Chulalongkorn
Chulalongkorn abolished slavery over thirty-one years without a civil war and gave away a third of his territory to keep the rest. He was fifteen when his father died and ruled through a regency for five years. His first act on taking full power in 1873 was to end the requirement that subjects prostrate themselves before the king. The second, in 1874, was a decree that reduced the price of every slave born after 1868 year by year until it reached nothing at their twenty-first birthday. That was the method throughout. Slavery in Siam covered perhaps a third of the population and was mostly debt bondage, and the slaveholders were the nobility whose support he needed. He removed it by attrition rather than proclamation, and the final act freeing everyone came in 1905, when there was almost nobody left to free and nobody left to object. He rebuilt the state on the same principle: twelve functional ministries in 1892 in place of the old lords of the interior, a salaried provincial administration, a national budget, railways, telegraphs, a school system and a legal code. The pressure from outside was constant. In 1893 French gunboats forced the bar at the mouth of the Chao Phraya, exchanged fire with the forts and anchored within range of the palace, and Siam gave up its claims to everything east of the Mekong. More went in 1904 and 1907, and four Malay states went to Britain in 1909, in exchange for the end of extraterritoriality. He toured Europe twice and was received as a sovereign rather than a client. Siam is the only state in south-east Asia that was never colonised, and this is largely how.
- Lived: 1853 CE – 1910 CE
- Nationality: Thai
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
