Tamara Lynn Loos has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the bureaucratic reforms and modernizing discourses of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Thailand by bringing into focus their gendered nature. Much past historical discussion has focused on the unique experiences of Siam as the subject of “informal” colonialism and the administrative modernization that saved it from the colonial fate of its neighbors, but Loos brings to light the multiple contradictions in this semicolonial status, and skillfully uses discourses of juridical reform as a heuristic to analyze and refute the binary presumptions of the colonized/colonizer relationship. She attempts to establish an alternative vision of modernity that transcends these dichotomies, and challenges the dominant Thai historiographic narrations that privilege the king's role as the sole agent of national independence. In so doing, she clearly demonstrates her scholarship; it is the depth of Loos's archival research that gives this work its distinctive historical detail and authority. Loos draws on case records from the Dika Court Library, the Thai National Archives, and the personal papers of foreign advisors to the Siamese court to demonstrate how important the transnational circulation of Western jurisprudence was in the process of “colonization and modern meaning-making” (p. 31); but she also discusses how legal practice remained a site for the reification of “tradition,” particularly as it pertained to family law, and how legal cases brought before the courts can be read to interpret gender practices and their meanings, in both the bureaucratic and popular imaginations.
As Loos demonstrates, the noncolonial status of Siam did not protect it from the “conditions of difference,” a quote she uses from Tani Barlow's work on noncolonial China. (p. 3; see Barlow's Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997], 5). As Loos states, “The transnational character of the legal reform process and the unique role of family law in Siam reveal the limits of the binary logic of cultural exchange between colonizer and colonized that dominates studies of the colonial encounter.” In support of this argument, she emphasizes a much-overlooked aspect of this semicolonial relationship: the ways in which Siam was able to use and emulate British imperial practice—particularly its legal practice in relation to family law—in its own expansionist policies toward the southern Muslim states that abutted the British colonial Malay territories. Siamese imperial desires were thus enabled by its assertions of rational legal governance over its southern states, demonstrating its own modernity to its European imperial rivals, while positing a separate non-Buddhist subjectivity for the Malay south. This policy toward the south and the adherence to traditional practices of polygyny demonstrate a multivocal position that recognized the centrality of the monogamous family union to Western notions of “civilized” society, while claiming an exceptional approach to modernity based on what were posited as Buddhist traditions of polygyny. Loos also demonstrates how the creation of “native courts” for the application of Islamic family law in the south served the colonial practice of “preserving tradition.” The polygyny debate itself pitted ideas of monogamy as a modern practice against colonial ideas of the preservation of tradition as a modern scientific approach to colonial rule.
While the practice of polygyny historically facilitated marriage alliances that secured the power of the royal family by eliding its fortunes with those of other powerful elites, King Chulalongkorn's bureaucratic reforms of the 1890s undermined this mechanism of maintaining state authority. However, although leaders could have chosen monogamy as a standard marital practice as early as 1855, they did not do so until 1935. Loos explains that forces in favor of polygyny continued to be powerful, showing their root in notions of power and masculinity, despite the recognition of the need to enact a modern family law centered on the bourgeois family. Such a modernization would have satisfied the colonial powers' requirement to lift the burden of unequal treaties and extraterritoriality—under which Siamese citizens had lower status than Europeans or their “Asiatic” colonial protégés.
Continuing her investigation of gender relations, Loos also focuses on the period after Rama V's reforms, with King Vajiravudh's (Rama VI, r. 1910–25) arguments against polygyny. She demonstrates from her use of public pronouncements that much of his polemic against sexual practices outside the heterosexual monogamous family was actually aimed at controlling the cohort of newly engaged bureaucratic functionaries. Many of these men had studied in the capitals cities of Europe, and returned harboring republican desires and ideas of individualism that were dangerous to the continuing power of hereditary elites. Although these discourses, which elaborated a complex taxonomy of “wives” and “mistresses,” had as their object the control of men's sexuality and personal power, it was for women that these nomenclatures would have more far-reaching and restraining consequences.
The theoretical considerations that place this work within the historiographic traditions of postcolonial analysis are treated with a light touch; Loos resists the temptation to be distracted by the semantics of the colonial “modernity” that she challenges. Her references to Michel Foucault's bio-power and technologies of sexuality, which could have taken a place of dominance in the work, are covert. While this lightness of theoretical presence allows the arguments of the book to take center stage, there are times when perhaps more theoretical elaboration, on such questions as the rise of the bourgeois family in a Southeast Asian comparative context, might have been useful, at least for this reader. Nevertheless, this innovative approach to analyzing administrative reform, and the exceptional archival scholarship of this work makes it an invaluable contribution to our understanding of modern Thailand.
