The Modernization of Siam

The Modernization of Siam. Siam's modernization (1851-1932) under the Chakri kings Mongkut (Rama IV) and Chulalongkorn (Rama V) made it the only Southeast Asian state never colonized. Mongkut - the scholarly monk-king who had studied English, Latin and astronomy during his 27 years in the monkhood - opened the kingdom deliberately: treaties with Britain (the Bowring Treaty, 1855) and the Western powers fixed low tariffs and extraterritoriality but bought peace, while he hired Western advisers, reformed the calendar and court, and patronized a Buddhist revival.

His son Chulalongkorn (r. 1868-1910) carried reform to the bone: he abolished slavery and the corvee by stages, created ministries, a salaried bureaucracy and a conscript army on Western models, built railways, telegraphs and modern law codes, sent princes to Europe, and centralized the kingdom's outlying tributaries under royal commissioners - while surrendering, with bitter calculation, the periphery to save the core: Laos to France (1893), the Cambodian provinces (1907), the four Malay states to Britain (1909).

The strategy worked: Siam's kings made themselves indispensable to the balance between British Burma and French Indochina, modernized just enough to be treated as civilized, and kept their throne. Bangkok was transformed - Dusit palaces, tramways, the royal temples restored - and a Western-educated elite of princes and commoners staffed the new state.

The price was a contradiction: absolute monarchy modernized the country and modernized the very classes - officers and officials - who demanded a share of power. Vajiravudh (Rama VI, r. 1910-1925) answered with nationalism and extravagance; his brother Prajadhipok (Rama VII) inherited fiscal crisis. In June 1932 a small group of commoner officials and officers, the People's Party, seized power without bloodshed and imposed a constitution, ending seven centuries of absolute monarchy - the logical end of the modernization the kings themselves had begun.

To read more about this topic:

Britannica: Chulalongkorn Britannica: Chakkri Dynasty Britannica: History of Thailand