How Thailand Resisted Colonization
worksinprogress.co
worksinprogress.co
This included imposing unified national language and cultural homogeneity across their territory, with centralized government, laws, administration. The other side of that is the suppression of regional languages and culture, as it happened during European nation-building with Welsh, Gaelic, Breton, Occitan, Alsatian, German and Italian dialects. Similarly in China, Japan, and elsewhere.
The building of telegraph lines, railways, and schools helped solidify nation state authority. I wonder how that relates to the internet, as a tool of communication as well as social control and centralizing power.
A way to summarize how Thailand resisted colonization is that it colonized itself, and successfully adapted culturally to the wave of Europeanization and modern global order of nation states.
That feels true only inasmuch as adapting a bit to the realities of the nineteeth century and strengthening the state is synonymous with colonization, which I don't think it is really.
Thailand remained an absolute monarchy throughout the colonial period, studiously avoided converting to Christianity, wide adoption of European languages or even orthography, and did not become a major trade partner even after signing agreements favourable to Europeans. It abolished serfdom and introduced national education and railways at its own pace decades after the initial trade agreement and its culture remained rural and Buddhist. Modern international Bangkok and its financial centre is the result of changes that took place long after the colonial era, built around palaces, temples and canals that predated it.
The article downplays that Thais were also more powerful than their Lao or Cambodian neighbours to the point they treated them like colonies themselves (hence why the French could claim to be "protectors" of Laos, and why their colonizing of Laos and Cambodia was a defeat for Siam, but not a critical one). So its not surprising they were able to command more respect from Europeans, particularly when they were pragmatic and diplomatic enough to give those de facto colonies up to the more powerful colonizer. The parts of Siam that stayed independent to become modern day Thailand also formed a neat buffer between what was French Indochina and English India/Burma
The European colonial powers were not all over the world to enforce "European cultural values". They were there to extract minerals, lumber, labor, and agricultural produce for as little a price they could pay.
Also,
Napier enforced the British prohibition of suttee, or sati practice. This was the custom of a widow's burning herself to death on the funeral pyre of her husband. While rarer during the time Napier ruled Sindh,[20] these immolations were, Napier judged, motivated by profits for the priests; when told of an actual sati about to take place, he informed those involved that he would stop the sacrifice. The priests complained that this was a customary religious rite, and that customs of a nation should be respected. As recounted by his brother William, he famously replied:
Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Napier_(British_Army_o...
Nobody's denying the subcontinent had its faults. But holding a few instances of positive work by the British doesn't nullify the millionfold negative stuff.
I'm not going to give you sources. You can research on your own. Every bit of British history in the subcontinent shows that the "customs" were nothing but a ruse to justify the loot and a fig leaf, at best, to cover up quite a lot of injustice.
The biggest criticism I usually see of this narrative is that the British and the French may have also seen Thailand as a neutral buffer zone between their respective empires. By staying out of Thailand, they reduced the risk of conflict between them, supposedly.
I have no idea how valid this idea is, or how much of a factor it would have been, I'm not a historian.
Of course the reality of nation state politics is complex and there's never going to be a single "true" theory.
My suspicion here is that the buffer theory takes agency away from the Thai and makes it seem like just luck, while this article does the opposite, and the reality is probably a big mess somewhere in between those.
It is by no means a given that Britain and France would see a need for a neutral buffer zone given that the home countries of the two powers only had a small channel separating them in Europe. They'd be used to the idea of sharing a border. We can all but guarantee that both of them had people looking at the map every so often and asking if it made sense to officially add Siam to the imperial holdings.
Rather as this history describes, the Thai monarchy and government appears to have modernized (Westernized?) just in time to be able thread a needle between two empires, playing them off each other to maintain independence.
It is worth noting that the word "Thai" has come to mean "free" in the eponymous language. Thailand literally means "land od the free".
Note that this history conveniently ends before World War II.
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I have to ask, though, where are you getting the idea that ไทย ("Thai") also translates to "free", or that it's pre-WW2?
Google Translate doesn't list that as a translation for "free" at all, and thai-language.com mostly lists that in the context of the Free Thai movement ([a WW2 anti-Japanese resistance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Thai_Movement)).
There's probably some subtleties I'm missing, but it really seems like a niche definition.
I confess my ignorance in this specific matter, but when somebody leaves something on the table it means that it costs too much to take it.
There's a lot of stuff there that needed to succeed in several different ways (technical, local population, foreign image) to work, and it did.
This seems a little too glib to me. Certainly Siam was a success in relative terms, but it seems to me they still adopted Western culture partly under duress. I suppose it's academic at this point, but I wonder how quickly they would have chosen to assimilate without the imminent threat of colonization.
> In the face of overwhelming military force, Chulalongkorn ceded the territory, making a necessary concession to preserve the kingdom as a whole. Siam was forced to cede territory to the French in what is now Laos and Cambodia, creating much of the modern borders of Thailand. The French established a demilitarized zone along the Mekong, and the Siamese had to pay an indemnity of three million francs. European powers readily resorted to gunboat diplomacy but even here, France felt compelled to frame its demands in terms of legitimate Vietnamese territorial claims rather than naked conquest.
> Between 1893 and 1909, Siam would cede around 40 percent of its territory to France and Britain. But the strategic retreat meant Chulalongkorn preserved what mattered most: the political independence of Siam’s core territories.
with its contrasting description of Burma definitely getting colonized:
> Following its defeats in the Anglo-Burmese Wars of 1824–26 and 1852, Burma had been forced to surrender four provinces, pay a crippling £1 million indemnity (about $160 million today), and accept the presence of a British overseer with veto power over the king’s decisions.
...
> When Britain manufactured border disputes to complete Burma’s annexation in 1885, Mindon’s modernization efforts provided no protection against a colonial power that was, by that point, committed to conquest.
It rather seems to me like Siam was about two decades into a process that would usually take a few decades more, but got a respite due to World War I distracting the colonizers. (Maybe an even better counterexample to the article's thesis that adopting the trappings of Western civilization protected against invasion by European powers.)
> Weak institutions built by colonists fell apart after twentieth-century decolonizations, contributing to the deaths of millions of people across Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Burma.
This is a really problematic narrative. Thailand was basically a junior partner in the American military aggression in the region, which is what was most responsible for those deaths. Something like 80% of all USAF air strikes over North Vietnam originated from bases in Thailand. There were tens of thousands of American service members serving in Thailand in the late 1960s, more than in South Vietnam. The B52s bombing Cambodia flew from U-Tapao. Thais even served in the war, mostly in Laos.
The declaration of 1896 was followed up by the Entente Cordiale of 1904, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Entente_Cordiale that divided Siam into spheres of influence, "disclaiming all idea of annexing any Siamese territory." Of course this was preceded by France annexing some Siamese territory earlier in 1904 and followed by France in 1907 and Britain in 1909 annexing even more territory.
There's really no need to explain a supposedly unusual reluctance by colonial powers to encroach on Siam, when they were doing just that, at their usual pace. It's not like they could roll in with tanks (that hadn't been invented yet) and take over the entire country in a few days. It took centuries to expand their empires to their maximum size, they could afford a few decades more. (Or so they thought. Then the tides turned towards decolonization.)
Either way, Thailand was also a Cold War hold out. It bordered Cambodia, Laos and Burma, and Vietnam by sea, all of which became Communist-run. The west helped prop it up.
There is a whole other argument about Thailand's current relationship with the west, which is complex to say the least.
The reality is, a nation state (a la french model) is much more powerful than the primitive kingdom structure or any other structure really. Most of these kingdoms/empires didn’t have education for the masses or mass levies.
However, I'm sceptical of the term nation state. I don't consider France to be a homogenous nation, since it contains areas like Brittany, Alsace and Basque areas. Likewise, Thailand has some indigenous minorities.
I don't think I've ever been in a country that doesn't have indigenous minorities so I'm not sure what that's supposed to prove. Maybe a very small country like Iceland could claim not to have any indigenous minorities? Otherwise they basically all do.
I don't know much about Thailand's minorities, but if it is anything like some Asian countries such as Nepal or the Philippines, its national identity is probably more complex.
You're right to mention Iceland, although by area it isn't that small! Remote island nations probably qualify better as nation states than conglomerates such as Thailand and France.
Likewise, the Catalans (a region in Spain) recently found out whether they belong to the nation state Spain. Their seditious "leaders" were thrown into prison by Spain.
France has been more heavy-handed with uniting its nation, but even it has issues. Spain is possibly looser than the UK, at least outside the sporting arena.
The UK is not a federal system like the USA, and so there is very little that counts as UK law as such. Even within Dublin, back when it was in the UK, the Easter Rebels of 1916 were mostly processed within Ireland itself.
Portugal and Andorra have a better case for being nation states than Spain does. I definitely would not call Spain a nation state. Or China or Russia. Being able to throw people in a prison does not prove it is a nation state. The Catalans are a nation as are the Basques.
This seems quite far-fetched. Parliamentary sovereignty alone would be unthinkable in the US model, where US federal legislatures have fairly delimited powers that they cannot arbitrarily change. The Scottish government, for example, essentially exists at the whim of Westminster and (in this iteration) was only created a few decades ago.
The UK constitution, if it can be called such, is made up of numerous contradictory documents, but Scotland retaining its own legal system was one of those. It has some everyday features not found elsewhere in the UK like procurator fiscal, and until recently the "not proven" verdict. (I was at a murder case a couple of years ago where the panel (accused) was given a "not proven" verdict.)
def do_i_belong_to(country):
return this.army * this.commitment_level < country.army * country.commitment_levelCorsicans, sure. But, in my experience, for Bretons and Basques it is very rare for them to deny their French identity in the way that plenty of Scots deny their Britishness. For whatever reason, the layered-identity model actually seems to work in France.
The reason why I mentioned the french is because they were the first to modernize at a significant scale (which enabled them to take over all of Europe?) during their revolution.
France did and does retain some odd ideas about its colonies. It took a long while to realise that most of the people in Algeria didn't consider themselves an integral part of France. Their Pacific possessions are seen as France as well.
I'm sure a credible argument could be made in the opposite direction with a different case study - i.e. celebrating their own identity even if it bemuses international markets / imperialists (Japan and manga/anime for example).
Of course, it's an interesting study, but do all remember to resist the temptation to take too much from it!
Siam was never colonized by Europe, it was colonized by Bangkok.
I was curious as to the debate surrounding the authenticity of the Ram Khamhaeng stele, but with a quick search was not able to find a definitive answer...
> In the 16th century, the decades long attempt to conquer the Highlands by the Ottomans would result in failure forcing them to offer a peace treaty where they were limited to the Eritrean coastline. In May 1865, much of the coastal lowlands came under the rule of the Khedivate of Egypt, until it was transferred to Italy in February 1885. Beginning in 1885–1890, Italian troops systematically spread out from Massawa toward the highlands, eventually resulting in the formation of the colony of Italian Eritrea in 1889, establishing the present-day boundaries of the country. Italian rule continued until 1942, when Eritrea was placed under British Military Administration during World War II; following a UN General Assembly decision in 1952, Eritrea would govern itself with a local Eritrean parliament, but for foreign affairs and defense, it would enter into federal status with Ethiopia for ten years. However, in 1962, the government of Ethiopia annulled the Eritrean parliament and formally annexed Eritrea. The Eritrean secessionist movement organized the Eritrean Liberation Front in 1961 and fought the Eritrean War of Independence until Eritrea gained de facto independence in 1991. Eritrea gained de jure independence in 1993 after an independence referendum.
[^0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eritrea
The only two African countries that weren't colonized were Ethiopia and Liberia, and both of those are technicalities. Italy tried for Ethiopia and failed at first but succeeded, briefly, under Mussolini; Liberia was a country created by the United States to send African slaves in the US that wanted freedom "back to Africa"