Matthew Reeder

The articles in this special issue examine engagements across ethnic boundaries in Asian cities over the past two centuries. We see these cities as stages for the co-production of ethnicity, where multiple actors, including but not limited to state authorities, have attempted to define, manage, and challenge the social boundaries between their diverse inhabitants. These articles direct our attention to the convergence of three critical themes: the flexibility and ubiquity of ethnic ascription, the top-down and bottom-up coproduction of social meaning, and Asian cities as crucial sites of social innovation.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, royal officials in Ayutthaya—the name for both the kingdom of Siam and its principal city—increasingly deployed ethnic labels for a new political purpose: to organize and distinguish administrative categories of foreign merchants, migrants, captives, and sojourners. The ethno-administrative categories that emerged were neither disinterested nor “natural.” Rather, they were shaped and reshaped by countless acts of ethnic identification made by rulers and ruled, alike. Ayutthaya’s merchant-officials, mostly of overseas origins themselves, likely adapted this approach to social organization from other port cities in maritime Asia. Cambodia’s officials, probably viewing Siam as a model, followed suit soon after. As ethnic labels became shorthand references to administrative categories, each with its own set of privileges and responsibilities, ethnicity became politically significant as never before.

Please contact me if you cannot get a copy through your library.

This article identifies a moment of conceptual innovation—the 1830s to the 1850s—in which everyday artists and writers in Siam were tasked with creating comparative representations of the peoples of the world. Although their compositions took a variety of formats, they departed from earlier representations of alterity by devoting equal attention to each 'type', including the Thai themselves. This approach is best exemplified in three mid-nineteenth-century works: (1) a set of archetypal portraits of about 20 peoples painted on the shutters of a major Buddhist monastery, (2) sculptures of 32 peoples at the same monastery with a short poem describing each one, and (3) entries defining terms for peoples in an early Thai-Thai dictionary. The systematic formatting of these works drew on similar compositions circulating across the nineteenth-century globe. Yet, despite the presence in Bangkok of foreign interlocutors and imported books and prints, the mid-nineteenth-century compositions preserve ethnic tropes and practices of expression specific to Siam. In addition, the agents of intellectual innovation were not restricted to the usual princely or missionary protagonists. It was a motley cast of anonymous artists, local scholars, and middling officials who tapped traditional genres of composition and local markers of differentiation to render the peoples of the world as comparable, generic, and fixed.

This article examines a late eighteenth-century innovation in the composition and revision of dynastic chronicles in the Thai language. In chronicles and chronicle passages composed at this time, internally-diverse political networks – the subjects or armies of one monarch or another – are regularly identified as single "ethnic" groups as never before. This transition is traced through three periods of chronicle (re)writing. Compositions from the Ayutthaya period (1351-1767) focus overwhelmingly on the actions of specific individuals. The diverse population, army, and nobility of a kingdom are not endowed with a single ethno-political identification, and are not allowed important roles in the narratives as corporate entities. In extant chronicle texts from this period, the ethnic term "Thai" does not appear at all. In chronicle narratives of the late eighteenth century, however, we can see the tentative introduction of the ethnic term "Thai" as one of the two communities supporting King Taksin (r. 1767-1782) along with “Chinese”, and a dramatic trend towards the ethno-political identification of the armies from the Irrawaddy valley kingdoms as “Burmese”. Finally, beginning in the last decade or so of the eighteenth century, the diverse peoples and armies of Bangkok were glossed frequently as “Thai”, and even the peoples of Bangkok’s tributary kingdoms were assigned ethno-political identities that distinguished them socially and politically from the “Thai” in Bangkok. In late eighteenth and nineteenth century chronicle compositions, the politicization of ethnonyms facilitated the narration of a chronic history of aggression and deceit not just between certain newly-ethnicized kingdoms, but also between their newly distinguishable sets of officials and subjects. Early twentieth-century historians, in turn, drew from these ethnicized royal chronicle narratives to craft a nation-centered history for modern Thailand. Indeed, the political circumstances that motivated late-eighteenth century chroniclers to promote loyalty to the crown through the repetition of ethnicized us-versus-them narratives of history remain powerful even today.

This is a short guide to the holdings and accessibility of the Manuscript Collection at the National Library of Thailand based on my research there (off and on) from 2014 to 2016 and an interview with the collection's public services librarian.

In 1830, a Brahmin from Varanasi, India, finally arrived in Siam after an arduous land journey. Thai officials eagerly recorded his account of the social structure of his hometown and details about his trip through British and independent Burma. The Brahmin died shortly after, but his story, modified and reframed in interesting ways over the next two centuries, still remains in the form of half a dozen manuscripts in the National Library of Thailand. This short bulletin article relates some of the questions that researchers face when studying manuscripts, while sharing some of my day-to-day experiences exploring the library's manuscript collections.

When a violent gang of buffalo robbers was finally caught and put on trial in July 1903, Siam’s interior minister Prince Damrong Rajanubhab was so impressed with the breadth and detail of their testimony that he decided to write it up in the form of a series of questions and answers. His stated intention was to provide the growing bureaucracy, including rural police, with insight about the methods of bandits, but he also likely saw his “conversation” as a contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on rural culture and its place in the nation. Damrong’s conversation therefore reflects two of the creative interests that have made him famous: his ingenious and tireless efforts to assert royal bureaucratic authority throughout the kingdom, and his scholarly endeavors to craft a narrative of Thai history, culture, and progress. Here, Matt Reeder and Chalermchai Wongrak offer an annotated translation of Prince Damrong’s “Conversation with Robbers” into English.

This article draws a connection between buffalo crimes—stealing buffaloes, robbing buffaloes, and "buffalo-napping"—and the effects of “modernization” in rural Siam around the turn of the twentieth century. I argue that political modernization (based on European colonial models of bureaucratic centralization) and economic modernization (based on expanding market and investment access to the countryside) were both causes and solutions to the crime problem. Because buffaloes were so valued in rural society, buffalo crime was a serious matter. This article outlines various kinds of buffalo crime, from small-scale thefts to gang robberies, and places them in their village contexts. After discussing the frequency and patterns of buffalo robberies in the year 1906, I pull economic data from newspaper accounts to show that the rural areas of new paddy land just north of Bangkok that experienced the most intensive capitalist interventions also experienced the most buffalo crimes. I also link political modernization and centralization in Siam to increased buffalo crimes. Crimes increased, at least temporarily, as Bangkok reduced the power of local authorities. Modern strategies implemented by the monarchy to combat buffalo crimes, such as expanding the duties and jurisdiction of the police, did not always reduce crimes but did assert that Bangkok was responsible for rural law and order. In numerous ways, these modern economic and political changes not only affected urban elites, but had dramatic effects on rural Siamese as well.