‘Stranger within the Gates’: Knowing Semi-Colonial Siam as Extraterritorials

Extract

Siam and the Semi-colonial Issue

The issue of Siam as a semi-feudal, semi-colonial social formation, mooted by Thai Marxists in the 1950s, and again in the 1970s, has by the 1990s by and large been set aside by critically-minded academics for its inability to provide a lineage for the strain of capitalist mode of production that has emerged by the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the ‘semi-colonial’ as an analytical framework retains its force in confronting the assumed independence and an unreflexive racially based elite nationalism that has so defined Thai self-representations and public culture, but also in how Thailand is understood by others.