcelled out the land along the banks, mainly to royal relatives. Big noble households copied the strategy. The Bunnag family built a major canal to the west and several other big households invested in smaller projects. In the 1890s, the royal-related Sanitwong family launched the largest of these projects to drain 1.5 million rai of the Rangsit area to the northeast of the capital. The king took a share. In these canal projects, the banks were allotted in large plots of 1500 to 3000 rai apiece, often worked by the nobles’ supplies of tied labour. People migrated, especially from the Khorat Plateau, to work as tenants and labourers in these new rice lands.
The government passed a land law that granted full property rights based on a cadastral survey and title deeds. Land prices in the Rangsit project jumped from 5 baht per rai in 1892 to 37.5 baht in 1904. Several royal relatives petitioned to launch yet more such canal schemes. One of Chulalongkorn’s half-brothers noted that ‘of all the enterprises in which Thai of good positions can at the present invest their money, it is difficult to find any as promising as trading in land, and of the various types of land none is as profitable as rentable rice land’.1
But this trend towards landlordism collapsed around the turn of the century. Sugarcane lent itself to large-scale plantations, but paddy was more suited to smallholder cultivation. The settlers who moved into the canal tracts were used to having occupancy rights and not used to landlordism. Many new landlords had no experience of managing land. By the 1890s in the Rangsit tract, ‘there is a dispute about almost every holding’.2 Communities organized local nakleng toughs to keep rent and tax collectors out of the village. In reply, landlords hired bands ‘armed with guns, cutlasses and other arms’ to drive settlers off the land.3 The Rangsit project office had to be defended by gun emplacements.
The king decided to halt the development of a landed nobility. In the 1870s, as he began to attack other bases of the power of the great households, Chulalongkorn instructed officials to allot land on new canal projects to peasant families, and to reclaim land that big landlords failed to cultivate. He refused permission for new canal projects – first, those planned by other noble households, and then, after 1900, those planned by royal kin as well.
Peasant colonization had already begun to expand in areas away from the canal tracts. From the 1880s, as more people escaped from labour bondage, the pace increased. No attempt was made to extend the new land property titling to these areas. Instead, officials evolved a practical system of allowing settlers to jap jong, stake a claim to empty land, and gain a certificate of occupancy right as long as they brought the land into cultivation.
The task of draining the swamps for cultivation was removed from private enterprise. A Dutchman, van der Heide, was hired to prepare a massive drainage and irrigation scheme covering the whole delta. His 1902 plan was shelved on grounds of cost, but the government’s Irrigation Department launched smaller schemes that gradually over following decades covered the whole delta with a lattice of canals. Settlements followed the engineers, putting 10 million rai (1.6 million hectares) under paddy in half a century.
The first phase of expansion was confined to the Chao Phraya delta. After railways were built to Khorat in 1900, Chiang Mai in 1921, and Khon Kaen in 1933, export demand sparked colonization around these railheads, bringing an additional 180 000 rai under paddy each year. As around Bangkok, some land was acquired by landlords. In the northern valleys, the old ruling families grabbed land to compensate for their loss of control over the state revenues and forests. Some drove peasants off the land by releasing rampaging elephants or spreading rumours of witchcraft. Some built irrigation systems to bring new land into cultivation. Around the railheads in the south and northeast, old ruling families, village chiefs, and a few successful merchants and tax-farmers acquired large landholdings by similar strategies.
But most of the expansion was carried ahead by peasant settlers released from labour bondage. Above Chiang Mai, they repopulated areas abandoned in the 18th century. In the northeast, they spread along the Chi-Mun river system. In the south, they cleared the broad basins between the mountains and the east coast of the peninsula. By 1937, only a quarter of the land in the central plain was under landlords and the remainder was occupied by smallholders. In the north, the landlord proportion was a fifth, and in the northeast insignificant.
The rice frontier created a small landlord elite, but its main effect was to turn the new citizens of the Siamese nation into peasant smallholders.
Smallholder society
The rice frontier changed not only the landscape, but also the social geography. Previously, most people lived clustered close to a mueang centre. Now they spread across the landscape as villages sprang up along the waterways throughout the paddy tracts. People also became more mobile. In the early years of the frontier, settlers came from all directions. One village was settled first by migrants from the hills, then by another group from upland plains, and later by people from coastal areas down the peninsula. For security, households often moved and settled in groups, generally related by kin. Many households moved several times in one generation. The practice of the monkhood changed in response to this new social geography: some monks left urban wat and circulated around the countryside, staying only for the annual rains retreat in a fixed place. As villages became more permanent and well off, they built a wat and invited these itinerant monks to stay.
Although most villages were newly established, that did not mean they lacked a heritage or distinctive culture. Indeed, the strength of village culture arose from its ability to survive such disruptions through communal cooperation. Most villages had a tutelary spirit, usually the ancestor-founder, often represented by a post, rock, or tree at the centre of the settlement. Spirit rituals encouraged cooperation, disciplined dissidence, and promoted the unity and independence of the community. As early travellers into the rural hinterland found, the first reaction of villagers to the approach of anything that might be official was to flee into the forests to avoid being conscripted for forced labour.
Villages on the rice frontier had a degree of economic independence also. Farmers worked with simple tools they fashioned themselves from wood, with a l
ittle help from a local blacksmith. Cattle bought from pedlars were the only major investment. Most farmers broadcast rather than transplanted paddy, and chose varieties that could grow quickly during the rising annual flood. Use of fertilizer was almost unknown. The yield per rai of this simple regime was very low. But, because of subtropical conditions, the natural fertility of river silt, and plentiful land, the yield per person in the Chao Phraya delta was higher than anywhere in Asia, even intensively cultivated Japan.
The natural environment also supplied other foods (fish, vegetables, fruit), the raw materials for tools and housing, herbs for medicine, and household fuel. The seasonal rhythm of monsoon paddy cultivation coexisted easily with a regime of supplementary hunting and gathering for these items. Production was organized on a household basis, with traditions of exchanging labour, especially for harvesting and house building. These communal projects were also excuses for festivity and occasions for courting.
Men and women shared work on the land, including ploughing (Figure 7). During the agricultural off-season, villagers took surplus and specialist products to trade with neighbouring villages and across the ecological boundaries between hills, plains, and coast. Many of these petty traders were women. So too were most of the barge-owners who transported rice along the waterways. In the 19th century, female slaves commanded a higher price than males because ‘the woman is decidedly as a worker worth more than the man’.4
Figure 7: Working women. Descendants of Lao forced migrants in Phetchaburi. Engraving based on a photograph, possibly by John Thomson, who visited this area during 1865–66.
The production system was highly geared to self-reliance. Visiting the far northeast in 1906, Damrong exclaimed: ‘Villagers around here make all their own food and scarcely have to buy a single thing…Nobody is slave and nobody master…nobody accumulates but you cannot call them poor because they feed themselves happily and contentedly’.5 During 1930–31, a Harvard economist, Carle Zimmerman, conducted the first quantitative survey of Siam’s agriculture. Everywhere, he found, farmers produced first for their own family needs and sold only any surplus that remained. According to the local saying, the household waited until it saw the yield of the current harvest before selling off the surplus of the previous one. Food security was priority. Beyond the immediate vicinity of the major towns and railheads, the agrarian economy was ‘near the state of self-sufficient’.6