From Siam to Thailand: the political economy of underdevelopment

Abstract

In the nineteenth century many contemporary observers of the East had thought that Thailand and not Japan would one day become the most developed country of Asia. Such has obviously not been the case and in a lot of ways Thailand has become much more underdeveloped than it once was. Poverty has become widespread and the disparity between the rich and the poor seems to grow with each passing year. Economists, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, technocrats and politicians have set out to study, examine and correct the situation with mixed short-term results and a rather unpromising long-term one. There was a time during the 1950s and 1960s when almost everyone seemed to be satisfied that things were going in the right direction. The GNP and GDP grew rapidly, and the rate of growth was averaging about 12% per annum. However, the 1970s have pointed out the facade of such 'development'; although the GNP grew, the gap between the rich and the poor has not been reduced at all. This leads one to ask the simple yet difficult question ... why? It seems that too often development and underdevelopment have been perceived of as mostly, if not wholly, an economic problem. Thus one forgets that there is no economic, social or political problem which exists in isolation. All are so intricatedly related that they must be viewed as a totality, and not in an ad hoc manner as has been done in the past. It must also be remembered that the present is never free from the past, the situation that Thailand finds herself in today is the result of historical, social, political and economic evolution that the country had undergone for centuries. Neither is Thailand a product of her own evolution in isolation from others, for she does not exist alone in the world. In fact her contacts with other societies have left profound marks on her path from old Siam to modern Thailand. For the purpose of this thesis, the most relevant of these contacts have been those with the Western colonial powers in the 1850s and later her contact with the U.S. after the Second World War. The two are actually parts of the same process of the spread of capitalism that came to engulf all of Asia by the latter half of the nineteenth century. This process has left the most profound effect on every level of Thai life, and it is the contention of this work that it has been responsible for making the Thai socio-economic I use the term 'socio-economic' in the broadest sense to include that which is political, social, economic, cultural, and ideological. structure increasingly more stratified ... thus underdevelopment. It has been responsible for the accumulation of wealth, and the means to control and produce it, mainly in the hands of a ruling class of various elites, namely the military, the bureaucratic, and the capitalist elites of Thai society, in cooperation with foreign capitalist interests. The thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter I examines Siamese society as it was before Western contact. Chapter II deals with the impact of the West and the early spread of capitalism that drastically changed the basis of Siamese socio-economic structures in the mid-nineteenth century, from a mainly self-subsistent economy to an increasingly commercialized economy. The remaining chapters are really a continuation of the second chapter, but each examines a different period of modern Thai history and the relevant developments within that period. It must be noted that this is done arbitrarily, only to facilitate analysis, and not to designate a clear-cut date for any historical turns. Chapter III examines the period roughly from the early 1930s to the late 1940s when the center of political power shifted from the monarchy to the civil-military elites, and the economy began to show distinctive signs of modern underdeveloped capitalism. Chapter IV deals with the post-World War II Thai contact with the U.S.-led world economy of the 1950s and 1960s, when Thailand plunged totally in the direction of underdeveloped capitalism, abandoning state capitalism which she unsuccessfully experimented with. The socio-economic effects of this course constitute a large part of the examination into a theoretical framework that attempts to explain Thai underdevelopment as a historical process which is a result of the development of capitalism on a worldwide scale.