Disinterested Friends? European advisers in Siam at the turn of the twentieth century (original) (raw)
The West and Siam's quest for modenity
Southeast Asia Research, 2009
This paper examines the interactions that occurred between Westerners and the Siamese elite in the nineteenth century. The author contends that the perceived superiority of Western science and knowledge came not as a result of its being Western as such, but rather as a consequence of the Siamese elite's secure political position in terms of its physical and intellectual powers. The adoption of Western knowledge was measured against the truth of Theravada Buddhism and Buddhist political ideas. Western knowledge and science thus provided the ruling classes with a modern perception of themselves and the world. Nevertheless, the persistence of Siamese sakdina [feudal] social relations ultimately prevented complete modernization. Modernity therefore ended up in the hands of the elite and did not extend to the wider populace.
Scandinavian Journal of History, 2024
This article contributes to a reconceptualization of the relationship between Siam and Scandinavia at the turn of the twentieth century. At that time, the relationship was manifested by the presence of a large group of Scandinavian, mainly Danish, entrepreneurs and professionals in Siam and repeated visits between the royal houses in Siam and the Scandinavian countries. The tropes of friendship and modernization dominate the main representation of the relationship. In accordance with this representation the Scandinavians were not perceived as a colonial threat to the Siamese rulers but co-producers of a modern and independent Siam. This narrative, created both by the Scandinavians and Siamese, reproduces a dominant royalist narrative in Thai historical writing that presents the absolute monarchy as a disinterested elite who launched a series of reforms to modernize Siam and safeguard the country against foreign encroachment. With reference to a revisionist tradition in Thai historical writing, we argue that Scandinavian–Siamese relations at the turn of the twentieth century needs to be accentuated in relation to the Siamese royal elite’s project of internal colonialism.
2009
By examining the historical context of colonialism and imperialism at the end of the 19th- beginning of the 20th century, the thesis aims to distinguish the place and role of personal contacts between the Russian Imperial Family and the Siamese Court in the turbulent circumstances of colonial rivalry over Siam. The major goal of the thesis is to enhance a better understanding of the reasons for the inception of close relationships between the Russian Empire and Siam at that period of time and the significance of this friendship in the history of both states. In this respect, the thorough documentary analysis applied in the research methodology is greatly enriched by a vast number of Russian scholarly resources and historical documents that provide valuable information and shed more light on the historical realities in which the countries developed mutual interest towards each other. The research finds that in spite of not having any colonial claims in Southeast Asia, the Russian Emp...
EC–ASEAN Relations in the 1970s as an Origin of the European Union–Asia Relationship
Journal of European Integration History, 2019
Today, the relationship between EU and Asian countries is at a turning point. During the Cold War, there was quite a large gap in status between the EC and ASEAN. The EC was highly institutionalised and the most advanced regional organisation, while ASEAN was simply an association of developing countries. However, in the post-Cold War era, Asia has gained a more important status compared to Europe. A striking example is the establishment of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) in 1996, where heads of states were treated as ‘equal partners’. This article addresses the following question as the main point of its research: Why and how did the EC establish institutional bonds with ASEAN countries? Despite this corpus of research, studies of the factors behind the EC’s shift towards institutionalised relationships with ASEAN have not examined the geopolitical interests at stake. This paper, thus, aims to give an overall picture of EC-ASEAN institutional relations in the 1970s, with particular ...
Business History Review, 2019
World War I was a global conflict, yet in contrast with the vast outpouring of volumes focused on Europe, the impact of the war and subsequent peace settlement on Asia has attracted relatively limited attention. This collection of essays by a group of distinguished scholars seeks to remedy this situation, exploring the ramifications of the war and subsequent peace settlement from Asian viewpoints. Japan, China, India, and the Ottoman Empire, together with the British, French, and Dutch colonies in Asia, were all belligerents, with the first three sending delegations to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and joining the new League of Nations as founding members. Particularly valuable is a broad overview essay by Mark Metzler, who juxtaposes different types and levels of crises in the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. He provides a detailed account of the wartime economic boom that much of Asia enjoyed as a result of demand for supplies of all kinds from the belligerent powers, especially the Allies, and its dramatic collapse in 1919–1920, accentuated by the return of the United States to the gold standard and the sudden imposition of fierce deflation from June 1919 onward. His insights into the intimate temporal and causal linkages—an “organic connection”—between deflationary postwar monetary stabilization and the synchronous political settlement complement and expand on those of Adam Tooze’s masterly study, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (2014), (Asia after Versailles, p. 47). India features extensively in Metzler’s survey. Although over one million Indians fought in World War I, many in the Middle East, only recently have their contributions begun to win recognition. Metzler describes the war’s profound and multifaceted impact on India itself. Up to half the victims of the 1918–1919 global influenza pandemic, perhaps fifteen million in all, may have been Indian—the greatest mortality rate in any country. He also highlights the degree to which before, during, and after the war, the British authorities used India’s gold reserves to bolster their own country’s financial position, so that “poor India systematically extended credit to rich England” (p. 41). Metzler’s chapter clearly demonstrates how extensively and too often to the dominion’s detriment—despite occasional efforts by such liberals as colonial secretary Edwin Montagu—Indian interests of all kinds were habitually subordinated to those of the metropole. An equally stimulating chapter by Cemil Aydin, a noted scholar of both Pan-Islamist and Pan-Asian anti-Western movements, addresses the war’s impact on the Islamic world. Ultimately, it broke up the Ottoman Empire and ended the caliphate over Sunni Muslims exercised by the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul since 1517. The implicit contract between the British Empire and the many Muslim soldiers in its Indian army—to respect Islam, especially its holy cities, and support the continuation of Ottoman authority in substantial portions of existing Ottoman territories—was, Aydin contends, broken by the postwar settlement. Effectively, the Allied powers dismantled the Ottoman Empire, converting many of its former Middle Eastern provinces into mandates under British or French control. The largely Turkish state that Kemal Atatürk founded—overturning most of the provisions of the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) in favor of a new settlement, the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), following the Turkish War of Independence—renounced pretensions to the caliphate or leadership of the Muslim world, pragmatically deciding that their small rump state, with perhaps eight million Muslims, should drop any aspirations to head a global community that outnumbered them many times over. The Lausanne agreement, Aydin argues, was an implicit bargain whereby Britain recognized Turkish sovereignty over Muslim Anatolia, in return for Turkey dropping Ottoman claims to influence over more than one hundred million Muslims in British India and Egypt. Turkey nonetheless became a model for other Islamic states, while Britain’s Middle Eastern policies “irreparably damaged British imperial legitimacy in the eyes of its Muslim subjects” (p. 69). If, in what historian Erez Manela has termed “The Wilsonian Moment” (The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism [2009]), anti-imperialist nationalists in Asia and the Middle East had pinned their hopes on President Woodrow Wilson’s pledges of self-determination, these expectations proved short lived, dissolving at Paris in what Metzler terms “the Wilson bubble” (p. 48). Almost half this volume’s chapters focus on an eclectic range of thinkers in Japan or China, two often antagonistic states that were usually at odds, not least over the disposition of Germany’s Shandong concession in north China, captured by Japanese and British forces in late 1914. In both China and the large Chinese community in France, Wilson’s decision to respect a 1918 agreement whereby the northern Beijing government ceded administration of Shandong to Japan in return for substantial loans prompted widespread nationalist demonstrations, and soon the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. China’s failure in 1919 to obtain an end to foreign extraterritorial privileges and Wilson’s effective veto of Japan’s moves to include provisions for the equality of states in the League of Nations covenant were galling manifestations of Western privilege that likewise helped to discredit the fledgling international organization with many Asians. Yet at Paris, as Naoko Shimizu highlights, and indeed throughout the next two decades, China, its internally divided government notwithstanding, surely proved more effective than Japan in presenting its case in the international media and using the League for its own purposes. Indian activists, another chapter indicates, demanded—ultimately successfully—that their League delegations be led by Indians, not the viceroy or his handpicked surrogate. This volume indicates how much still needs to be done to attain a comprehensive evaluation of how World War I and its aftermath played out in Asia. Despite Ho Chi Minh’s well-known (though futile) 1919 appeal to Wilson at Paris, no chapter focuses on, for example, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, British Malaya, or Thailand. If something of a taster’s menu, this invariably thought-provoking collection undoubtedly highlights the need for more in-depth, wide-ranging, and nuanced studies of the global consequences of World War I.
In this chapter I will examine the origins, functions, and consequences of extraterritoriality in Siam, and its important role in the creation of the modern Thai state. More specifically, I will trace the role of extraterritoriality in the creation of a territorially bound polity governed through bureaucratic mechanisms displaying a high degree of legalisation of social relations and integrated into a global capitalist system. In the first part of this chapter, I will examine the establishment, operation, and abolition of extraterritoriality in Siam, having as my main reference-point the 1855 Bowring Treaty and the subsequent legal, institutional, and economic reforms enacted by the Siamese monarchy in its attempt to have extraterritoriality abolished. In the second part, I will discuss the process of creating a territorialised, centralised state and the assumption of control over former vassal states by Bangkok. Here I revisit imperial struggle and co-operation between Britain and Siam regarding the resource-rich Northern Siam (Lanna). I will argue that extraterritoriality treaties in 1874 and 1883 crystallised the alliance between foreign capital and the Siamese ruling classes, an alliance that drove the process of state-building in Siam. The core of my argument is that extraterritorial jurisdiction was a legal technique through which British capitalists, the Foreign Office, the Siamese monarchy, and the nascent bourgeoisie formed a precarious and contradictory, yet operationally effective, alliance that enabled Siam’s transition to capitalism, the emergence of fixed borders, and the subjugation of northern vassal states and concomitant consolidation of state control over these territories, as well as the mastery over and commodification of nature.
Representing civilization: Solidarism, ornamentalism, and Siam's entry into international society
Although norms are important in various schools of international relations theory, there has been relatively little effort to integrate their various uses of the term. Here I seek to bring together the Constructivist use of norms based on individual human agency with the English School's concept of solidarism. This perspective helps make sense of the expansion of international society, a point demonstrated through a study of the apparently anomalous case of Siam, which achieved sovereignty without developing significant military power. Siamese elites were able to gain inclusion in international society by enacting solidarism with European conceptions of 'civilized' behavior and using European conceptions of class to trump preconceptions about race.