Throughout the 19th century, constitutional language traveled rapidly across imperial and colonial worlds. Terms such as “law”, “constitution”, “rights”, and “representation” appeared with increasing frequency in places far removed from their original European genealogies.
Yet this circulation did not produce uniform meanings or predictable outcomes. Instead, constitutional vocabularies entered local debates shaped by inherited legal traditions, political institutions, and moral frameworks. The result was not simple imitation, but a series of creative negotiations over what law was supposed to do, whom it was meant to bind, and how authority should be constrained or justified.
The three articles in this colloquy explore those negotiations from distinct but complementary vantage points. They show that constitutionalism did not arrive outside Europe as a finished blueprint. Rather, it functioned as a flexible repertoire, one that could be deployed to confront arbitrariness, ward off colonial pressure, reorganize governance, or reaffirm existing sources of legitimacy. What unites these cases is not a shared institutional outcome, but a shared problem: how to render power accountable without dissolving the social and moral orders that sustained political life.
Reimagined to Regulate and Legitimize
In “Mirza Malkom Khan and the Politics of Legal Reform in 19th Century Iran”, Sara Zanotta examines how written law emerged as a response to uncertainty and discretionary rule. In this setting, legal reform was framed less as a rupture with inherited norms than as a means of stabilizing governance and making authority predictable. Codification promised to transform power by subjecting it to publicly articulated rules, while still allowing older legal and ethical frameworks to inform the content of those rules. Codified law here appears not as a foreign imposition, but as a remedy for arbitrariness, grounded in the belief that justice requires form, procedure, and general applicability. This approach highlights how demands for codification could arise from within existing traditions even as they drew on globally circulating concepts.
Kongsatja Suwanapech’s contribution “The Constitutional Petition That Changed Everything in Siam (Or Did It?)” turns to constitutional language as a site of cultural translation and friction. It shows how shared vocabularies could mask fundamentally different assumptions about political order. Constitutional terms that sounded familiar to European ears were mobilized locally for strategic purposes, often disconnected from popular sovereignty or democratic participation. In this case, constitutionalism functioned less as a mechanism for dispersing power than as a resource for defending autonomy and redefining legitimacy under imperial scrutiny. The encounter reveals that constitutional dialogue is rarely symmetrical: identical words can carry incompatible meanings depending on whether authority is imagined as mechanical, moral, or developmental.
The third text, “Constitution as Method in 1880s Egypt” by Mujeeb Khan, approaches constitutionalism as a method rather than a doctrine. Instead of asking whether constitutional ideas were imported or indigenous, it examines what those ideas were made to accomplish in practice. By focusing on procedures (consultation, constraint, administration, and execution), it shows how it was possible to integrate constitutional language into long-standing legal traditions and institutional settings. In this context, the constitution is not primarily a declaration of rights or a symbolic concession, but a regulatory framework that disciplines authority through rules, councils, and enforceable limits. Comparison across regions underscores that such methodological uses of constitutionalism were neither unique nor derivative but emerged from parallel efforts to govern change.
The actors who played a part in shaping these transformations were both anchored in local traditions and affected by global influences. An Iranian writer and diplomat who had studied in France ended up publishing an oppositional newspaper in London, inspired in equal parts by examples from Europe and from Muslim countries. A group of Siamese princes submitted a constitution drafted in London to their king, whose reply refuted the universality of European standards. In Egypt, a reformist scholar and later grand mufti conceptualized constitutionalism within Islamic legal tradition, blending the foreign with the local.
All three cases challenge linear narratives of constitutional diffusion. They suggest that constitutionalism’s global history is best understood not as a story about adoption of or resistance against European ideas, but as one of transformation. Law, in these contexts, was not merely borrowed; it was repurposed. And it was through this process of repurposing, which was deeply shaped by local institutions, intellectual traditions, and political pressures, that constitutional ideas acquired their force.
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Mujeeb Khan/ant.e team, "Creatively Negotiated Transformations," ant.e, May 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/intro-creatively-negotiated-transformations/
The Constitutional Petition That Changed Everything in Siam (Or Did It?)
MAY 26, 2026
COLLOQUY
Repurposing Constitutional Vocabularies
The Constitutional Petition That Changed Everything in Siam (Or Did It?)
COLLOQUY
Repurposing Constitutional Vocabularies
ARTICLE
The Constitutional Petition That Changed Everything in Siam (Or Did It?)
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.
Diplomat Prince Prisdang (1851 – 1935) was one of the four drafters of the constitutional petition. A grandson of Rama III, he was educated in London and graduated with top honours from King’s College. Image credit: Camsj58, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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”.
King Chulalongkorn, who reigned from 1868 to 1910, believed that good law and governance flowed from the ruler’s moral authority. He inverted Orientalist discourse and portrayed European leaders as the real despots. Image credit: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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.
The king held that constitutionalism responded to European tyranny rather than representing universal evolution.
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.
Following the Siamese revolution of 1932, King Prajadhipok signed the Permanent Constitution of Siam on 10 December 1932. More moderate than the first temporary constitution, it reinstated the monarchy as “sacred and inviolable”. Image credit: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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.
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). ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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). ↩︎
Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton University Press, 2000), 13. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
Andrew Huxley, “The Buddha and The Social Contract,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 407, no. 24 (1996), 411. ↩︎
Wootton, Liberty, Metaphor and Mechanism, 219–20. ↩︎
David L McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2009) 63–64, 74, https://academic.oup.com/book/36354. ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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Kongsatja Suwanapech, "The Constitutional Petition That Changed Everything in Siam (Or Did It?)," ant.e, May 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/the-constitutional-petition-that-changed-everything-in-siam-or-did-it/
The colloquy “Unseen Agencies of Transformation” explores how non-Western legal systems transformed during the 19th and early 20th centuries – not as passive recipients of Western legal models, but through contested, negotiated, and often locally driven processes of reform and adaptation.
In December 2022, the symposium “Legal Orders under Pressure: Non-Western Experiences of Legal Transformations in the 19th and early 20th Centuries” critically reassessed what it means for legal systems to modernise under the pressure of Western influence and internal reform1. While modern legal history is often framed in terms of Western legal expansion – highlighting codification, constitutional moments, and the transplantation of foreign legal models – this colloquy argues that such narratives obscure the lived experience of legal change and the local rationalities that shaped it.
» Legal change must be understood not only in terms of institutional design or textual production, but also in terms of how people used, contested, and reinterpreted law in their social worlds «
Global history has encouraged scholars to view the “long nineteenth century” as a unified temporal framework that captures global transformations of commerce, empire, nation, and ideas. Yet, applying this historiographical turn to legal history remains challenging. A key reason for this is the continued emphasis on the formal adoption of Western legal codes, often in the late nineteenth century, particularly in relation to unequal treaties. This focus obscures earlier, more gradual legal developments that emerged from within each society. To overcome this limitation, we need to turn to legal practice itself – examining transformations in customary norms, the involvement of various actors in shaping legal reasoning, and the cross-regional exchanges that shaped these changes.
By focusing on legal practices involving Christian, Muslim, and Jewish merchants as well as local bureaucrats, we can more accurately capture the complexity and diversity of legal modernisation outside the West. Legal reform in these cases is more clearly understood in terms of regionally embedded processes of rationalisation, dispute settlement, and the reorganisation of order, which preceded the formal enactment of modern legal codes.
Perspectives on the world depend greatly on where you stand: Shintei – Chikyu Bankoku Hozu (Square Map of all the Countries on the Globe), 1853, source: Wikimedia Commons/Geographicus Rare Antique Maps.
The westernisation of law should not be reduced to a single moment of rupture – such as the promulgation of a civil code or a treaty – nor should it be understood solely as legal reception. Instead, we highlight the agency of local actors, the continuing importance of customary and religious law, and the tensions between official reforms and everyday legal practices. Legal change must be understood not only in terms of institutional design or textual production, but also in terms of how people used, contested, and reinterpreted law in their social worlds.
The three case studies presented – the Ottoman Balkans, Thailand, and Ethiopia – illustrate this approach by foregrounding the internal dynamics of legal transformation in non-Western contexts. These studies show how non-Western societies engaged with legal modernity not as passive recipients of European norms, but as active participants negotiating legal change on their own terms.
Local Agency, Tradition as Archive, and Selective Engagement
Ivelina Masheva’s text “Merchants, Local Elites, and New Commercial Litigation in the Ottoman Balkans” shifts the focus from central legal reforms to local dynamics. By examining how commercial courts emerged in the Ottoman Balkans in the 1840s and 1850s in response to local demands for more efficient legal mechanisms, Masheva shows that the institutionalisation of commercial litigation was a negotiated process shaped by competing interests at multiple levels. This bottom-up perspective challenges the assumption that legal modernisation in the Ottoman Empire was exclusively state-driven and shows how legal practices evolved organically from the initiatives of provincial actors. It enriches our understanding of Ottoman legal pluralism and invites comparison with other regions where local agency also drove legal innovation.
Surutchada Reekie and Adam Reekie’s text “Siam’s Tectonic Legal Reform Process” examines the role of the Three Seals Code in shaping legal norms. Contrary to the common view that traditional Thai law was replaced by Western-style codification, it argues that the Three Seals Code served as a living legal archive that continued to inform legal reasoning well into the modern period. It emphasises that legal modernisation in Thailand was not a simple replacement, but a hybrid process shaped by indigenous legal traditions, foreign (especially British) advisers, and commercial imperatives. This dynamic account reframes Thai legal reform as a negotiation between tradition and modernity.
Hailegabriel Feyissa’s text “European Imperialism and Legal Transformation in 20th Century Ethiopia” offers a two-stage framework for understanding Ethiopian legal reform. Distinguishing between early 20th-century constitutional initiatives (such as the 1931 Constitution) and later codification efforts (such as the 1960 Civil Code), Feyissa critiques the dominant view of Ethiopia’s legal modernisation as either entirely endogenous or externally imposed. He shows that Ethiopia’s legal transformation was shaped by selective engagement with foreign models, including Japan’s Meiji Constitution, and active domestic debates about sovereignty and legitimacy. He also highlights the limited attention given to Ethiopian legal history in scholarly discussions.
Rethinking Legal Transformations Through Practice and Pluralism
Taken together, these contributions offer more than region-specific insights – they contribute to a reconceptualisation of legal modernity itself. They show that economic rationality, moral imagination, and institutional experimentation emerged in various forms throughout the non-Western world, often well before or independently of direct colonial rule or Western intervention. This challenges the dominant historiography that associates modern law with codification and centralised state power, and opens space for a more pluralist, actor-centred, and practice-based understanding of legal change.
In sum, legal reforms in the Ottoman Empire, Thailand, and Ethiopia cannot be explained simply as a response to pressure from Western countries or as a mere imitation of European legal systems. Rather, they were a multi-layered process of restructuring legal orders, deeply rooted in local realities and involving a variety of actors – judges, merchants, bureaucrats, lawyers, national and local politicians – in creative and controversial ways. By reconstructing the process of formation of these alternative modern legal systems, we can deepen our understanding of the history of law and develop new conceptual tools for thinking about law and order that are rooted in each region and history.
Online symposium of the Max Planck Research Group Translations & Transitions, 7–9 December 2022, organised by the Chair for Globalisation and Legal Pluralism, Faculty of Law, University of Vienna, Austria, together with the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Theory, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. ↩︎
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Makiko Hayashi, “Introduction: Legal Reforms as Reorganisation of Order,” ant.e, September 2025, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/introduction-legal-reforms-as-reorganisation-of-order/.
» It is appropriate to think of law in South East Asia geologically, as a series of layers each of which overlays the previous layers without actually replacing them, so that in places, due to tectonic shifts, the lower layers are still visible, although not perfectly distinguishable from each other. « – Andrew Harding1
What does it mean for a country’s legal system to modernise without colonisation? Applying Professor Harding’s geological analogy, the answer for Siam seems to lie beneath tectonic layers of law, culture, and reform – with the willingness to push forward change being the main tectonic force that caused the shifts.
Siam’s law reform in the 19th and early 20th centuries may be thought of as comprising two main parts: the reform of substantive law and the reform of the judicial system. Focusing on the first, we argue for a more comprehensive understanding of the reform process, to encompass the true complexities involved. Rather than a seamless transition from traditional to modern law, Siam’s legal reform may be thought of as piecemeal and shaped by multiple, overlapping influences. Accordingly, any research into the reform process should accommodate the many spheres of influence, not only from the obvious source that is pressure from colonial powers, but also from the much less discussed latent impetus.
For this blog post, we have chosen two aspects that highlight this complexity: our presupposition of the nature of “traditional law” and the under-acknowledged influence of the people who personified the law reform.
The Elastic Nature of Siam’s Traditional Law
There is no single accepted narrative of Siam’s legal history, and the roles that various factors played in the country’s legal development continue to be debated. However, for the purpose of this blog post, it is useful as a starting point to draw on the work of the late eminent Thai scholar Professor Preedee Kasemsup,2 according to whom Thai legal history may be divided into two broad eras: “pre-modern” or “traditional” law, and “modern” law.3 The former refers to the laws of previously ruling states in the geographical area of today’s Thailand (the Sukhothai, Ayutthaya and early Bangkok periods), while the modern era began with the reform period and continues to present-day Thailand.4
The progression from traditional law to modern law certainly hinges on the linear notion that the country moved from one broad type of “law” to another. This view was challenged when Baker and Phongpaichit recently argued that Siam’s traditional law, known as the Three Seals Code, should not be seen as legislation, but as an archive of socio-legal history. According to Baker and Phongpaichit, it would be illusory to impose our modern understanding of law and law-making on historical texts such as the Three Seals Code which, in their view, should be viewed as a historical archive reflecting the gradual accumulation of court rulings and decrees, as well as poetry, word play, and homily.5
More than “just” law: the Three Seals Code includes not only court rulings and decrees, but also poetry, word play and homily. Here displayed at the National Museum, Bangkok, Thailand.
This led to their thought-provoking suggestion that the Three Seals Code perhaps should not be treated as “law”, as far as law may be broadly understood as a system of rules, since it possesses different characteristics and may serve a wider social function – such as teaching the public about desirable behaviours – rather than a narrow statutory function.6 Instead, it may be considered as an archival compilation of written evidence of the evolution of legal conceptions.
Therefore, we should adopt a more flexible analytical framework when examining Siam’s reform process and recognise the true nature and characteristics of the subjects under study within their specific contexts. Certainly, it is more convenient to compare like with like – that is, one type of “law” with another type of “law”. However, such an approach may inadvertently obscure a richer, more nuanced understanding of legal history.
But if the law itself was elastic and layered, who or what were the “tectonic forces” – i.e. the agents shaping its form and direction?
Law-Shaping Lawyers
Another layer that adds to the tectonic landscape of Siam’s law reform comes from what Alan Watson called “Law-shaping Lawyers”, by which he referred to a group of the legal elite who shape the law either through their involvement in the legislative process or through the creation of precedents or authoritative legal interpretation.7 In a context of legal transplants, which Siam’s legal reform may be seen as, Watson argued that the law which emerged from the process tended to be strongly influenced by the knowledge of this group of lawyers, by their imagination, training, and worldviews.
The case of law-shaping lawyers in Siam is most fascinating. Tamara Loos acknowledged the transnational and transcultural nature of Siam’s legal reforms, as a number of foreign legal advisers from the East and the West worked alongside Siamese lawyers in shaping and implementing various changes.8 We have also taken an interest in the roles in which lawyers from the common law world helped shape the law reform process of Siam, a civil law country.
In our work on a comparative history of the courts of justice, we found that during the reform period, many British lawyers were appointed to the highest court of the land (and also to lower courts, but judgments of these were not recorded, rendering this a difficult topic for research), sitting alongside French, Japanese, and Siamese judges.9 We argued, among other things, that their legal backgrounds and professional experiences – such as their previous work as barristers in Britain or judges in British colonial territories – may have influenced Siam’s legal development, through their methods of legal analysis and application. However, their strong common law influence during the formative years of the country’s “modern” legal era was counterbalanced by the civil law influence from the French and Japanese judges. This is but one aspect of the hybridity of Siam’s reform process.
» In a context of legal transplants, Watson argued that the law which emerged from the process tended to be strongly influenced by the knowledge of a legal elite, by their imagination, training, and worldviews. «
In another article focusing on vicarious liability law, we argued that Thailand’s current main provision on vicarious liability (section 425 of the Civil and Commercial Code) may have been an incidental legal transplant from English law, influenced by the main Siamese drafters at the time, who were educated in England.10
Other “Law-shaping Lawyers” may be found in the Law Drafting Committee (currently known as the Office of the Council of State), the Ministry of Justice, and among personnel of other government departments such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior, as well as foreign advisors to the government. Together, they established the country’s legal structure and navigated the devious course of modernisation in the shadow of colonial threats.
All these facts point to the importance of understanding the key persons behind each legal phenomenon in order to truly unpack the layers and spheres of influences affecting the change.
How Should We Approach the Multi-Layered Reform Process?
This blog post marks an early step in what we hope will be a sustained exploration of the rich and layered field of legal history. From among many facets of this complex process, we explore two aspects which yield two key lessons. The first is to be open-minded to a challenge to an accepted norm – such as the question if traditional law was “law” at all. Another lesson is to understand a process not only from its impetus, but also from the people who turn its wheels. In the case of Siam, internal motivations and domestic spheres of influence help form a wider and more holistic view of the process. An emphasis on colonial threats is never the whole story – just one tectonic force.
Andrew Harding, “Comparative Law and Legal Transplantation in South East Asia,” in Adapting Legal Cultures, ed. David Nelken and Johannes Feest (Hart Publishing, 2001), 205. ↩︎
See Preedee Kasemsup, “Reception of Law in Thailand—a Buddhist Society,” in Asian Indigenous Law: In Interaction with Received Law, ed. Masaji Chiba (KIP Limited, 1986), 267–300. ↩︎
Another eminent Thai scholar who shares a similar view is Professor Kittisak Prokkati (see Kittisak Prokkati, The Reform of Thai Law under European Influences (Winyuchon, 2013), 55 (Thai language)). ↩︎
Note that other scholars may hold different views. For instance, R. Lingat divided Thailand’s legal development into four periods: the Ayutthaya period, the early Bangkok era (reign of King Rama I to early reign of King Rama IV), the Reform Period (reign of King Rama IV to reign of King Rama V), and the current period marked by the use of main codes of law (codification period). Robert Lingat, History of Thai Law (1935), 83-84 (Thai language). ↩︎
Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, “The Child is the Betel Tray: Making Law and Love in Ayutthaya Siam,” Thai Legal Studies 1 (2021): 1-21. ↩︎
Alan Watson, “Comparative Law and Legal Change,” CLJ 313, no. 37(2) (1978): 322-328. ↩︎
See Tamara Loos, Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand (Silkworm Books, 2006), 29-71. ↩︎
Surutchada Reekie and Adam Reekie, “British Judges in the Supreme Court of Siam,” in Thai Legal History, ed. Andrew Harding and Munin Pongsapan (CUP, 2021), 103-121. ↩︎
Adam Reekie and Surutchada Reekie, “The Long Reach of English Law: a Case of Incidental Transplantation of the English Law Concept of Vicarious Liability into Thailand’s Civil and Commercial Code,” Comparative Legal History 6, no. 2 (2018): 207-232. ↩︎
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Adam Reekie and Surutchada Reekie, “Siam's Tectonic Legal Reform Process,” ant.e, September 2025, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/siams-tectonic-legal-reform-process/.
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