Siam kept its nation intact by importing an externalized workforce

Evidence

Chulalongkorn regarded himself as a modernizer. But his prime models were not the United Kingdom or Germany, but rather the colonial beamtenstaaten of the Dutch East Indies, British Malaya, and the Raj. Following these models meant rationalizing and centralizing royal government, eliminating traditional semi-autonomous tributary statelets, and promoting economic development somewhat along colonial lines. The most striking example of this – an example which in its odd way looks forward to contemporary Saudi Arabia – was his encouragement of a massive immigration of young, single, male foreigners to form the disoriented, politically powerless workforce needed to construct port facilities, build railway lines, dig canals, and expand commercial agriculture. This importing of gastarbeiter paralleled, indeed was modelled on, the policies of the authorities in Batavia and Singapore. And as in the case of the Netherlands Indies and British Malaya, the great bulk of the labourers imported during the nineteenth century were from southeastern China. It is instructive that this policy caused him neither personal qualms nor political difficulties – no more than it did the colonial rulers on whom he modelled himself. Indeed the policy made good short term sense for a dynastic state, since it created an impotent working class ‘outside’ Thai society and left that society largely ‘undisturbed.’ — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 381

Categorization

• QUESTION: Chulalongkorn’s ‘outside’ workforce prefigures the guest-worker logic of Gulf states and Singapore — worth investigating whether this is a durable strategy of dynastic statecraft.