Miles Warde

Almost the entire world was colonised by European powers in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Siam (now Thailand) was one of the only countries that resisted successfully. It did so in one of history’s biggest PR victories and state capacity-building efforts: the ‘siwilai’ modernisation campaign – its equivalent of the Meiji Restoration – in which the trappings of European civilization were adopted to turn the imperial ‘civilizing mission’ on its head: - Siam hired Belgian lawyers to redesign its laws and royal court along European lines, which worked to stop European powers from claiming that their subjects should be exempt from Siamese laws, a common tactic for creating pretexts for invasion. - They brought in German military advisors and replaced traditional noble levies with a standing army and a professional officer corps designed on Prussian lines. - The state adopted the Gregorian calendar, 24-hour days, censuses, fixed borders, railways, and discouraged betel-nut chewing and promoted wearing Western dress. - Siam’s king Mongkut spoke English and Latin, was a student of Western science and technology, and maintained a library containing everything from scientific works to Sir Walter Scott novels. - The royal heirs were sent to Eton and European military colleges. The king negotiated with British diplomats in English over wine and cigars, in a library filled with scientific texts and Walter Scott novels. By 1907, Le Figaro was comparing Siam with post-Meiji Japan and telling its readers that Siam’s king had the dignity of a European king. The story has been made famous in The King and I, but how it actually happened is not well understood in the West. From the new issue of Works in Progress, how Siam Europeanised itself in just a few decades, divided the coalitions that drove imperialism in Europe, and managed to stand against some of history’s most fearsome imperial powers and win. worksinprogress.co/issue/how…