Thammasat University students interested in international law, history, sociology, development studies, political science, and related subjects may find a new book useful.
Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective is an Open Access book available for free download at this link:
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/1/
It is edited by A. L. Beier and Paul Ocobock.
Professor A. L. Beier teaches history at Illinois State University, the United States of America (USA).
Assistant Professor Paul Ocobock teaches history at the University of Notre Dame, USA.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes several books about different aspects of vagrancy laws.
The publisher’s description notes:
Throughout history, those arrested for vagrancy have generally been poor men and women, often young, able-bodied, unemployed, and homeless. Most histories of vagrancy have focused on the European and American experiences. Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective is the first book to consider the shared global heritage of vagrancy laws, homelessness, and the historical processes they accompanied.
In this ambitious collection, vagrancy and homelessness are used to examine a vast array of phenomena, from the migration of labor to social and governmental responses to poverty through charity, welfare, and prosecution. The essays in Cast Out represent the best scholarship on these subjects and include discussions of the lives of the underclass, strategies for surviving and escaping poverty, the criminalization of poverty by the state, the rise of welfare and development programs, the relationship between imperial powers and colonized peoples, and the struggle to achieve independence after colonial rule. By juxtaposing these histories, the authors explore vagrancy as a common response to poverty, labor dislocation, and changing social norms, as well as how this strategy changed over time and adapted to regional peculiarities.
Part of a growing literature on world history, Cast Out offers fresh perspectives and new research in fields that have yet to fully investigate vagrancy and homelessness. This book by leading scholars in the field is for policy makers, as well as for courses on poverty, homelessness, and world history.
In December 2023, Thaiger reported:
The Thai Health Promotion Foundation (ThaiHealth) and associated agencies took the stage on November 30, to bring to light the findings of an extensive survey conducted on the state of homelessness in Thailand.
The details were presented at the 2024 Protection of Homeless People Expo.
The survey, spearheaded by Phoranee Phuprasert, director of ThaiHealth’s Office of Vulnerable Group Support, discovered that Thailand is currently home to over 2,499 homeless individuals. The primary causes leading to this situation were identified as unemployment and familial disputes.
The majority of these homeless individuals were observed to be residing in urban territories, specifically in cities like Bangkok, Chon Buri, and Chiang Mai.
In August 2023, The Bangkok Post explained:
New ban puts homeless in jeopardy
From September, Ratchadamnoen Avenue will no longer be a haven for those living rough
The book’s introduction states:
Vagrants, vagabonds tramps, beggars, bums, mendicants, idlers, indigents, itinerants, the underclass, and the homeless—all these names and legal categories seek to describe poor, unemployed, and highly mobile people—people who form the focal point of this collection of essays.
Vagrancy laws are unique; while most crimes are defined by actions, vagrancy laws make no specific action or inaction illegal.
Rather the laws are based on personal condition, state of being, and social and economic status. Individuals merely need to exhibit the characteristics or stereotypes of vagrants for authorities to make an arrest.
Thus, vagrancy can mean and be many different things to many people, and therein lies its legal importance as a broad, overarching mechanism to control and punish a selective group of people.
Yet what are these qualities that arouse the suspicion of police and transform people into vagrants? Through history, those so labeled and arrested for vagrancy have often been poor, young, able-bodied, unemployed, rootless, and homeless.
Yet it has been the seeming voluntary unemployment and mobility of people for which vagrancy laws have been designed. In general, the primary aim of vagrancy laws has been to establish control over idle individuals who could labor but choose not to and rootless, roofless persons seemingly unfettered by traditional domestic life and free to travel outside the surveillance of the state. Over time, particularly in the twentieth century, vagrancy became a catchall category favored for a “procedural laxity” that allowed the state to convict a “motley assortment of human troubles” and circumvent “the rigidity imposed by real or imagined defects in criminal law and procedure.”
As the geography and heterogeneity of punishable social ills increased, more and more fell under the classification of vagrancy.
As a result, explaining what vagrancy means, who vagrants are, and why they attract the ire of the state, is fraught with difficulty. As this collection of essays attests, vagrants can be peasant farmers, literate ex-soldiers, famine victims, former slaves, beggars, political agitators, newsboys, migrant laborers, street people, squatters, and in some cases, those the state and the upper classes feared had breached social norms.
Yet, the complicated nature of vagrancy and its connections to human labor, mobility, behavior, and status have made it a useful historical tool to scholars.
Historians have used the concept of vagrancy to examine a vast array of processes, including the development and impact of the market economy, migration of labor, construction of modern states and imperial structures, formation of subcultures among the poor, rapidity of urbanization, and responses to poverty through charity, welfare, or prosecution. […]
Furthermore, the collection attempts to bridge some of the geographic, temporal, and disciplinary divides that have discouraged a global history of vagrancy and homelessness. The purpose of juxtaposing these works is not to expose a uniformity of vagrancy’s
form and function among nations and across centuries, but rather to explore the development of vagrancy (or lack thereof) as a common response to managing poverty, labor, and social norms, and how this strategy changed over time and adapted to regional peculiarities.
The contributions in this collection straddle seven centuries, five continents, and several academic disciplines. They delve deeper into the struggle of societies to understand and alleviate chronic poverty, whether through private charity, criminalization, institutionalization, or compulsory labor. Some chapters illustrate the power of vagrancy
laws as coercive engines in punishment and exploitation; others highlight the utter failure of vagrancy policies at the hands of human agency, state incapacity, and persistent personal charity. Several of the chapters envision vagrancy as a lifestyle, by choice and circumstance, in which people define themselves by both opposing and appropriating cultural norms. The authors offer fresh perspectives on old historiographical debates or new research in fields that have yet to fully investigate vagrancy and homelessness.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)