Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2020. xii, 233 pp. (Map, B&W photos.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-4015-2.
It is well known that in the late nineteenth century the Siamese state expanded its reach over the lives of Siamese subjects, much in the way that the European colonial states were doing elsewhere in Southeast Asia. What Trais Pearson does in this unusual book is describe how this expansion of state power extended to recording and managing cases of unexpected death in Siam. While Siam was of course not directly colonized, the existence at this time of extraterritoriality, the legal right of foreign subjects to be tried by foreign consular courts, significantly limited the Siamese government’s sovereignty. Cases of sudden, accidental, or indeed suspicious death involving foreigners, therefore, raised sensitive issues of sovereignty. How the Siamese government and representatives of the colonial power dealt with such cases, what Pearson calls “necropolitics,” or “discursive and practical actions around dead bodies,” is the subject of this book (4).
This book is essentially a study of legal issues surrounding accidental death in Siam’s royal capital, Bangkok, in the late nineteenth century. However, it also touches on broader political, social, and cultural issues. The book argues that Siam’s peculiar semi-colonial status was a major factor that contributed to changes in official and popular attitudes towards accidental death. Pearson shows that such deaths were once a “social affair,” but they now increasingly attracted the attention of the state. For example, the customary practice in the case of accidental death was to compensate the relatives of the deceased with an ex-gratia payment without any intervention of the courts or indeed any admission of legal responsibility (9). Now the police, which had only been established in the royal capital a generation earlier, began to take on a new role of investigating and recording these deaths, leading police inquests, and in some cases referring the matter to the courts for adjudication. Where once the Buddhist temple had played a major role in postmortem examinations and mediation over issues of compensation, during this time period the police, the courts, and the royal bureaucracy began to take a much closer interest in cases of accidental death. The practice of conducting official autopsies also appears at this historical moment, along with the new science of police forensics. Decisions on sensitive cases would often be sent to the newly founded Ministry of the Capital, whose head, Prince Naret Worarit, would pass a “verdict” on the case before the file was finally sent up to King Chulalongkorn for royal endorsement (25–26). As the Lord of Life (jao chiwit), the Siamese king’s traditional mandate had extended over the lives of all his subjects. Now, Siam’s semi-colonial status meant a significant curtailment of the king’s “sovereign power over the living and the dead” (2).
The book is also part social history of the modern transformation of Bangkok. Pearson describes the revolution in modes of transport in the capital, as public transport began to shift from the khlongs (canals) to newly built roadways. As elsewhere in the world, the arrival of motorized transport enabled people to move around the city more quickly, but also led to frequent accidents resulting in injury and death. Many of the cases Pearson deals with in the book involved the Bangkok Tramway Company, founded in 1887 (40). The company represents a case study of the impact of extraterritoriality on the management of cases of accidental death. It was managed by a Dane, Aage Westenholz. King Chulalongkorn was a major shareholder. An American, Dr. T. Heyward Hays, was chief physician at Bangrak Hospital, then Bangkok’s most advanced medical institution, and also a major shareholder in the company. Hays was often called upon to operate on victims of tramcar accidents, carry out autopsies, and to provide expert testimony to establish the extent of liability faced by the company. Since the Bangkok Tramway Company was a limited liability corporation registered under British law, it came under the jurisdiction of the British consular court. In cases involving Siamese accident victims and their families, the company compensated them outside of court according to “traditional expectations arising out of Siamese social practices and cultural repertoires” (60). By contrast, foreign subjects who had registered as protégés (protected subjects) could go to the foreign consular courts to claim damages. In 1892 the Bangkok Times newspaper claimed that there was as much litigation going on in Bangkok as in any other part of the world (68). Pearson argues that the foreign consular courts and this burst of litigation greatly contributed to the rise of forensic medicine in Siam (113).
In one fascinating part of Sovereign Necropolis Pearson discusses what he refers to as the “metaphysics of the accident” (87–109). The Thai term for accident, ubattihet, comes from the Pali, uppattihetu, which had originally simply meant an event which had occurred. From there the term appears to have evolved during the nineteenth century to its current meaning, which is equivalent to the English understanding of accident as an unexpected event (interestingly, it appears that the Western concept of accident underwent a similar modern evolution) (94). Pearson argues that the official, bureaucratic use of the term “accident” as a mode of classifying death was imported into Siam by a former colonial officer in British Burma, A. J. A. Jardine, whom the Siamese royal government appointed inspector general of police in 1897 (96–102). Similarly, one British barrister working in Bangkok at the time, Edward Mitchell, “a champion rower, boxer, and a renowned expert on falconry who had been called to the Bar by the Middle Temple in 1869,” found himself forced to find Thai words for terms in English civil law. This search led him to a Siamese “metaphysics … of civil wrongs.” Eventually he identified the Thai concept of khwan (hitherto mainly understood within a religious, especially ritual context) as “both the object of civil wrongs and the subject of indemnification or compensation for such wrongs” (90). Mitchell went on to produce one of Siam’s first bilingual dictionaries.
This is a book that is full of surprising and intriguing insights into Siam’s peculiar semi-colonial status in matters concerning accidental death. It will contribute to the now burgeoning literature on the history of Thai law, and may encourage greater interest in “death studies” in Thailand.
Patrick Jory
The University of Queensland, Brisbane