Sovereign Necropolis: The Politics of Death in Semi-Colonial Siam

By Trais Pearson

By the 1890s, Siam (Thailand) was the last holdout against European imperialism in Southeast Asia. But the kingdom's exceptional status came with a substantial caveat: Bangkok, its bustling capital, was a port city that was subject to many of the same legal and fiscal constraints as other colonial treaty ports. Sovereign Necropolis offers new insight into turn-of-the-century Thai history by disinterring the forgotten stories of those who died "unnatural deaths" during this period and the work of the Siamese state to assert their rights in a pluralistic legal arena.

Based on a neglected cache of inquest files compiled by the Siamese Ministry of the Capital, official correspondence, and newspaper accounts, Trais Pearson documents the piecemeal introduction of new forms of legal and medical concern for the dead. He reveals that the investigation of unnatural death demanded testimony from diverse strata of society: from the unlettered masses to the king himself. These cases raised questions about how to handle the dead—were they spirits to be placated or legal subjects whose deaths demanded compensation?—as well as questions about jurisdiction, rights, and liability.

Exhuming the history of imperial politics, transnational commerce, technology, and expertise, Sovereign Necropolis demonstrates how the state's response to global flows transformed the nature of legal subjectivity and politics in lasting ways. A compelling exploration of the troubling lives of the dead in a cosmopolitan treaty port, the book is a notable contribution to the growing corpus of studies in science, law, and society in the non-Western world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501740169

Book preview

SOVEREIGN NECROPOLIS

THE POLITICS OF DEATH IN SEMI-COLONIAL SIAM

TRAIS PEARSON

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

To Phi Pha and the Sukwong Family, who took in a twenty-one-year-old wanderer and helped him find his way.

To Su-Ping, Quinn, and Josephine—the life and light in my world.

Archives do not record experience so much as its absence; they mark the point where an experience is missing from its proper place, and what is returned to us in an archive may well be something we never possessed in the first place.

—Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy

The chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the great and the small, thereby accounts for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history.

—Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Note on Naming Conventions, Sources, Transcription, and Translation

Introduction

1. Bad Death

2. Indemnity and Identity

3. Treaty Port Tort

4. Accidental Metaphysics

5. Morbid Subjects

6. Incisions and Inscriptions

Conclusion

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. The charnel grounds at Wat Saket, circa 1900

2. Map of central Bangkok, circa 1900

3. King Chulalongkorn boarding an electrified tramcar

4. Pratu Sam Yot (Sam Yot Gate), circa 1892

5. Thanon jaroen krung (New Road), circa 1900

6. An electric-powered tramcar on New Road

7. Dr. T. Heyward Hays

8. Prince Naret Worarit

NOTE ON NAMING CONVENTIONS, SOURCES, TRANSCRIPTION, AND TRANSLATION

The nation-state of Thailand was known as the Kingdom of Siam until 1939. In the interest of historical accuracy, I refer to the polity and its population as Siam and Siamese, respectively, throughout most of this book. I have followed the Royal Thai General System of Transcription (1999) with some minor changes: I have transliterated as "j" when it appears in initial position (as in jao phraya or jao phanak ngan). Other exceptions have been made to conform to recognized spelling conventions in the case of proper names (e.g., Chulalongkorn).

I have chosen to retain Thai-language titles and honorifics more or less in accordance with their historical usages in the archival documents. These include markers of age, gender, (commoner) social status, and ethnicity such as amdaeng (Miss), nai (Mister), and jin (the ethnic marker for a male of Chinese birth or ancestry). Readers will also note three distinct titles used to signify medical expertise: (1) the English-language title Doctor (Dr.) was used to refer almost exclusively to Western-born and Western-educated physicians; (2) the Thai term phaet was also used in reference to these doctors, as well as Thai (or other non-Westerners) whose medical training was recognized as being in the Western tradition; (3) the term mo was typically used to refer to physicians trained in Siamese or local Asian medical traditions. Finally, the title phra was used in two contexts: when it appears before a Buddhist monk’s personal name, the term is an honorific meaning Venerable. When used before a civil servant’s name, it signifies a bureaucratic rank, as in Phra Thep Phlu, with phraya and jao phraya signifying elevated ranks or offices. In the case of individuals who appear throughout the study but whose titles and ranks may have changed along with their office, I have elected to use a single, consistent honorific to aid in recognition; such is the case with Prince Naret Worarit, who occupied the office of Minister of the Capital during seminal years covered in this book.

The Siamese currency was in flux during the transitional period discussed in this book. Foreign-language sources most commonly used the Portuguese/Malay loanword tical when referring to the Siamese currency until 1897, when it was standardized using a decimal system whereby one hundred satang equaled one baht. The term catty (plural: catties; Thai: chang) referred to a larger denomination of the Siamese currency; it was based on a standardized Chinese measure of weight. One catty amounted to eighty baht (or ticals).

The empirical core of this book is a collection of documents from the National Archives of Thailand labeled Death by various causes (tai duai het tang tang; NA R5 N 23). The collection consists of the documentary records of inquests, or investigations into cases of unnatural or suspicious deaths in the Siamese capital city beginning in 1890. They are a diverse and uneven lot, containing voices ranging from illiterate subalterns to the king himself, often treading on every rung of the cosmopolitan social ladder in between. In making sense of and ultimately translating portions of these documents, I have benefited greatly from the help of Sirinan Bunsri and Ngampit Jagacinski. Any errors, of course, are my own.

In the only other work of published scholarship to make extensive use of the inquest files, Takashi Tomosugi has analyzed the documents as evidence of the changing nature of urban lives at that time; see his Reminiscences of Old Bangkok: Memory and the Identification of a Changing Society ([Tokyo]: The Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo, 1993), 131–50. These documents deserve much greater attention, and I urge scholars to pay them their due. Like the dead whose passings they recount, they have been hiding in plain sight for too long.

Introduction

The life of sovereign power is a life that is lived in the shadow of death—many deaths, nameless and innumerable, disavowed and forgotten.

—Stuart J. Murray, Thanatopolitics: On the Use of Death for Mobilizing Political Life

On July 19, 1906, the queen consort of King Chulalongkorn of Siam was involved in a fatal car accident when the motorcar she was traveling in struck and killed a pedestrian in central Bangkok. Although the queen informed the king of the event the next morning, seven days passed before news of the accident reached him through official channels in the Siamese bureaucracy. Chulalongkorn was incensed. He penned a letter to the responsible party, noting, Since time immemorial, whenever a human being died under unusual circumstances—such as being struck by lightning, burned in a fire, drowning, or being stabbed or shot—whether by an act of the Gods or not, if it happened in this city it was the duty of the Ministry of the Capital to report it to the king without delay.¹

Chulalongkorn’s letter might be seen as in keeping with a paternalistic vein in the Thai monarchical tradition. It harkens back to a pastoral kingdom where the subjects did not want owing to the fish in the water and rice in the fields, and where petitions could be voiced to the sovereign himself, who hung a bell over the palace gate and if any commoner in the land has a grievance which sickens his belly and gripes his heart … he goes and strikes the bell which the King has hung there; King Ramkhamhaeng, the ruler of the kingdom, hears the call; he goes and questions the man, examines the case, and decides it justly for him.² In this reading, Chulalongkorn’s concern for the dead resounds as a beneficent extension of the Siamese king’s traditional mandate as Lord of Life (jao chiwit) to include jurisdiction over the dead as well. There is, however, an alternative reading, one that hints at darker realities of modern Thai history. In that view, the sovereign’s concern for the dead is not a simple ethnographic anomaly, a testament to some ahistorical facet of Thai culture, but is rather a vision of Siamese political culture that intersected in crucial ways with the reality of the kingdom’s semi-colonial status and the pragmatic actions being taken by the state to address those conditions.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Siamese king’s sovereign power over both the living and the dead had been dramatically curtailed. Since the mid-nineteenth century, unequal trade treaties had granted extraterritorial legal privileges to foreign residents. Consular courts administered justice to the growing contingent of foreigners residing in Siam, including immigrants from across Asia who likewise claimed privileged status as protégés (protected subjects) of the imperial powers. Bangkok, the Siamese royal capital, a cosmopolitan city of some half a million residents, thus became a plural legal arena, and death—especially death under unnatural, accidental, or suspicious circumstances, which might entail civil or criminal legal action—became a matter of transnational concern and expert intervention.³ Barristers, physicians, police, consular officials, juries, and newspaper editors all disputed the Siamese monarch’s claim to power over life and death, raising questions of evidence, liability, and jurisdiction. Sovereign Necropolis attends to these debates over the dead and injured and asks what they might reveal about the practice of sovereign politics in the (semi-)colonial world.

The social, cultural, and political lives of the dead have long been a topic of concern for anthropologists, who have endeavored to capture the symbolic, spectral, and affective presence and agency of the dead.⁴ All of these forms of agency and concern for the dead are well attested to in the interdisciplinary field of Thai studies. Whether as victims of political violence or the looming spirits of those who suffered financial ruin or displacement by new urban lifeways, the dead figure prominently in much recent anthropological scholarship on Thai society.⁵ The dead, however, are much more than just symbols and specters. They have a physical presence in the form of material remains that require diverse forms of care ranging from the custodial to the curatorial and can prompt forms of attention ranging from filial to forensic.⁶ In their very physicality, the dead offer a carnal and charnel rejoinder to anthropological work fixated on the spectral and symbolic.⁷ Yet these practical forms of engagement with the dead can themselves inspire a great deal of angst in the unaccustomed observer, as noted by Michael Taussig and by recent work in the field of death studies.⁸

In its early days, death studies scholarship tended to focus on longitudinal studies of deathways in homogeneous (largely European) cultural contexts.⁹ By contrast, studies attuned to the ways in which cross-cultural encounters challenged established Western deathways or the ways in which empire building and evangelization invested death with new significance for colonized communities have been comparatively rare.¹⁰ But the few notable exceptions, including Erik Seeman’s Death in the New World and Vincent Brown’s The Reaper’s Garden, have helped to establish that historically death has been one of the most important channels of communication between peoples of different cultures—an insight that is borne out by modern Thai history.¹¹

For foreign residents and visitors to Siam, indigenous deathways have historically been a topic of macabre fascination, ethnographic interest, and medical scrutiny. Travelogues attest to the fact that Wat Saket, a Buddhist temple located just outside of the city walls that was renowned for its role as a charnel ground, was an essential stop on the itinerary of any adventurous foreign visitor to the Siamese capital city in the late nineteenth century. Oh! no I will not die here, vowed Ludovic Marquis de Beauvoir (1846–1929) after witnessing a corpse—seemingly resurrected—dance on top of a funeral pyre at Wat Saket, limbs flailing as the heat of the pyre scorched tendons and connective tissue.¹² One particularly graphic news item from the late nineteenth century chronicles the execution of a Siamese criminal who had been convicted of a brutal murder by bludgeoning while in the commission of a robbery.¹³ Five foreign journalists attended the gruesome proceedings, along with an American physician named Dr. T. Heyward Hays. After the executioner’s sword had severed the spinal column of the condemned man, Hays knelt down to take his pulse. Eyes fixed on the halting but rhythmic ticks of the seconds hand on his watch, Hays kept count as the pulse of the deceased grew fainter under the pressure of his pointer and middle fingers. The execution was very much a Siamese affair, but like so many other aspects of life and death in the colonial world at the end of the nineteenth century, Western science brought a new form of scrutiny to bear on it. The uninvited gaze of the foreign residents signaled the arrival of a new manner of concern for the dead and dying in the Siamese capital.

It is perhaps not surprising that such forms of disciplinary and charnel pageantry should have provoked the interest of foreign observers, but this study calls attention to quotidian and forgotten instances of death and injury in the city’s streets, canals, gardens, and temples. Specifically, it explores the Siamese state’s burgeoning interest in the fate of its dead and injured subjects and the increasingly systematic ways in which it investigated the circumstances of their passing and attempted to assert their rights in the plural legal arena of fin-de-siècle Bangkok. In contrast with the public spectacle of executions and the gruesome labors of undertakers, this study reveals the progressive sequestration of the dead as their bodies increasingly became the terrain of expert concern and intervention.

Sovereign Necropolis argues that the investigation of unnatural death was an early—and unlikely—site of direct interaction between the state and its subjects. By bringing agents of the state into direct relations of concern with its previously anonymous subjects, the inquest effectively sidestepped the hierarchical social relations that characterized the traditional sociopolitical order in Siam. It therefore stands in stark contrast to institutions like corvée labor and taxation, for example, whereby interactions between state and subject were mediated by the social relations of the feudal order and the tax-farming system, respectively.¹⁴ Although these might appear prima facie to be liberalizing developments consistent with a growing recognition of subjects as rights-bearing citizens, I argue that in fact they were not. Although unnatural death became a new interface between the state and its subjects, it was not a trajectory that tended toward democratic politics or the formation of recognizable forms of civil society. Rather, the new legal and medicolegal channels of concern for the bodies of Siamese subjects maintained and even bolstered traditional forms of authority and authoritative political culture both within and outside of the state bureaucracy.

Moreover, I argue that the adoption of these forms of forensic expertise was part of a broader implementation of a conservative grammar of rule that spoke to conditions ranging from the nature of legal and political subjectivity to the metaphysical constitution of the social world. In short, Sovereign Necropolis makes the case that reforms in the arena of civil law and legal medicine were not intended to secure justice for the masses, but rather to meet the practical challenges faced by the Siamese elite in their ongoing engagement with imperial powers. The result was a form of necropolitics, in the general sense of discursive and practical actions oriented around dead bodies, which has important implications for our understanding of Thai history in the era of high imperialism and beyond.¹⁵

The Sovereign Exception (or, Exceptionally Sovereign?)

The emergence of a necropolitical regime at the turn of the twentieth century offers a troubling rebuke to the master narrative of modern Thai historiography: namely, the doctrine of Siamese/Thai exceptionalism. Thailand’s status as the only nation-state in Southeast Asia to avoid direct control by European imperial power marks it as a singular state with an exceptional past. It is a narrative that has been touted by royal-nationalists and twentieth-century authoritarian advocates of development alike, who unanimously point to Siam’s independence as evidence of its singular virtue. When confronting the question of how Siam remained independent, these scholars have looked first to the nation’s leaders, specifically the monarchs of the reigning Chakri dynasty. In the view of Thai historians like Prince Damrong Rajanuphap, King Mongkut (Rama IV, r. 1851–1868) and his son and successor King Chulalongorn (Rama V, r. 1868–1910) were clear-eyed and farsighted leaders who ushered in reforms to anticipate and defuse the demands of the foreign powers for greater control over Siam.¹⁶ Such historical narratives, which have been labeled the royal-nationalist mode of historiography, glorified the kings and purported to identify the true genius of the Thai people: the selective adaptation of the foreign.¹⁷

It is a narrative that has not gone unchallenged, however. By the mid-twentieth century, revisionist perspectives informed by Marxist theory began to seep in from the margins of Thai historiography, injecting a measure of skepticism. Pulling back the curtain on the drama of foreign aggression and the countervailing efforts of Thai monarchs to preserve the independence of the kingdom, these scholars saw evidence of both semi-coloniality and feudal social relations. With respect to the kingdom’s semi-colonial status, scholars looked to unequal trade treaties that Siam had signed with European imperial powers beginning in 1855. The treaties transformed the Siamese economy by liberalizing the terms of foreign trade and enshrining extraterritorial legal privileges for foreign residents, which exempted them from Siamese judicial institutions.¹⁸ Evidence of feudalism included a developed hierarchical system of social ranking that bestowed (royal) elites with the figurative power to control rice patties (sakdina) as well as the literal power to command human labor.¹⁹ Thai scholars working in the Marxist tradition saw living remnants of these feudal traditions in mid-twentieth-century Thai society.²⁰

More recently, scholars have revealed Siam’s engagement with colonial modernity by charting the impact of technologies, institutions, and forms of expertise, including maps, laws, and medicine.²¹ These works have advanced our understanding of how the Siamese state employed new forms of expertise to address the conditions of its constrained sovereignty in ways that often seemed to model the conditions of colonial states throughout the region. They decenter the monarchy by highlighting both the work of foreign advisers and the constrained conditions under which Thai modernity evolved.²² Moreover, by revealing the transformative effects of foreign technologies and modes of expertise on Thai society, these works have gone a long way toward upending Whiggish historical narratives that explain the arrival of Western modernity through sanguine metaphors of adoption, adaptation, and transplantation. Sovereign Necropolis advances these efforts by revealing the ways in which new forms of technology, institutions, actors, and expertise helped to reconfigure Siamese political life with a view to the dead.

Outside of Thai studies, the notion of sovereignty itself has increasingly come under scrutiny. Scholars have come to see the idea of sovereign power as a notion profoundly unsettled, inconsistent, fraught with contradictions—troubled, for example, by an incessant need for outside recognition and by inherent inconsistencies surrounding the very nature of power over life.²³ These insights have gone a long way to upset classical conceptions of sovereignty as a stable attribute, a function of violence over territory.²⁴ They suggest that sovereignty is better understood as a precarious set of practices oriented around bodies, especially through the assemblages of law and medicine.²⁵ The bodies themselves, however, no longer bear any resemblance to those of the romantic subjects of normative political theory. In the colonial world, sovereign politics—like law itself—could have perverse outcomes when it attempted to humanize its subjects.²⁶ Achille Mbembe has extended these insights to the postcolonial state, demonstrating the ways in which sovereign power has engendered hybrid forms of political life that constitute a third zone between subjectivity and objecthood.²⁷ Together, these revisionist challenges to the nature of sovereign power reveal the state itself to be little more than a collection of contingent and heterogeneous modes of governing.²⁸ They have also brought to light the fetishization of life and the disavowal of death as the sine qua non of classical iterations of sovereign biopolitics.²⁹ In the process they have helped to spur a posthumanist turn in studies of political sovereignty, one that creates space for the agency of the dead—symbolic and otherwise. Armed with these insights, we can begin to see the outlines of the Siamese necropolitical state at the turn of the twentieth century and to grasp its significance both to Thai social and political life and to our understanding of sovereignty more broadly.

The sense of necropolitics employed in this study differs in important respects from the canonical understanding, which focuses on the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.³⁰ For Mbembe and other theorists, necropolitics, along with the closely related idea of thanatopolitics, has been used to refer to the deployment of violence against lives that had been deemed expendable.³¹ The term has also been invoked to theorize the ways in which human lives have been subsumed under differential regimes of value—whether imperialist, capitalist, or biocapitalist.³² Such normative forms of necropolitics were also in evidence in late nineteenth-century Siam. One might cite, for example, the lives and labors of Chinese immigrants and prostitutes, respectively, whose bodies were sacrificed for economic development. This connection is surprisingly literal in both cases: Chinese coolies expended their labor building canals and other infrastructure—paying a triennial tax for the privilege to do so; they then patronized the state-granted monopoly on the sale of opium in order to allay the physical pains of their toil, as well as the emotional pains of migration.³³ At the same time, the state similarly earmarked the tax proceeds from female sex work toward the construction and maintenance of the capital’s roadways in the euphemistically named road maintenance tax.³⁴

The necropolitical regime in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Siam was distinct from, though not unrelated to, these other historical formations. It too was a product of practical efforts aimed at addressing changing historical circumstances, such as the decline of the feudal bonds that had long structured the deployment of labor and the allotment of social status in Siamese society. In their place were emerging more direct relations between state and subject—the historical constitution of what David K. Wyatt described as a compromise or amalgam between the old concept of the ‘subject,’ stripped of the intermediaries that stood between the king and the peasant, and the modern concept of the ‘citizen.’ ³⁵ What marked the new form of late nineteenth-century necropolitics as distinct, however, was above all the fact that it emerged out of the practical efforts taken by the royal elite to assert sovereignty in the face of particular constraints imposed by unequal trade treaties. The treaties enshrined extraterritorial legal privileges for foreign residents, created a plural legal arena, and opened up the kingdom to the arrival of new forms of social actors, including technology, expertise (legal and medical), and interests—most notably foreign capital in all its nascent assemblages. It was in this cauldron that modern Siamese necropolitics took shape: as the Thai royal elite became more assertive about the rights of their subjects, these conditions conspired to place the emphasis on the dead and injured. The forms of expert intervention—both legal and medicolegal—that state officials adopted in turn created peculiar forms of legal and political subjectivity and a distinctive polity whose crucial constituents were the dead.

Morbid Subjects and Anomalous Archives

This is a book about morbid subjects. In the first and literal sense, the book concerns death and the ways in which we care for and assert the rights of the dead. Accordingly, its pages are filled with lost lives and limbs—victims of misfortune, misadventure, and even malevolence. From pedestrians run down by tramway cars to corpses found floating in Bangkok’s waterways, quotidian tragedies and suspicious deaths prompted a range of legal and medicolegal interventions aimed variously at investigating the cause of death or injury and determining the appropriate form of compensation or restitution for the victim and their relatives. The documentary records of these seemingly disconnected deaths constitute an anomalous archive, a testament to anonymous historical actors whose lives were interrupted and whose fortunes were transformed by the confluence of foreign capital, expertise, technology, and institutions with indigenous forms of faith, custom, and absolutism. This is the second, figurative sense of morbid subjects, which refers to the kinds of legal and political subjectivity that were constituted when the Siamese state entered into new relations of concern with the bodies of its dead and injured subjects.

In spite of the anonymity of the morbid subjects of the Siamese state—the vast majority belonged to the ethnically diverse subaltern classes of the Siamese capital—their stories have been preserved in a peculiar collection of archival documents bearing the enigmatic label Death by various causes (tai duai het tang tang).³⁶ Compiled by the Siamese Ministry of the Capital beginning in 1890, the collection consists of the documentary records of inquests, or investigations into cases of unnatural or suspicious death in Bangkok. The documents attest to a forensic turn in Thai history and, in combination with the correspondence of Siamese state ministers and bureaucrats and reports in the local press, they make it possible to provide a social and institutional history of civil law and forensic medicine in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Siam in a way that is attentive to Siam’s semi-colonial status.

The current investigation begins with an emic account of indigenous cultural forms of concern for inauspicious or bad death (tai hong). Attending to the Siamese state’s archives of unnatural death, chapter 1, Bad Death, identifies distinct registers of different semantic projects focused on the corpse. State interventions—including vernacular forms of forensic investigation and the verdicts rendered by the Ministry of the Capital—conflicted with subaltern forms of care and concern for the dead. Reading against the grain of the state archive, the chapter recovers fragments of subaltern lives and voices, as well as evidence of their efforts to resist the imposition of state-mandated forms of medicolegal concern as the forensic regime of suspicious death overcame sociocultural concerns for inauspicious death.

Chapters 2 and 3 analyze the ways in which urban passenger rail travel and its attendant tragedies helped to rewrite the rules governing loss and liability in Siam in ways that transcended both social conventions and codified sources of law. Chapter 2, Indemnity and Identity, makes the case that compensatory arrangements made in the aftermath of injury and death effectively constituted a new and distinctive mode of legal subjectivity in the form of persons endowed with certain privileges and obligations, and in contradistinction to prior forms of rights and responsibility grounded in social relations. In nineteenth-century Siam, death required compensation, typically in the form of an ex gratia payment made to the relatives of the deceased without the intervention of courts or the admission of legal or moral responsibility. In the case of the Chinese man killed by the queen’s motorcade, for example, the matter of compensation was handled through extrajudicial channels in the form of a monetary payment.³⁷ King Chulalongkorn found no fault in this arrangement—indeed his ministers had signed off on any number of such transactions, deeming them in each case an adequate and appropriate outcome, as the following chapters demonstrate. These compensatory arrangements, which were often reached outside of legal institutions and independent of judicial authority, were predicated not on a sense of universal rights and the dignity of human life but rather on customary modes of action and hierarchical social assumptions inherent in acts of noblesse oblige.³⁸ It was not just the Siamese elite, however, who enjoyed this privileged position of status and the entitlement to regard the lives of others with beneficence. These forms of privileged (extralegal) action were extended to foreign residents and limited liability corporations alike. Inspired by work in sociolegal studies, I examine these practices to consider not only the diverse forms of logic, interest, and authority that gave rise to them, but the manner of legal subjectivity that they might be said to have constituted. How did these practices determine what it meant to be a human being subject to law, and with what incumbent rights and responsibilities?

Since foreign lives and limbs were deemed more precious than those of subaltern Siamese subjects, chapter 3, Treaty Port Tort, considers the kinds of legal and medicolegal disputes that arose when foreign residents sustained injuries on the tracks of the Bangkok Tramway Company. What kinds of expertise and institutions were responsible for adjudicating claims for compensation? And what of the rights of the Bangkok Tramway Company, its employees, managers, and shareholders? In answering these questions, the chapter analyzes jurisdictional politics, conflicts over the preservation, creation, nature, and extent of different legal forums and authorities, in the plural legal arena of treaty port Bangkok.³⁹ It deconstructs historical metanarratives about the Westernization or modernization of Thai law by revealing the fractious nature of Western law, including evidence of internecine squabbles between the representatives of legal and medical expertise—barristers and physicians—but also among the laypeople who advocated for particular brands of European legal tradition. It therefore complicates celebratory narratives of legal liberalism by demonstrating how nationalist sentiments (Dane versus Brit, for example) and professional self-interest (physicians and barristers) were the true impetus for legal change, not any grand imperial ambitions for bestowing law as a civilizing force.

Chapter 4, Accidental Metaphysics, steps back to consider the more abstract side of these practical questions about law and liability for accidental death and injury. It analyzes the adoption and adaptation of tacit assumptions about human identity, agency, and responsibility that underlie legal liberalism, a notion that I call the metaphysics of civil law. Crucial to any effort to understand the boundaries of human agency and responsibility lies the notion of the accident. Although the accident masquerades as timeless and commonsensical, it is in fact a historical and cultural artifact: ubatihet, the Thai term, is a neologism dating to the late nineteenth century. Charting its introduction through etymological and historical linguistic evidence—as well as in practice as part of municipal governance—the chapter argues that the accident functioned as one axis of a metaphysical grid for representing social life and as a means of further codifying the identity of the Siamese legal subject. In both respects, the accident must be understood as part of a conservative grammar of rule: predicated on a secular-naturalistic vision of social life, it defined the legal subject in negative terms—through a constrained sense of agency rather than through the positive articulation of rights. Attending to the accident—and related terms such