Unlike its Southeast Asian neighbors, Thailand was never colonized by an imperial power. However, Siam (as Thailand was called until 1939) shared a great deal in common with both colonized states and imperial powers: its sovereignty was qualified by imperial nations while domestically its leaders pursued European colonial strategies of juridical control in the Muslim south. The creation of family law and courts in that region and in Siam proper most clearly manifests Siam's dualistic position. Demonstrating the centrality of gender relations, law, and Siam's Malay Muslims to the history of modern Thailand, Subject Siam examines the structures and social history of jurisprudence to gain insight into Siam's unique position within Southeast Asian history. Tamara Loos elaborates on the processes of modernity through an in-depth study of hundreds of court cases involving polygyny, marriage, divorce, rape, and inheritance adjudicated between the 1850s and 1930s. Most important, this study of Siam offers a novel approach to the question of modernity precisely because Siam was not colonized yet was subject to transnational discourses and symbols of modernity. In Siam, Loos finds, the language of modernity was not associated with a foreign, colonial overlord, so it could be deployed both by elites who favored continuation of existing domestic hierarchies and by those advocating political and social change.

"This book recovers a hidden tradition of Thai political life in the era of high imperialism by examining legal and medico-legal interventions in death"--

This unusual and intriguing study of nationhood explores the 19th-century confrontation of ideas that transformed the kingdom of Siam into the modern conception of a nation. Siam Mapped challenges much that has been written on Thai history because it demonstrates convincingly that the physical and political definition of Thailand on which other works are based is anachronistic.

Woman between Two Kingdoms explores the story of Dara Rasami, one of 153 wives of King Chulalongkorn of Siam during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in a kingdom near Siam called Lan Na, Dara served as both hostage and diplomat for her family and nation. Thought of as a harem by the West, Siam's Inner Palace actually formed a nexus between the domestic and the political. Dara's role as an ethnic Other among the royal concubines assisted the Siamese in both consolidating the kingdom's territory and building a local version of Europe's hierarchy of civilizations. Dara Rasami's story provides a fresh perspective on both the sociopolitical roles played by Siamese palace women, and Siam's response to the intense imperialist pressures it faced in the late nineteenth century. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.