I write this review as someone who has done work on social and cultural histories of gambling rather than as a Thai expert. The role of gambling in Southeast Asian history has attracted far less scholarly attention than its sister vices – opium and prostitution – and James Warren's book, Gambling, the State and Society in Thailand, is a big step towards addressing this gap. Broad in scope and detailed in analysis, the book pries open the complex relationships between gambling and the modernisation of Thailand in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study reveals how gambling, as a form of popular illegality that performed significant social and economic functions, was criminalised, stigmatised, tolerated, and celebrated in ways that registered the contesting values and interests of different social groups in a changing Thai society.

The historical arc of Warren's book spans the pendulum swing of attitudes and policies towards gambling in Thailand, ranging from widespread gambling and its uneven legalisation in the nineteenth century to its near total criminalisation in the mid-twentieth century. Beginning in the 1800s, the first three chapters of the book analyse the relationship between tax farming, Western imperialism and the rise of the market economy, and the birth of modern Thai nation-state. As Trocki (Reference Trocki1990) has also shown in the case of British Malaya, tax farming, especially of opium and gambling, was the key institution that attracted migrant Chinese labour and generated substantial revenue for both farm operators and the colonial empire. Warren makes a significant contribution to the literature by showing how gambling farms played a key role in the development of the cash economy in Thailand by keeping money in circulation and extending credit to the masses. This connects to similar arguments by various historians who study the relationships between gambling, stock markets and insurance, revealing how the development of these economic institutions often both conflicted with, and merged into, each other (Daston 1987; Kavanagh Reference Kavanagh1993). In the case of Thailand, the shift in the economic base of the nation state meant that tax farms were ultimately replaced by direct taxation: “the irony, of course, is that by providing the Thai state with the funds to create a strong centralized bureaucracy that could collect its own taxes, tax farming rendered itself obsolete” (p. 51). I also find Warren's analysis of the social and cultural functions of gambling in Thai society to be very perceptive. Gambling was seldom just about monetary gain; it was a legitimate form of leisure and socialisation that crossed class divisions and “nurtured a sense of community at various levels” (p. 41). This helps us understand why people gambled without falling back on essentialist and pejorative claims that frame gambling as an irrational activity or a natural vice of a specific class or race.

In Chapters 4, 7, and 8, Warren analyses the politics of different social classes in relation to gambling. For the Thai elite, policies towards gambling were as much about economic gain as they were about ensuring political autonomy in the face of encroaching Western imperialism. This resulted in contradictions whereby certain types of native or Chinese gambling were banned while Western types like casinos and horse-racing were promoted in the early twentieth century. At the same time, the Bangkok middle class critiqued the hypocrisy of the state's anti-gambling discourse in the print media, while monks participated in public gambling and temples served as festival grounds where widespread gambling took place. Warren also attempts to explore popular attitudes towards gambling through Thai folklore, though this section lacks the empirical richness that characterises his work in general.

Chapters 5 and 6 provide a fascinating excursion into the actual practices of controlling gambling. They examine the juridical and policing measures that attempted to bring the force of law to the ground, and show how these measures exacerbated the contradictions of anti-gambling discourses that criminalised some forms of gambling while excusing others. The limitations of manpower and penal facilities, the networks of collusion, bribery and espionage, the diplomatic immunity of foreign powers operating in Thailand, and the very arbitrariness of legal concepts pertaining to what constituted gambling all come to play in Warren's analysis. These dynamics of control and evasion were not peculiar to Thailand – they appeared with surprising regularity in British Malaya and the metropolitan heart of London. I would have liked to know more about the spatial dimension of these programs, since the conceptual line dividing the private and public continues to be central in framing the legality of gambling. The urban nature of the problem of gambling control suggested in these chapters is also intriguing. Tagliocozzo (Reference Tagliacozzo2005), for example, suggests that illicit activities in colonial Southeast Asia were as much an urban problem as a problem of porous frontiers. Chazkel (Reference Chazkel2011: 10) has also shown that the criminalisation of the lottery in early twentieth century Brazil entailed the enclosure of urban spaces that led to “the privatization and monetization of public life”.

In the last chapter, Warren compares Thai policies on gambling, opium and prostitution and argues that their differentiated treatment was a result of who were affected by these vices. Warren offers explanations for why gambling, which contributed the most to state coffers, had been criminalised earlier. This analysis alerts us to the complex interdependencies of these policies, and how changing the moral and legal status of one could have an effect on the other. Although I get Warren's point that gambling was a domestic problem unlike opium and human trafficking, this distinction is rather too neat. While not in the same order of international policies and movements that changed the fate of opium and human-trafficking, the phenomena of remittances and cross-border lotteries operating just outside of national jurisdiction, for example, were also problems of extraterritoriality.

Those unfamiliar with Thai history and politics might find the book a little difficult to follow at times because it does not follow a clear chronological order. This could have been rectified by including a chronology of key events in the appendix. As a social and economic history of gambling in the Southeast Asian context, Warren shows how the modern nation-state ultimately monopolised the lucrative arena of popular gambling in the name of pursuing modernity. It is a timely reminder that the values we attach to gambling are historically contingent and shaped by those who have come to benefit most from controlling its forms and representations.