The Franco-Siamese War and the Russo-Japanese War

Abstract

The adoption of the ambiguous yet politically powerful idea of ‘race’ in Siam during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was shaped in a contradictory manner by two colonial wars. In the aftermath of the Franco- Siamese War of 1893 the idea of a Thai ‘race’ was promoted to differentiate the populations under Siamese and French rule. After the Russo-Japanese War and increasing criticism from an emergent Siamese middle class, the kingdom’s ruling class embraced Orientalist stereotypes to argue against the suitability of constitutional governance for the Siamese due to their being ‘Asians’. In consequence, before the Siamese Revolution of 1932, the elite of the absolute monarchy argued simultaneously that the Siamese were racially different from their neighbours but fundamentally alike to all ‘Orientals’.