How Thailand Escaped Colonialism

i'm in bangkok right now and what's behind me is what's called colonial architecture basically a european architecture brought to places where it has no tradition and no context and it was brought there by people who well colonized these places you can find this type of architecture all over asia from cambodia to philippines and there's a bunch of it in thailand as well as you would expect except that thailand unlike all these other places was never colonized so what is it doing here [Applause] [Music] well the reason why thailand has a colonial architecture is also the reason why it was never colonized in the first place but to explain that let's go back a little bit the kingdom of thailand which was actually called siam until the 20th century has been a regional power for over a thousand years dominating the southeast asia as the strongest and largest country but in the 19th century things started to change european countries were expanding further and further colonizing every bit of the planet including egypt and great britain was taking the lead after it conquered india it moved next door to myanmar the western neighbor of saiyan turning it into its another colony and calling it british burma meanwhile the french were coming from the east they just conquered what we now call vietnam and zion was now stuck between two of the most powerful colonial empires in the world especially france was determined to take over the entire territory of siam and create a huge french colony comparable to british india from vietnam they started to move to what is now cambodia and lao at that time controlled by zion the king of siam decided to fight back but almost immediately he found out that his forces stood virtually no chance against the much more advanced european militaries at that point siam was sandwiched between two countries with a never-ending appetite for expanding their territory while being the last remaining part of the region that was independent and in the eyes of the europeans that meant free-for-taking so what do you do when someone much stronger than you wants to take your land and you have no way to stop him from doing that well siam found a way and it's a strategy that could be best called adapt and survive whatever it takes the thing is that while colonization was mostly about getting more land money and power it wasn't just that in the eyes of the colonizers it was also about expanding the boundaries of the civilized world and that's what according to them made it a completely legitimate behavior that they didn't see as something bad but actually as doing a service to those who were being colonized the europeans didn't see the countries that they were invading as legitimate and saw their colonization as the natural order of things bringing civilization culture and technology to the people who according to them didn't have it so the king of siam at the time king chulalongkor figured that if sayam cannot fight back militarily it has to do everything it can to be seen as a legitimate country according to the european definition because that will decrease the chance that they will get colonized and the way to do this was to become as similar to the europeans as possible so the king began a national program of europeanization that involved all aspects of the society he became the first siamese royal who went to europe to both learn the customs of europeans and to show them that the siamese were not so different and he didn't stop there his children and other members of the royal family were sent to get their education to europe and the king started wearing western clothes and importing european cars customs and products and he even started bringing hundreds of foreign advisors from europe to come and help siam reform almost every aspect of the country he brought german engineers to build the railways and train his army french to advise on judicial reforms and mining games to build the navy and brits to establish the financial system european architecture was built all over the country people started to dress like europeans and the way the kingdom was run and organized started to look more and more like europe and this didn't mean that europeans couldn't just take time anyway if they wanted they could but after the king jewel alonghorn met almost every royal family in europe and after european newspapers spent years writing about how amazing the kink and his reforms are it would look at least weird and there was one more thing that the king did to stop saying from being colonized and it was absolutely brilliant he realized pretty early on that europeans were obsessed with cartography with both making maps and understanding the world through them especially when it came to colonial politics because they were mostly about drawing and redrawing borders and making deals with other european powers about who gets which territory but meanwhile most of the countries in the world including siam didn't have clearly established borders which often made the europeans feel like that if a territory is not on a map then it's just free for anyone to take so the king chulalongkorn hired a bunch of british cartographers brought them to siam and paid them to map the entire country and draw exactly where the borders are so that no one could just come and take their land without asking anymore there were other reasons that worked in times favor as well like that the british actually liked to have a country that served as a buffer zone between them and french territories but that wouldn't be enough not unless thailand did everything they could to remain independent the fact that there is only a handful countries on the planet that escaped colonization in this era only makes it more impressive and it's an ultimate example of what the ability to adapt and survive looks like

Channel: Explained with Dom

Views: 235,936

Keywords: thailand colonialism, why thailand was never colonized, how thailand escaped colonialism, thailand colonial history, thailand colonial rule, thailand colonization averted, thailand european colonialism, siam kingdom, king chulalongkorn

Id: 8kkr4lOL3lE

Length: 6min 15sec (375 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022