Invisible semicolony

The postcolonial condition and royal national history in Thailand

Bibliographic Data

ID4465783
AuthorsHong Lysa (corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume11
Issue3
Pages315-327
Publication date2008-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePostcolonial Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1368-8790 • E-ISSN: 1466-1888
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13688790802226710
OpenAlexW2014972968
LanguageEN
Citations received6

The emergence of anticolonial and ‘independent’ nation-states following colonialism is frequently accompanied by a desire to forget the colonial past. In the case of semicolonial Siam, the ‘forgetting’ commences at the very point of encounter with the colonial itself. While residents of turn of the twentieth century Bangkok were aware of how extraterritoriality compromised the country's sovereignty, this has been written over by the history of enlightened Siamese monarchs, abetted by contemporary British officials. So successful has royalist history been that even its critics overlook the loss of territory to the gunboat diplomacy of the west as demonstrated in the Paknam crisis (1893) as a predatory colonial encounter, thus forgoing anticolonialism (and hence also antiroyalism) as basis of Thai nationhood. Instead, the wars with the Burmese in the precolonial period have been played up, with Thai monarchs portrayed as warriors and national saviours. The 1997 financial crisis occasioned a similar stock cultural response, only this time, the warrior monarchs were brought to life in the blockbuster movie Suriyothai (2001). The reification of the Thai monarchy is contingent on the continuing denial of the country's semicolonial past

Ancient history · Colonialism · Diplomacy · Economic history · Monarchy · National identity · Political science · Politics · Sovereignty · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Cambodian History and Society · History · Law · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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