This chapter examines the records of Armstrongs and Vickers in selling armaments in Asia over a century. As part of their foreign policy strategies, the firms built diplomatic relationships with states in the region– independent of the British Government– using their own agent-diplomats and reaped impressive rewards for their labors. At the start of the Armstrongs pioneered many gun and warship deals with China (aided by Sir Robert Hart) and Japan. Armstrongs created lasting relationships with key Chinese and Japanese government officials, hosting numerous delegations, and many of the firms’ management received state decorations for their services. The relationship between Armstrongs and China spanned more than six decades and survived several changes of regime. After Vickers moved into warship production just before the turn of the century, they also began to secure lucrative contracts in the region, sometimes competing with Armstrongs and sometimes allying with her. Business was interrupted by the Great War. Weapons ordered by Siam before the war were delivered afterwards. In the interwar period armament sales did not match their previous levels, though Vickers-Armstrongs vigorously pursued Chinese sales.

In Siam, later Thailand, doctrines of Buddhist kingship fluctuated with the needs of the king and the interests of the legal profession. In the period between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the transition to constitutional monarchy relied on notions of Buddhist kingship to ’smooth’ this process and indigenize the legal transplant of Western constitutional monarchy. The most important element of this hybridisation was the doctrine of ’the king as source of the constitution,’ which established royal sovereignty in Western, positivist, terms. The prestige of the nineteenth-century European models of constitutional and ‘limited’ monarchies, embodied in royally granted charters, provided a reservoir of doctrines to draw from in order to ‘modernise’ the monarchy in accordance with the newly imported tenets of legal positivism, while consolidating royal authority. In particular, the doctrine of ’granted constitutionalism’ established the king as the sovereign source of the constitution, a modern construct that was easily hybridised with traditional theories of Buddhist kingship. As a result, in present-day Thailand, the principle of royal sovereignty prevails both in doctrine and in practice.

This chapter offers a survey of the three principal environments of Buddhist law in precolonial mainland Southeast Asia: vinaya (monastic law), dhammasattha (juristic law), and rājasattha (royal legislation). It assesses, on the basis of manuscript and epigraphic evidence from Burma and Thailand dated between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, the scope and significance of constitutional norms and jurisprudence within each sphere. The chapter seeks to dethrone prior scholarship on constitutionalism in Theravāda Buddhism that has narrowly fixated on idioms of kingship and dharma, arguing that such work misconstrues and diminishes regional legal history. It explains, moreover, that the comparative study of Buddhist constitutionalism in precolonial Southeast Asia must necessarily expand the horizon of inquiry to consider those fields of law (such as family law) concerned with matters other than higher-order institutional governance.

In 1855 Siam signed the Bowring Treaty with Britain, the first of 15 unequal trade treaties with nations around the world. The treaties introduced to Siam extraterritoriality, or consular jurisdiction over foreign subjects in exclusion of Thai authorities’ jurisdiction, using specially established consular or international courts staffed by foreign judges. As well documented and discussed elsewhere, this extraterritoriality led to the pressure for the country to modernise its legal system and introduce legal codes modelled on codes in civil law countries such as France, Germany and Japan. Much less examined is the quiet and latent influence of common law during this important juncture of the country’s legal history. This chapter looks at some of the leading British lawyers in Siam who, following the abolition of the international court, sat in the Supreme Court of Siam, or Dika Court, as members of the ‘Committee of the Supreme Court’, an equivalence of modern day judges. The chapter examines their legal backgrounds, their legal careers in Siam, and their role as Supreme Court judges. As the chapter traces through their work, our inquiry reveals a fascinating dynamic of common law legal reasoning and principles in a civil law, code-based jurisdiction. This investigation into the role of these British judges during the formative years of Siam’s newly established legal system, often understated and unexplored in academic literature, is crucial for a more complete understanding of the country’s process of modernisation.

This chapter looks at the history of prostration in Thailand. The practice appears to have been adopted from the Angkorean Empire of the Khmers and was used at the Kingdom of Ayutthaya. It examines the modes of etiquette that were required in royal audiences for both Thais and foreign visitors. The chapter argues that by the nineteenth century Europeans regarded such practices as slavish and 'uncivilized'. This led, in 1873, to the young new king, Chulalongkorn, issuing a famous edict abolishing the custom of prostration and replacing it with European modes of paying respect such as bowing. But while in public functions involving Europeans the new modes of paying respect were observed, privately the custom of prostration before one’s superiors continued with little change.

This chapter follows the globalization and radicalization of the policies on enemy aliens that occurred in the last two years of the war. In 1917, the conflict became truly global with the entrance of the Americas (the United States, Brazil and Cuba) and Asia (the independent states of China and Siam, and the Philippines as a US dependency). At the same time, Russia and Romania exited the conflict, signing disadvantageous peace agreements with Germany. All the states that joined the war in 1917 drew up policies against enemy aliens, notwithstanding the enormous differences in the numbers of such people within their territories. The chapter analyzes the policies against enemy aliens in the United States, in Brazil, in China and Siam, and compares them with the evolution of the war in Europe where radicalization transformed all foreigners into enemies and also affected neutral countries. The chapter concentrates in particular on a series of new developments that concerned property rights. On the eve of the end of the conflict, property rights were no longer safe in any of the belligerent countries and were actually in pieces in many places.

This chapter deals primarily with the Company commercial policy in East Asia and mainland Southeast Asia but also discusses extensively the first territorial Dutch colony in Taiwan. It highlights the crucial position of Japan where the Dutch could build on their exclusive trading rights in Deshima to procure the precious metals that were necessary for the India trade. The China trade is discussed in connection with the restrictive policies of the Ming and Qing states as well as in the context of the trading interests of the Dutch headquarters in Batavia. In conclusion, a comparison is made between the Dutch position in Mughal India and Qing China as well as between the Dutch Empire and other European empires in Asia.

The end of the thirteenth century and the early decades of the fourteenth century witnessed the end of Southeast Asia’s classical period, that age when the empires of Pagan (Burma), Angkor (Cambodia), Dai Viet (northern Vietnam), and Sri Vijaya (in the Malay Archipelago) thrived and introduced the region’s religions, political models, and cultural standards. The thirteenth-century invasions of Mongol armies coming out of Yuan China encouraged, but did not cause, the collapse of most of these states, although changes in the application of the Chinese tribute system may have played a substantial role in the fall of Sri Vijaya. On the mainland, however, Mongol intervention was merely disruptive and did not represent meaningful conquest. Instead, administrative weaknesses and trade dislocation contributed to political fragmentation followed by internecine war among the myriad successor states. This fighting would only end with the reemergence of large-scale empires from the middle to the end of the sixteenth century. The period between 1300 and 1540 thus represented a phase of near constant warfare, due both to the multiplicity of competing polities and the administrative weaknesses that worked against sustained political centralization. By the end of the period, the formation of new empires established the political terrain for warfare in the centuries to come.

Collective beliefs and the corresponding political organization influenced features of interstate relations such as the nature of warfare, alliance structure, and the absence of a hegemonic power. Except for Siam, the European colonial powers controlled every polity in Southeast Asia by the late nineteenth century. Siam adjusted to Western principles of political organization but did so against the backdrop of its existing belief system. Positivist international law nevertheless continued to exclude it from the Law of Nations, in a case similar to how the West treated the Islamic and East Asian polities.