Culture and Defensive Modernization in Thailand, 1855-1932

How can “Siam/Thailand” be brought, as a new non-western case, into the corpus of comparative-historical sociological cases without falling into the trap of methodological nationalism (which glorifies its own agency behind its ‘success story’ of independence) and globalism (which sees its as a periphery within the capitalist world-system)? This paper traces the unfolding course of defensive modernization in Siam/Thailand through a critical (re)examination of four discourses and their accompanying sites of practice, i.e., the political economy, the discourse of civilization, the humanitarian discourse, and the postcolonial discourse. Situated within the overlapping spheres of the British and French imperial expansions and encroachments, Siam/Thailand (from 1855 to 1932) has been considered as one of the exemplary cases in which the modernization occurred as a direct response to the Western imperialism. Such form of modernization, nonetheless, still lacks a conceptual background and theorization.This paper aims to probe deeper into the case of defensive modernization in Siam/Thailand by integrating relatively recent case studies by Thai revisionists about Siam/Thailand in this period and by providing a new theoretical angle to analyze those cases. The main argument of this paper centers on the constitutive role of culture in the construction and elaboration of the programs of defensive modernization by the Siamese/Thai ruling elite. The three contributions that this paper gives are: 1) bringing empire, imperialism, and colonialism into historical sociology; 2) providing a new non-western case to the comparative-historical studies of modernization (beyond the old-fashioned paradigm of the “modernization theory”) as well as state and imperial formations; and 3) creating an ongoing dialogue with the macro-social theories that choose to walk a tightrope between the methodological nationalism and globalism.