Where was the colonial in Siam/Thailand?

One of the general notions about Siam/Thailand - compare to other Southeast Asian countries - is that it is the only country in the region that could escape colonization in the 19th century and could maintain independent.

It is the feature that Thai people always proud of. "Being independent" has always been the apex of "Thainess" for decades. No one can take it away from Thai people.

Hence, being independent (i.e. never been colonized) = being "Thai"

A group of historians in this volume The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand (2010) are saying that that isn't the whole story.

With a forward by Dipesh Chakrabarty, this volume offers a fresh look at Thai history through the lens of Postcolonial Theory.

There are at least two dimensions that I think it suggests,

1) It has been many decades - at least since the Maoist look at Thai history from the 1950s - that the discourse of Thailand-the-non-colonized-country has begun to be deconstructed. A body of literature, theoretically and empirically, emerged to look at Siam/Thailand as having a 'semicolonial' status. On the one hand, Siam/Thailand was under indirect colony especially in the economic dimension. And on the other hand, the elite themselves acted as an agent of "internal colonization".When the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) ceased its movement in the 1980s, the Marxist framework to Thai history began to decline. This volume aims to reinvigorate and refresh the post-Marxist analysis with the new theoretical force.

2) This volume calls for the more serious consideration of using the Postcolonial framework on looking at Thai history. Previously, Siam/Thailand was in little attention, if not left out, from the powerful dialogue of the Postcolonial debate, just because the general notion of not being a colonized country (this might due to the scholars themselves). But bringing Siam into that dialogue would further create stimulating debates, and eventually would bring about the alternative to the Euro-American centrism framework like "Postcolonial" itself. There is a lot to be done, and this book is one of the powerful attempts in that direction.


As Tony Day put it about this book

"This excellent collection of essays represents a major advance in the application of Western postcolonial theory to the study of Asian History and culture. No other book is more successful at shattering the "uniqueness" of Thailand, or of demonstrating the many ways in which Southeast Asia is comparable to the rest of the world"