Between 1984 and 1994 Thailand was the country with the highest economic growth rate in the world – around 10 per cent annually. These were the years of the boom when Thailand was industrializing, urbanizing and modernizing at an astonishing speed. Asphalt was poured over rice paddies and concrete over tropical beaches; foreign companies located their assembly plants here, and international banks and hoteliers built skyscrapers. Pollution increased, occupational safety standards slipped, and new disparities in wealth made Thailand one of the most inegalitarian countries in the world.

The old pre-boom Thailand had been a far more quiet and more predictable place. It was a country of peasants run by a series of authoritarian, if never actually repressive, military regimes in cahoots with a small class of Chinese businessmen and a large class of hidebound civil servants. With close to 90 per cent of the population living in the countryside, farming completely dominated economic and social life. Agriculture was commercialized late, and in remote parts of the country such as the north-eastern region of Isaan subsistence farming lasted well into the 1960s. In the pre-boom years there was little in the way of manufacturing industry and no working-class. In fact, apart from the capital, there were not even any genuine cities.

Changes which in other countries took centuries to accomplish were thus in the case of Thailand dramatically compressed. In the span of a few short decades former subsistence farmers were exposed to the full force of global capitalism.