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 farther 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.

In the late 1950s, the USA brought together the military, businesspeople, and royalists – the three forces that had tussled since 1932 – in a powerful alliance. Together they resurrected and embellished the vision of a dictatorial strong state, demanding unity in order to achieve development and to fight off an external enemy – in this era, communism. But the alliance’s strength was undermined by the generals’ abuse of power and their obvious subordination to American policy. Opposition to the intensity of capitalist exploitation grew. Protests emerged against American domination. Communists launched a guerrilla war, which attracted the support of old intellectuals, young activists, and exploited peasants. Students became the channel through which radical, liberal, nationalist, Buddhist, and other discourses were focused against militarism, dictatorship, and unrestrained capitalism.

Abhisit Vejjajiva (1964–). Born in UK to an illustrious Vietnamese-Chinese lineage that arrived in Siam in 19th century. Educated in UK at Eton College and Oxford University (a first in PPE). Drafted into Democrat Party under patronage of Chuan Leekpai. Elected to parliament in 1992. Party leader in 2005. Prime minister, 2008–11.

Anand Panyarachun (1932–). Born in Bangkok, descendant of noble Mon family and Hokkien jao sua. Educated in England at Dulwich College and Trinity College, Cambridge. Career diplomat, 1955–77, including ambassador to USA. Resigned government service, joined Saha-Union (textile-based conglomerate), and became chairman, 1991. Prime minister under NPKC coup junta, 1991–92. Head of Constitution Drafting Assembly, 1996–97.

Anuman Rajadhon, Phya (1888–1969). Born to Chinese family in Bangkok. Educated at Assumption College.Worked in Customs Department. Independent scholar and essayist on religion, Thai culture, philology, and folklore under penname Sathirakoses. Recruited to Fine Arts Department in 1933 and rose to director-general. Taught and lectured after retirement.

Banharn Silpa-archa (1932–). Son of moderately successful cloth traders in Suphanburi market. Chinese name, Tek Siang sae Be. Moved to Bangkok after secondary education and gained patronage of senior officials in Public Works Department. Won contract to supply chlorine for water supply. Founded construction company, working mainly on public works contracts. Also crop trader and business in construction materials. Elected MP for Suphanburi in Chat Thai Party from 1975. Party secretary-general, 1976–94. Various ministerial posts, including finance and interior in Chatichai Cabinet, 1988–91. Party leader in 1994. Prime minister, 1995–96.

The massive economic and social changes begun in the American era spilled into politics over the last quarter of the 20th century.

After 1976, the senior bureaucracy, palace, and military still clung to the model of a passive rural society that accepted the hierarchical social and political order, and that needed to be protected against both communism and capitalism. The generals and bureaucratic elite laid plans to engineer social harmony and guide ‘democracy’ from above. But economically and culturally, the country was rapidly becoming more urban than rural, more dominated by business than bureaucracy, and more assertive than passive. The paternalist vision was swept away by the advance of industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, and the growth of mass society.

Through the 1980s, business politicians inside the parliamentary system, and a new ‘civil society’ outside it, pushed the military back towards the barracks, but reluctantly, slowly, and incompletely. An attempt to halt this trend during 1991–92 proved to be a critical transition. Thereafter, the military’s role declined steeply. Political spaces widened. High expectations arose for wide-reaching changes aided by the forces of globalization and the new assertiveness in parts of mass society. The political forces that prioritized the well-being of society and nation seemed set to flourish in the broader political space. But the traditions of the strong dictatorial state had been deeply embedded. When big business and a rural-based populism made a bid to sweep away the old bureaucrat-dominated state, it unleashed a conflict that brought the military back to the front line and placed both liberal democracy and economic growth in peril.

After the Second World War, the USA became a new foreign patron, more intrusive than anything Siam had experienced in the colonial era. While Britain had focused on its colonies and never taken more than peripheral interest in Siam, the USA 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 USA helped to revive and strengthen the military rule, which had faltered at the close of the Second World War. To consolidate Thailand’s membership of the ‘free world’ camp in the Cold War, the USA 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.

Under this regime, a new elite emerged consisting of ruling generals, senior bureaucrats, and the heads of new business conglomerates. Strengthened by the ideology of development and unconstrained by democracy, business was able to exploit both people and natural resources on a new scale. The countryside was transformed again, by driving the agrarian frontier through the upland forests and subjecting the smallholder decisively to the market. Against this backdrop, the old Thai social order faded into history.

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.

The society of this hinterland had evolved over prior centuries in a pattern that was similar throughout Southeast Asia. The landscape was dominated by tropical and subtropical forest. People clustered in city-states. Society was organized around personal ties of service and protection. An era of warfare from the 13th to 16th centuries saw the emergence of a powerful militaristic kingship buttressed by Brahmanical ritual, trading profits, and systems for marshalling forced labour. But since the 17th century, this social and political order had begun to shift with the expansion of a commercial economy, a loosening of labour ties, the emergence of an aristocracy, and the new vitality of Theravada Buddhism.

PEOPLING THE CHAO PHRAYA BASIN

Mainland Southeast Asia is one of the most fertile and biodiverse areas of the planet. To the north, hill ranges divide the region from China and splay southwards, subdividing the region like the fingers of a hand (Map 1). The plains between these ranges are heated to tropical and subtropical temperatures, while five great rivers carry snowmelt from the high mountains of inner Asia, and monsoons sweep the region with four to six months of heavy rainfall a year. High temperatures and plentiful moisture create a spectacularly abundant environment. The natural vegetation is thick forest – deciduous in the north, merging into tropical rainforest further south, and dense mangrove along the coast.

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 traditional 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.

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, would reappear over decades to come. 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.

An opposing vision took shape in the early 20th century, in the new urban society created by colonial commerce and by the nation-state itself. Old relationships of patronage were replaced by contracts in the marketplace. People evolved new ideas on human society by reflecting on their own status as independent merchants and professionals, and by grabbing the increasing opportunities to compare Siam to an outside world undergoing tumultuous change. The new men and women of early 20th-century Siam took up the ideas of nation, state, and progress, and recast them. They challenged the definition of the nation as those loyal to the king. They demanded that ‘progress’ be more widely shared. They redefined the purpose of the nation-state as the well-being of the nation’s members.

History was invented for the nation-state. It has a tendency to imagine ‘the false unity of a self-same, national subject evolving through time’ (Prasenjit Duara). All too easily, the nation becomes something natural that always existed but was only properly realized in the nation-state. In reaction against this tendency, historians today prefer to write about people, things, ideas, localities, regions, or the globe – anything but the nation. Or else they write reflective histories about the interplay between the nation and the production of its own history.

The approach adopted here is to make the career of the nation-state the explicit focus of the story. One of the themes of this book is how the idea of the nation and the machinery of the nation-state were established in Thailand, and then how different social forces tried to make use of it – by reinterpreting what the nation meant, and by seeking to control or influence the use of state power. The second major theme is the evolution of the social forces involved. After the introductory chapter, the chapters alternate between these two themes, though the division is rough not rigid.

The publisher wants the books in this series to be accessible to a wide readership, not too long and not overloaded with academic referencing. Our policy has been to limit footnoting to the sources for direct quotations. The appendix of ‘Readings’ cites major published works in English, but rather little has been published in English on modern Thailand over the past generation. In Thai there has been a huge amount, and even more exists in unpublished theses in both Thai and English. Our dependence on these works should be easily recognizable by their authors and other experts.

Although the capital was physically destroyed, 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 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 farther 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 major change was in the economy. The trading connections with China, begun in the early 18th century, were resumed and reinforced. The market economy expanded rapidly in the Chao Phraya plain and down the peninsula, driven largely by importation of Chinese enterprise and labour. The growth of the market economy began to remake the social structure and change the mentality of the elite. The return of Europeans bringing ideas of ‘progress’ and threats of colonial rule prepared the ground for an era of change.

FROM AYUTTHAYA TO BANGKOK

Within a very short time, several pretenders emerged to occupy the vacancy left by the obliteration of the city and dynasty of Ayutthaya. Among these, Phaya Taksin emerged as strongest. His origins are obscure. Possibly he was the son of a Teochiu Chinese migrant gambler or trader and his Thai wife. Possibly he became a provincial cart trader and bribed his way to governorship of the border town of Tak. He thus had no traditional claims to rule but was a leader of great charisma. He gathered around him other Chinese traders, sundry adventurers, and minor nobles.

The Cold War in Asia eased after the US departure from Indochina. The USA 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. 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 into 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.

The pace of economic transformation quickened over the last quarter of the 20th century. The balance of economy and society shifted decisively from rural to urban, and from parochial to open and globalized. The peasantry declined steeply as an element in the national economy, more moderately as a factor in the demography, and very markedly in the national culture. The rural remnant became an increasingly marginalized and truculent part of a society whose dynamism was decidedly urban.