Chulalongkorn's Abolition of Slavery and Centralising Reforms
Siam abolished slavery by a series of measured decrees between 1874 and 1905, and no one revolted. Slavery there was not chattel slavery of the Atlantic kind. Most slaves were debt slaves — Siamese who had sold themselves or been sold by their families against a loan, with a legally recognised price at which they could redeem themselves, and rights that a master could not simply set aside. Others were war captives and their descendants. Estimates put a quarter to a third of the population in some category of bondage in the mid-nineteenth century. Chulalongkorn came to the throne in 1868 at fifteen and issued his first decree in 1874, the year he came of age. The method was deliberately gradual, and it was designed to avoid the resistance of the aristocracy whose wealth was held in people. The 1874 decree set a declining redemption price for anyone born a slave since 1868, so that the price reached zero at twenty-one; a person born into bondage would simply age out of it. Further decrees extended the principle to other categories, and the act of 1905 ended it entirely and made enslavement a criminal offence. It ran alongside the abolition of corvée labour, a salaried bureaucracy, railways and a standing army — reforms undertaken with an eye on the British in Burma and the French in Indochina. Siam was never colonised, which is the argument for the strategy. The counter-argument is that the process took thirty-one years, and that a person born in 1867 could be held for a lifetime while the reform worked its way through the generations behind them. Chulalongkorn is nonetheless the king Thais call the Great.
- Year: 1874 CE
- Category: Political
