Thammasat University students interested in Thai history, sociology, political science, colonialism, imperialism, urban development, and related subjects may find a new book useful.

Chiang Mai between Empire and Modern Thailand: A City in the Colonial Margins is an Open Access book available for free download at this link:

https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/132051

It is by Assistant Professor Taylor Easum, who teaches history at Indiana State University, the United States of America (USA).

The Thammasat University Library collection includes several books about different aspects of the history and culture of Chiang Mai.

The publisher’s description notes:

Urban histories tend to be dominated by large, global cities. But what does the history of the modern, colonial era look like from the perspective of smaller cities? By shifting the focus from the metropolis to the secondary city of Chiang Mai, this study provides an alternative narrative of the formation of the modern Thai state that highlights the overlap between European, American, and Siamese interests. Through a detailed analysis of Chiang Mai’s urban space, the power dynamics that shaped the city come into focus as an urban-scale manifestation of colonial forces—albeit an incomplete one that allowed sacred space to become a source of conflict that was only resolved in the years before WWII. Today, as the city confronts the challenge of overdevelopment, the legacy of the colonial era, and the opportunity of heritage preservation, this deep, multi-layered history of the power of (and over) urban space is vital.

The author observes:

What does the space of a city tell us? In the case of Chiang Mai, it tells us that the largest city in northern Thailand has not always been northern, or even Thai. Though Chiang Mai is often called Thailand’s “second city” and is a regional center dominating Thailand’s northern region, the urban space of the city tells a story that reaches beyond the nation and between competing and cooperating empires. Chiang Mai was—and in some ways remains—part of a vast network of city-states with historical and cultural connections stretching across the interior of mainland Southeast Asia.

Once the center of a powerful inland kingdom known as Lanna, Chiang Mai found itself incorporated into modern Siam as a provincial city by the turn of the twentieth century. Urban space reminds us, however, that this transition was not just a national one. This was also a story of external, overlapping colonial powers that reshaped the urban environment. In short, Chiang Mai’s urban space tells a story of its peculiarly marginal position, on the periphery of the modern Thai state, removed from coastal centers of power, and located between the frontiers of both Western and Siamese imperial states.

This book aims to tell the story of that urban space. The story of old and new royal palaces, colonial-style government buildings, Western missionary hospitals, Chinese markets, and the way these forces pulled and stretched the city in different directions is certainly worth telling on its own. However, the transformation of Chiang Mai’s urban space in the colonial margins also reflects several broader processes, including the regional realignment of power away from inland, north-facing networks of exchange and toward riverine and coastal trade associated with the global colonial economy; the cooperation between British and Siamese interests; the formation of the modern Siamese state; and the development of informal forms of colonialism and empire in mainland Southeast Asia.

This focus on urban space is the result of several impulses. First is the move away from the nation-state as the dominant frame of historical analysis. One major approach moving away from the nation-state has been to expand the scale of analysis to global empire and world-systems, a trend often called the “imperial turn.”

Another path away from the nation-state leads to studies at the smaller scale, of regional and local histories, at times embedded within the nation-state but often located at the margins between two or more competing centers of power.

A detailed examination of urban space in Chiang Mai seeks both to follow and further these trends toward empire and local history. The challenge of local historiography is avoiding repetition of larger national narratives on a smaller scale. Rather, there is a need for more scholarship that integrates the local and the global, without parroting nationalist narratives of progress, modernization, or unification.

The second impulse that this book seeks to develop is a desire to refocus scholarly attention away from the metropolis and toward the great urban middle, where most urban dwellers live and where the timing and nature of historical change often differs in important and telling ways from the metropole or colonial cities. Moving the analytical frame to the level of the city can only do so much. Major cities have frequently found themselves at the center of studies of empire and nation; smaller, secondary, or intermediate cities, however, have received far less attention from scholars. As Mark Jayne has pointed out, if one takes the time to count, the typical size of cities around the world is not large but rather small or intermediate.

For many years, this point was somewhat muted in Thailand, where the rate of urban primacy in the 1980s was so high that the majority of the urban population in the entire country resided within Bangkok and its suburbs.

Nevertheless, the point remains: while more people live and work in Bangkok than in any other Thai city, an increasing number live and work in smaller cities throughout the country. As sustainable development pushes our attention to secondary and smaller cities, more historical attention is needed to understand those cities, both to make use of their potential and to protect the unique local character of those cities for residents and visitors alike.

Within the field of Thai studies, this move has particular importance, as Bangkok’s domination of the urban landscape of Thailand serves as an extreme example of urban primacy. Bangkok lords over Thailand as the center of government, administration, trade, and even culture and religion. Bangkok’s urban primacy within Thailand has been among the most remarkable in the world.

There are other cities in Thailand, of course, but the large cities near Bangkok have become absorbed into the greater metropolis as suburbs, satellite ports, or industrial towns. The larger cities of the provinces, further removed from Bangkok, have generally been able to retain more of their unique identity, but even then, these provincial cities and towns have become holiday destinations for the Bangkok elite or outposts extending the reach of the central state. There are regional centers as well, larger cities that act as administrative hubs anchoring a wider region comprising multiple provinces and districts. The three largest cities outside the Bangkok region are Hat Yai in the south, Nakhon Ratchasima in the northeast, and Chiang Mai in the north. However, none of these cities comes even close to Bangkok in terms of influence and power, or even in population or territorial extent. Even based on conservative estimates, the next largest city in Thailand, outside the central Bangkok region, is less than 1/30 the size of Bangkok in terms of population; Chiang Mai is closer to 1/40 the size of Bangkok.

For many Thai and visitors alike, the main urban formula is simply: Thai + city = Bangkok. […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)