In January 1885, four Siamese princes huddled in secret in London, drafting what would become one of the most fascinating documents in Thai constitutional history.¹ After circulating their draft among Siamese officials in Europe and gathering eleven signatures in total, they submitted their petition to King Chulalongkorn (reigned 1868-1910). The king’s response four months later would reveal just how differently each side understood constitutional order.² The dialogue shows how constitutional ideas transformed beyond Europe.³

Same Words, Different Worlds

The petition’s authors spoke fluent constitutionalism – they advocated for “constitutional law based on the wisdom and strength of the people”, “equality before the law”, and “freedom of speech”.⁴ To European ears, this sounded like familiar Enlightenment music. Yet the same words carried different connotations for Siamese audiences, indicative of a deeper tension between two incompatible conceptions of constitutional order.

Understanding this friction requires taking colonialism as a backdrop into account. Siam occupied a precarious position in 19th century Southeast Asia – formally independent but surrounded by colonised territories and subjected to exterritorial treaties with imperial powers. While the petitioners may have understood and even embraced European constitutional theory, their proposal was designed less to empower the people than to legitimise the monarchy in imperial eyes. Western powers often demanded the presence of the rule of law as a prerequisite for recognising sovereign states.⁵ If Siam could employ the right legal vocabulary, perhaps it might gain recognition and avoid becoming colonised like its neighbours. Therefore, constitution-making served a dual purpose: defending against accusations of “Oriental despotism” and meeting the “civilised” standards used to justify imperial intervention.

Beyond strategic concerns, the petitioners genuinely embraced constitutionalism. They adopted the European mechanical metaphor that replaced rulers’ moral qualities with structural mechanisms.⁶ They envisioned European constitutionalism as an automatic system of rules – what they later called “a machine that can be naturally activated”.⁷

King Chulalongkorn, however, saw constitutional order differently. For him, governance required the active wisdom of righteous kingship – good law and governance flowed from the ruler’s moral authority, not from automatic procedures. This perspective was rooted in Buddhist kingship (Dhammaraja). For Chulalongkorn, no body of law could replace the king’s dharmic insight needed to mediate worldly justice, nor could it constrain a righteous ruler whose authority derived from moral wisdom. The Buddhist legal tradition operated on a fundamentally different premise, as Huxley noted: “Rather than setting up a body to force the king to do good, we ensure that a king is chosen who will never want to do evil.”⁸ This reveals something profound: legal transplants change in cultural dialogue, taking on new purposes and meanings through local appropriation.

The Friction of Cultural Translation

The 1885 constitutional dialogue demonstrates how cultural translation operates through productive friction between conflicting worldviews. Both sides recognised that performing legal modernity was essential to avoid colonial intervention, yet each grasped different meanings from identical vocabularies. The 1885 petition thus stands as a key moment showing how legal ideas transform through negotiation and resistance.

Consider the petitioners’ own metaphor: Siam as “a floral festoon held by a single rope”.⁹ To them, this diagnosed a fatal weakness – one broken thread, and everything collapses. Their solution would replace fragile personal rule with a modern state bound by law and formal institutions. A constitution was required to regulate this new body politic and prove that Siam was not ruled by “Oriental despotism”.

Yet through the Buddhist king’s eyes, that same “single rope” represented essential unity, where the king’s moral authority bound governance together. In his view, the mechanical constitution threatened to unravel what should remain whole. Instead of self-governing rational subjects, those with accumulated wisdom should guide society at the proper pace. Rooted in Buddhist kingship, natural justice was only accessible to those with moral quality. Chulalongkorn reframed this as evolutionary progress, justifying carefully guided governance.

This friction deepened because the two sides used different standards. The petitioners deployed European ideas of the rule of law to measure Siam’s legal system. The king used the Buddhist legal worldview to justify his absolute power, despite adopting European expressions to defend traditional governance. When the petitioners wrote of “constitutional law based on the wisdom and strength of the people”, they envisioned a structure of distributed power. When Chulalongkorn read those words, he saw confirmation of his view that moral guidance was supposed to be concentrated in the morally developed few over the rest.

This was not simply a clash of political interests but a collision of incompatible worldviews navigating the same political moment, where modern concepts simultaneously served and subverted traditional power. In Europe, the mechanical metaphor of constitutional government was powerful, freeing governance from the ruler’s personal morality.¹⁰ In the Buddhist legal worldview, however, this metaphor lost its appeal. A worldview that prioritised inner wisdom over mechanistic thinking could strategically reject this form of modernity as spiritually inferior.¹¹

The King’s Counter-Narrative

King Chulalongkorn’s response employed historical comparison to challenge European universal standards. He argued that constitutional constraints arose from specific circumstances of royal oppression. In contrast, Siamese history followed a different path, where the righteous ruler, rooted in Buddhist kingship, safeguarded against tyranny. Therefore, parliamentary constitutionalism was unnecessary.¹² The king held that constitutionalism responded to European tyranny rather than representing universal evolution. This reframed Siam’s difference as geographical and historical uniqueness, rather than inferiority – refuting charges of “Oriental despotism” and demands for constitutionalism at the same time.

This comparative methodology was neither mere defensive rhetoric nor unique. Like other non-European rulers facing similar pressures, Chulalongkorn strategically appropriated European intellectual frameworks. He drew on ideas of geographical divisions and constitutional evolution to construct a Thai legal identity based on Buddhist kingship. In doing so, he inverted Orientalist discourse by portraying European monarchs as the real despots and Siamese subjects as politically immature.

This allowed Chulalongkorn to claim rational justification over European rulers and his own people, while recasting Buddhist moral authority within Western frameworks of progress. The Buddhist ideal of the righteous king was framed as the opposite of tyranny, rendering constitutional restraints unnecessary. In this way, he demonstrated how supposedly universal modernity could be selectively adopted and transformed to strengthen, rather than constrain, traditional authority. Rather than submitting to European standards of modernisation, he reframed their vocabulary as tools for legitimising Buddhist kingship. The king’s response effectively ended the petition effort: he recalled all four princes and several signatories from Europe, and constitutional reform would not resurface until the 1932 revolution, forty-seven years later.

The Ongoing Conversation

Though the 1885 petition may seem remote, the underlying friction between European constitutionalism and Buddhist kingship continues to shape Thailand’s constitutional struggles.

Critics often point to Thailand’s numerous coups and abolished constitutions as evidence of failed constitutionalism. Yet what has remained remarkably resilient are institutions drawing on Buddhist kingship – the monarchy and the judiciary – which claim moral guidance over popular democracy. Like Chulalongkorn’s response to the petitioners, these institutions position themselves as guardians of righteous wisdom, necessary to guide a populace deemed unprepared for unmediated self-governance.

This persistence indicates that Thailand’s constitutional instability reflects a deeper tension the 1885 petitioners also faced: the encounter between legal modernity and tradition. Just as the petitioners advocated for constitutionalism and free speech, today’s critics challenge the monarchy and the judiciary, which continue to claim moral legitimation over parliamentary democracy. Unlike in 1885, however, traditional authority is now reframed through the doctrine of “democracy with the king as head of state”, which invokes democratic language but undermines parliamentary democracy.

Understanding this historical dialogue illuminates why each constitutional crisis feels familiar. The friction between mechanical rules and moral authority reflects different standards and meanings shaped by distinct historical contexts.

1. See Prisdang and others, ‘เจ้านายและข้าราชการกราบบังคมทูลความเห็นจัดการเปลี่ยนแปลงราชการแผ่นดิน ร.ศ.103 [The Petition of Royal Families and Officials for Reforming State Affairs R.E. 103]’,เจ้านายและข้าราชการกราบบังคมทูลความเห็นจัดการเปลี่ยนแปลงราชการแผ่นดิน ร.ศ.103; และ, พระราชดำรัสในพระบาทสมเด็จพระจุลจอมเกล้าเจ้าอยู่หัว ทรงแถลงพระบรมราชาธิบายแก้ไขการปกครองแผ่นดิน [The Petition of Royal Families and Officials for Reforming State Affairs R.E. 103 and Royal Speech of King Chulalongkorn regarding the Royal Policies of State Reforms] (Department Publishing House, 1967). ↩︎
2. Sumet Jumsai, “Proposal for the First Constitution in Siam, 1885” in Prisdang’s Files on His Diplomatic Activities in Europe, 1880-1886, ed. Manich Jumsai (Chaloemnit, 1977) cited in Tamara Loos, Bones around My Neck: The Life and Exile of a Prince Provocateur (Cornell University Press, 2016), 46. ↩︎
3. This piece draws on arguments developed in chapter 3 of my PhD thesis: Kongsatja Suwanapech, “Colonial Encounters: The Formation of Modern Thai Legal Identity” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh 2025). ↩︎
4. Jumsai, Proposal, 20–26. ↩︎
5. Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton University Press, 2000), 13. ↩︎
6. David Wootton, “Liberty, Metaphor, and Mechanism: ‘Checks and Balances’ and the Origins of Modern Constitutionalism” in Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century, ed. David Womersley (Liberty Fund, 2006), 210–20, 250–55. This mechanical metaphor emerged from 17th century scientific comparisons of both nature and political systems to clockwork machines. ↩︎
7. Jumsai, Proposal, 24; Ployjai Pintobtang, ‘รัฐธรรมนูญนิยมและความเป็นพลเมืองไทยในฐานะส่วนหนึ่งของประวัติศาสตร์ภูมิปัญญาสาธารณรัฐนิยมสมัยใหม่สากล (ค.ศ. 1885 – 1932) [Constitutionalism and Thai Citizenship as Part of the Intellectual History of Modern Global Republicanism (1885–1932)], Chulalongkorn University Journal of Social Sciences 236, no. 2 (2023), 247. ↩︎
8. Andrew Huxley, “The Buddha and The Social Contract,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 407, no. 24 (1996), 411. ↩︎
9. Jumsai, Proposal, 17. ↩︎
10. Wootton, Liberty, Metaphor and Mechanism, 219–20. ↩︎
11. David L McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2009) 63–64, 74, https://academic.oup.com/book/36354. ↩︎
12. King Chulalongkorn, “พระราชดำรัสตอบความเห็นของผู้จะเปลี่ยนการปกครอง จ.ศ.1247 (The King’s Reply to the Petitioner Ch.E.1247)”, เจ้านายและข้าราชการกราบบังคมทูลความเห็นจัดการเปลี่ยนแปลงราชการแผ่นดิน ร.ศ.103 ; และ,พระราชดำรัสในพระบาทสมเด็จพระจุลจอมเกล้าเจ้าอยู่หัว ทรงแถลงพระบรมราชาธิบายแก้ไขการปกครองแผ่นดิน (The Petition of Royal Families and Officials for Reforming State Affairs R.E. 103 and Royal Speech of Phra Baht Som Dej Phra Chula Chom Klao Chao You Hua regarding the Royal Policies of State Reforms) (Department Publishing House, 1967), 107. ↩︎