Background

Ever since its designation as capital in 1782, Bangkok has prospered more than any of Thailand's other cities. It is the seat of the monarchy, the country's administrative centre, its centre of wealth, its principal port, home to the largest non-agricultural labour market, as well as the centre of internal and international trade. Bangkok is also the country's most populous city. In 1850, the population of Bangkok was estimated to be between 50,000 and 100,000 and since that time it has remained Thailand's primate city.

Bangkok is located favourably in the fertile lower Chao Phraya River delta in the country's Central Plain, an area that has long been the country's rice bowl with transport made easy and relatively inexpensive by a network of canals connecting with the Chao Phraya.

As the country's capital, Bangkok was the tribute collection centre from various places, as well as a centre for exports and international trade. Even before the signing of the Bowring Treaty with Great Britain in 1855, Bangkok was an important port not just in Thailand but also in the Asian region, receiving goods from India, the Malay Peninsula, and elsewhere for re-exporting to China. Trade was largely monopolized by the royal government, with China as the kingdom's major trading partner. Growth in both internal and international trade led to the expansion of Bangkok's economy. Revenues from international trade were especially important as they constituted one of the major sources of income of the kingdom.

International trade helped to open Siam to western and, through Singapore, Chinese influences. In 1820, Portugal set up a consulate in Bangkok and built a warehouse on the Thonburi side of the Chao Phraya River to store goods shipped from England. Westerners like the Portuguese were mainly employed in shipping, and as the port grew, Bangkok became a major employer of Chinese immigrants involved in shipping-related activities. Increasingly, the Chinese came to play major roles in various sectors of Bangkok's economy, as skilled and unskilled labour, concessionaires, tax collectors, entrepreneurs, and property owners. They acted as middlemen and merchants forging links between Bangkok and other economic centres in Asia and other parts of the globe. In time, more than half of Bangkok's population were Chinese.

Background

The Southern Region's society and culture are quite different from that of the other regions. The South has the highest number of Muslims. Ethnic problems are prevalent. Interventions by imperialist Britain also created political problems at the multi-national level. The region has its own history and culture which is related to neighbouring Malaya. It is the smallest of Thailand's regions, making up just 14 per cent of the country's land area (after 1909). It contains the thinnest point between Myanmar and the Gulf of Thailand, with the Ta Nao Si mountain range running along its length.

The Siamese settled in Nakhon Si Thammarat in the thirteenth century. At the time, the city was the region's commercial hub with links to Malaya. Nakhon Si Thammarat was later established as an independent state. The centres in the east side of the Southern Region (as it is today), which comprised Pattani, Narathiwat, Yala and parts of Songkhla, were once important cities belonging to the ruler of Malaya. They traded with Kelantan, Terengganu, and Melaka, which were commercial centres in Muslim Southeast Asia. Pattani became prosperous and was home to multiple ethic groups. The Thai state started to expand its reach into the state of Pattani and there were a number of skirmishes around the seventeenth century. In 1786, Pattani was under Bangkok's rule, butnevertheless had a degree of autonomy as a tributary state. The Muslim population held numerous anti-Siamese state protests in Bangkok and Pattani. The Siamese government tried to restore order by appointing a provincial commissioner to rule Pattani under the thesaphiban system. In 1909, the Anglo-Siamese treaty legitimized “the incorporation of Pattani into Siamese nation at the same time as it created, on the province of Satun, henceforward separated from Sultanate of Kedah which has passed into the hands of the British”.

The Muslims in the four Southern provinces — Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat and Satun — had close historical, ethnic, religious and cultural links to Malaya. Communications between them were easy because Malaysian was the local language. The people in these provinces became Thai due to political reasons.

Background

The Central Region contains a vast fertile plain that is the Chao Phraya River delta. It is similar to other river deltas of the world such as those of the Mekong River in Vietnam and Cambodia and the Ayeyarwady River in Burma, all of which are important to population settlement. Deltas are plains created by the accumulation of sediment carried by the river from mountains and other high areas. Delta soil is rich in natural fertilizers and is ideal for growing grains and crops to feed a large population.

The Chao Phraya River delta was first settled by communities of various ethnicities that migrated from abroad. It is suitable for building houses and for agriculture. The Central Region's delta has been deemed one of the most important “rice bowl” of the world. This reflects the area's richness and its suitability for rice cultivation with a potential to “feed” the people of the world. Other river basins exist in the Central Region, namely those of the Tha Chin and Pa Sak rivers. The western part of the region is not a plain but a continuation of mountain ranges from the North. The area is also fertile because it is a confluence of the Mae Klong and Phetchaburi rivers with coastal basins along the Gulf of Thailand. The Central Region also covers the east coast, which is the southeastern part of Thailand. The area comprises deltas formed by small rivers such as the Rayong, Chanthaburi and mueang Trat. The upper watersheds next to the Gulf and in the eastern part of the Central Region are the Bang Pakong basin and the Prachin Buri basin.

Before 1855, the economy and commerce of the region was expanding. Sugarcane farming for sugar production flourished in Bang Pla Soi, Nakhon Chai Si, Bang Pakong and Chachoengsao. There were no less than 200 sugarcane processing plants in Chachoengsao, some with as many as 200 labourers. During the reign of King Rama III, sugar production extended to 19 major cities, most of which were in the Central Region. Pepper was another important export. Its main production sites in Chanthaburi were run by the Chinese. The amount of pepper exported to China in 1822 was 600,000 hab. The development of a market economy affected the growth of the region's population and economy.

Background

For a long time (before 1760), the Northeastern Region, also known as Isan, had been under the rule of the Kingdom of Lan Xang. After 1779, the whole of Northeast and Laos came under Bangkok's rule and in 1893, western Laos was taken over by the French. Then, in 1903, some parts of the Northeast fell under French colonial rule as well. The centralization during the reign of King Rama V (which strengthened the unification between the central government and the national treasury) and the construction of the railroad linking Bangkok to Khorat allowed the educational system and culture of the region to be under the control of Bangkok.

The Northeast was a tributary state. Major mueangs in the region sent levies to Bangkok to fund exports and construction projects such as the construction of royal palaces. The growth of the Bangkok elites could in fact be attributed to levies from the Northeast. These levies reflected the economic expansion of the country even before the signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855. A majority of the levies, particularly those paid in gold, came from the Northeast. This showsthat the region was able to pay its taxes in kind, rather than “money” or“labour”, which meant that the region was, to a certain degree, affluent.

The Northeast has arid weather because it is located in a rain shadow behind mountain ranges that separate it from other regions. The mountain ranges block the southwestern storms. As a result, the agricultural economy of the region became dependent solely on the South China Sea cyclones. The main river in the region is the Mekong which flows through a host of nations such as China, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Also present are the Mun, Chi and Songkhram rivers. The Northeast is sometimes called the Khorat Plateau. The mountain ranges that form the boundary between itself and other parts of Thailand are the Petchabun, the Dong Phya Yen and the Khao San Kamphaeng. The Phanom Dong Rak range separates the region from Cambodia.

The soil in the Northeast is generally not suitable for rice farming. Therefore, farmers produce little excess rice. Many areas in the region have a rather arid climate. Some areas had been settled by migrant Laotians who had crossed the Mekong River from Laos.

A regional economic history of Thailand is important for a broad picture of the economic changes in the country for a number of reasons. First, most existing studies focus to a large extent on Bangkok and the economic progress of this city and the central areas. This is understandable. Bangkok itself, since its inception as Thailand's capital in 1782, has always been the most significant urban centre in Thailand — indeed, the only city of considerable size in the country until the very recent period. Thus, Bangkok has been the centre of court and government, manufacturing production, consumption, finance and foreign trade, and a host of other economic activities. This has naturally induced historians to look mainly at Bangkok for significant changes in the Thai economy, and to ignore what is happening in the rest of the country.

Again, there is a cultural dimension to Bangkok's centrality in the story of Thailand's economic development. Bangkok has traditionally been seen as the focus of social changes, and regional developments have been obscured by such an emphasis on the capital. Equally, many of the existing sources, whether records of government departments, newspapers, or descriptions by foreign travellers, all tend to pay attention primarily to Bangkok.

Of course, Bangkok is a major part of the story of Thai economic development, and in this study Bangkok is given a prime place as one of the important regions of Thailand. But we also emphasize changes in the other regions, give importance to the ways in which Bangkok had an impact on the other regions, as well as how changes in the other regions affected Bangkok.

Another reason for a regional approach to Thai development is that for much of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, the realities of communications and transport in Thailand meant the existence of quite separate regional economies. Certainly river transport linked many parts of the country, but away from the main river arteries, road transport was often non-existent and local specialization and regional commercial hubs were prevalent. Such regional economies often fall below the radar of studies whose focus is national rather than regional. We may reflect, for example, that until the close of the nineteenth century, links between the northern cities of Chiang Mai and Lampang were often more developed with Burma (through overland trade) than they were with Siam proper.

This study has provided a regional perspective on Thai economic history. Such a perspective is necessary in order to avoid an undue emphasis on Bangkok.

Of course, the long-term predominance of Bangkok in so many spheres has affected all parts of the country since the early nineteenth century. However, it is necessary to emphasize: (a) the continuous and autonomous development of the regions, even during periods of Bangkok's greatest primacy; (b) the relative lessening of Bangkok's primacy, which took place from the 1980s, and which saw considerable urbanization and economic diversification in the various regions; and (c) a growing integration of Bangkok's economy with that of the regions.

During the nineteenth century several factors influenced Thai regional development. One was the existence of natural resources. This could be seen most clearly in the South, where, for example, tin was mined predominantly by the Chinese — controlled and operated by enterprises, processed in Penang or Singapore, and exported to foreign markets. Later, the South developed rubber and other plantation commodities.

In other regions, too, specialization resulted in centres of commercial activity, sometimes geared towards foreign markets. Already before 1900, textiles from Chiang Mai and Phrae, gems from Kanchanaburi, and a variety of forest products throughout the country, found their way to domestic and foreign markets, including notable land border trades with Burma and Malaya. Later, such border trades expanded and widened.

A notable feature of Thai economic history has always been the unusually large proportion of the population engaged in agriculture (mainly rice farming), with consequent high proportions of Thais living in rural areas. A natural result of this has been very limited urbanization outside Bangkok until very recent decades. Such a pattern was well established before the First World War, and continued until the 1980s. The large agricultural populations that characterized all regions have influenced social and economic development. Only since the 1980s have there been marked changes, with regional urban centres such as Hat Yai, Chiang Mai, Nakhon Ratchasima, Udon Thani, Rayong, and many others, exerting a profound local and non-local influence.

Thai regional economic development has been influenced by geographical factors to an extent that cannot be overestimated. Both transport and agricultural productivity have been dominated by geography.

This book, A Regional Economic History of Thailand, presents an economic history of Bangkok, the Central Region, the North, the South, and Northeastern Regions from the signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855 to the present. It takes a regional perspective, which is meant to provide a more accurate picture of the long-term development of the country's infrastructure, economy and society than a Bangkok-centric approach. Although Bangkok has undeniably had a wide-ranging influence on Thai society, studying the economic history of all of the kingdom's regions at the same time yields a more complete picture of the changes in the Thai economy. Four reasons support this argument.

Firstly, past studies of the long-term economic changes in Thailand have focused primarily on Bangkok, its surrounding areas and the central delta region. This is because Bangkok is the capital city and centre of government, finance, commerce, industry, consumption, and international trade. It is the most populous city and exerts tremendous influence over the social, cultural, and economic development of other regions. Furthermore, research resources, such as government documents, newspapers, and foreign records of Thailand's history, most commonly originated from the capital. Most research has, therefore, focused on Bangkok as the centre of change affecting other regions and has neglected other regions that had an influence on Bangkok.

Secondly, the social and economic fundamentals of the five regions are inherently different and are unique to each region. These fundamentals include population (for example, ethnicity); economy; agriculture, industry and service infrastructure; and geography (plains, hills, mountains, seas). It is therefore important to study each region separately. Stark social and economic differences may exist even within the same region, such as in the eastern and western parts of the Central Region, so the distinct characteristics of each should also be explained. In contrast, almost all past studies of long-term economic changes (such as over a 100-year period) have addressed a particular area in isolation instead of examining the five regions together to compare factors such as geography, including an area's distance to a river or sea, and the availability of natural resources and raw materials.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY