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- Hacker News
- Interesting article!
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...
by pcrh - They have a saying here in Thailand:
Siam was never colonized by Europe, it was colonized by Bangkok.
by joeguilmette - A great read. One change not mentioned in the article is a ban of chopsticks and transition to a fork and a knife. To this day, Thailand remains the only South East country using forks instead of chop sticks.
- From Works in Progress, a media company promoting economic growth.
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!
by tmgldn - It depends whether one considers Thailand to have been part of informal empire or not, much like the British influence over Portugal, Chile and Argentina.
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.
by nephihaha - They decided to “nation-state”. The border theory doesn’t hold since colonial nations border each other pretty much everywhere else.
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.
by csomar - Thailand's rapid modernization and giving up 40% of its territory gave it time to embrace guns and a modern military. Sadly the widespread adoption of guns during this time period has a lasting impact today. Thailand has the highest number of gun deaths per capita of any asian country today. Resisting colonization in Thailand and overthrowing colonization in the US have embracing fire arms in common.by sinoue
- Comparing this article's description of Siam definitely not getting colonized:
> 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.)
by yorwba - The article gives way too much weight to charm, reform and image management, and basically no weight to the fact that both the French and British agreed that having a neutral buffer state was in both their best interests. See the Anglo-French Declaration of January 1896.
> 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.
by ElProlactin - Absolutely this. Thais love saying they've never been colonized, but conveniently forget to mention that 40% of their territory was colonized and permanently lost.by flyingshelf
- Always interesting to read how something very difficult was done very well. Understanding the West's true and purported motivations, bending their own culture - choosing what to adopt or not and how - without breaking, ceding some land, and it all working out in the end. Quite remarkable.
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.
by ahartmetz - > it all working out in the end
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.
by fwipsy - An interesting and standard narrative for how Thailand avoided colonization. There's a lot to commend it.
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.
by KingMob - That sounds like a viewpoint that would be vulnerable to just accepting everything that is as preordained. Every country's destiny is heavily influenced by their neighbours.
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.
by roenxi - I've also seen this suggested before, often enough and by historians that I'd say it's at least a well known theory. The fact that this article doesn't even mention it makes me a but suspicious that it's biased.
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.
by esperent - The two narratives are not mutually exclusive. In contrast to other parts of the world, the English and French would have just divided the territory with arbitrary lines. Why did they suddenly need a buffer zone?
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.
by markkitti - Entertaining and educational historical narrative, much of it was new to me. The main idea is that kings of Siam willingly and actively embraced European culture and modernization efforts, unlike other countries in Asia which resisted and implemented them reactively, often by force.
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.
by lioeters - Japan did the same. And its colonies (Taiwan, Korea) became similar sucesses inheriting the institutions and infrastructure.
- From what you write it appears to me that you have never been to Thailand.by raffael_de
- It very definitely patterned its behavior on colonizer to survive - even becoming a local-sphere colonizer itself, interestingly. Definitely a case of "if you can't beat 'em, (temporarily) join 'em."
- However:
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.
- > 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
by notahacker