The Power of Ethnic Claims in Early Modern Siam (1400-1850)

In Southeast Asia today, ethnic groups are commonly viewed as age-old, “natural” categories of social organization. In contrast, scholars often see them as legacies of colonial “divide and rule” tactics, which transformed cosmopolitan premodern states into fractured “plural societies.” The implication of both views is that ethnic identities were static and apolitical before the “high colonial period” of the late nineteenth century. However, a careful reading of premodern, Thai-language texts reveals that patterns of ethnic identification were far from static. They shifted dramatically over the course of the early modern period (1400-1850). In this talk, I discuss three early modern “moments” in which ethnicity was mobilized in new ways. Further, I show that each new kind of ethnic claim-making was political—it was used to make a new kind of claim on people, their labor, and their connections—and that each one laid the groundwork for modern conceptions of ethnicity and nation.

SPEAKER

A historian of Southeast Asia and its global interconnections, Matthew Reeder is an assistant professor at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He received his doctorate from Cornell University, where his dissertation earned the Messenger Chalmers and Lauriston Sharp prizes. His current book project examines ethnicity and politics in early modern Siam (Thailand). He has conducted archival work in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phnom Penh, and Paris, and his research has appeared in journals such as Modern Asian Studies and Rian Thai.

CHAIR

Fiona Williamson is Associate Professor of Science, Technology and Society at SMU. She specialises in the history of climate and environment and the history of science in colonial Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.