Although the capital was physically destroyed in 1767, Ayutthaya represented traditions of trade and rule that were not easily erased. Over the next 15 years a new capital emerged further down the Chao Phraya River located at Thonburi-Bangkok, a site with better chaiyaphum for trade and defence. Members of the old elite dramatized Bangkok as a revival of Ayutthaya. But in fact much was very different. This era of war extended the Siamese armies’ influence further to the north, south, and east than ever before. Forced movements of people transformed the ethnic mix in the Chao Phraya plain. The great noble households that survived the crisis became the dominant force in the polity.

The name Thailand was invented in 1939. The country it described, formerly called Siam, had been defined by borders drawn in the 1890s and 1900s. Its capital, Bangkok, had been founded in 1782 in succession to an older city, Ayutthaya, destroyed 15 years earlier. Ayutthaya had been one of the great port cities of Asia, with trading links stretching from Persia to China and a political and economic hinterland focused on the basin of the Chao Phraya river system.

With the appearance of the Future Forward Party, and especially with youth protests in 2020, age became a factor in Thai politics as never before. Behind this was more than the perennial clash of hope and conservatism. Because of the rapid changes over the prior 70 years, successive generations had grown up in different worlds, shaping different mentalities.

The era of development incorporated more people more firmly into the national market economy. The era of national security brought more people more firmly under the direction of the nation-state. Armed with new funds and technologies, the nation-state extended its power deeper into society, and further into the villages and hills. Struggles to control and direct the nation-state now affected the lives and commanded the interest of larger numbers of the nation’s citizens.

After the Second World War, the US became a new foreign patron more intrusive than anything Siam had experienced in the colonial era. While Britain had focused on its colonies and had never taken more than peripheral interest in Siam, the US seized on Thailand as an ally and base for opposing the spread of communism in Asia. To build Thailand’s capability for this role, the US helped to revive and strengthen the military rule, which had faltered at the close of the Second World War, and supported a revival of the monarchy. To consolidate Thailand’s membership of the ‘free world’ camp in the Cold War, the US promoted ‘development’, meaning primarily economic growth through private capitalism. To achieve ‘national security’, US funding helped to push the mechanisms of the nation-state more deeply into society than before.

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 were transformed by a frontier movement of peasant colonization. Uniquely in Asia, new land was being opened up faster than the population was growing 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 peasant smallholder society represented four-fifths of the population and was the main driving force of the economy.

In the latter part of his reign, Chulalongkorn and his supporters repeatedly justified the creation of a strong state and its absolutist management on grounds of the need for Siam to progress and be a significant country in the world. This formulation marks the start of one of the two recurring visions in modern Thai politics. The same idea, adapted to changing international and local contexts, reappeared over the following decades. The Chulalongkorn era had also created the key vocabulary of this theme, particularly the notion of samakkhi, unity, and its highly masculine and militaristic imagery, exemplified by Chulalongkorn’s equestrian statue and Damrong’s account of Thai history as a series of wars.

During the 27 years from the restoration of the parliament in 1978 to the election of 2005, the parliamentary system became established as never before. Elected politicians reclaimed space from military tutelage – gradually at first, then decisively in 1992. Successive constitutional reforms enlarged the role of elections. Popular participation increased from a 44 per cent turnout at the 1979 poll to 73 per cent in 2005. Policy platforms became a significant factor in elections from 2001, and the party system was streamlined into an approximation of a two-party system. The cabinet and parliament gradually passed more legislation responsive to popular demands, including social welfare measures, reforms of the bureaucracy, expansion of education, supports for agriculture, and provisions to combat poverty. As the parliamentary regime strengthened, there was more space for media, civil society, and public debate. Around the millennium, Thailand was vaunted as the most open society in Southeast Asia.

The Cold War in Asia eased after the US departure from Indochina. The US remained Thailand’s military patron, but at a much greater distance. Thailand’s orientation to a liberal market economy, established in the American era, strengthened as the socialist alternative declined on a world scale. After an initial period of economic and political adjustment to the US departure, Thailand caught the tail of an Asia-wide boom led by Japan and the East Asian Tiger economies of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The liberalization of first trade and then finance accelerated the pace of industrialization and urbanization and incorporated Thailand more firmly within a global economy. The close of the Cold War also transformed neighbouring countries from enemy territory to economic hinterland – as markets and as sources of human and natural resources. In the late 1980s, China emerged from its four decades of partial eclipse and again became a major factor in Thailand’s economy and position in the world.

This chapter develops a theory of how local political exclusion drives ethnic riots in multiethnic countries during political transition. I discuss existing accounts of the onset of ethnic riots and their limitations in explaining why ethnic rioting rises and subsequently declines during political transitions in multiethnic countries. I argue that ethnic riots in democratizing countries are driven by local elites’ demands for inclusion in local politics. This deployment of ethnic riots as a form of political engagement is particularly prevalent in weakly institutionalized multiethnic settings, where institutions are less reliable and where available local networks tend to be ethnic-based. Once a group’s demands for inclusion have been met and violence has served its purpose, rioting will decline. I derive a set of observable implications and hypotheses I will examine in the subsequent empirical chapters.