The Thai Village Economy in the Past (review)

330Book Reviews The Thai VillageEconomy in thePast. By Chatthip Nartsupha. Translated by Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit. First published 1984. Reprint ed. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1999. 131 pp. How wonderful to have this classic work available in English! Originally published in Thai in 1984, this book, The Thai Village Economy in the Past, catalysed a generation ofscholars in disciplines ranging from history to anthropology. Even today, this book continues to shape the work not merely ofacademics, but also a wide range of° activists. Thanks to this polished translation by Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, together with Silkworm Press, a wider international audience will now be able to enter these debates. Included in this English edition is an "Afterword" by Baker and Pasuk which provides an excellent overview of the intellectual trajectory ofChattip's scholarship and its wide-ranging impact on others. Chatthip's writings are widely read and have been extremely influential . As Baker and Pasuk note, Chatthip's research has spurred three schools ofstudy: "the political economy group at Chulalongkorn University , the school ofvillage study based on a cultural approach, and a new social and cultural study ofTai communities across the region" (p. 116). Chatthip was trained as an economist in the United States, and his dissertation was on the impact offoreign trade and foreign finance on Thailand's economic development in 1959-65. However, despite his American training, his approach to economics was more continental. His interests were at once humane and humanitarian, grounded in a concern with the quality oflife ofordinary people. His first major work in English, ThePoliticalEconomy ofSiam, written and edited with Suthy Prasartset, was a trailblazer. Using a variety of English and Thai archival sources, Chattip and Suthy offered a characterization ofthe overall political economy ofnineteenth centuryThai society. Included in their historical reconstruction was an effort to understand the condition of peasants and slaves; they even included a few early archival sources on the condition of women. In The Thai Village Economy in the Past, Chattip narrows his focus from understanding the overall political economy to unearthing agrar- Book Reviews331 ian life, daring to supplement archival evidence with fieldwork and oral histories. Just how innovative this methodological approach was can be inferred from remarks made by another pioneering scholar Phya Snuman Rajadhon of a generation before, who explained that his account ofpeasant life was not based upon firsthand fieldwork but rather on "the verbal accounts of many other friends who have seen farming and have been kind enough to explain farming to me" (1961, p. 3). By contrast, despite his own health issues, Chatthip travelled to numerous villages, seeking out knowledgeable village elders for their perspectives on past and present. Both the questions he addressed and the interdisciplinary methodologies he used were path-breaking. I am among the generation whose interest in and approach to agrarian history were shaped by Chatthip's innovativeness. The book is short (the actual text is only seventy-seven pages), yet its arguments hold wide-ranging implications. In the first two chapters, Chatthip describes his interpretation of traditional Thai villages, noting their transformation from "primordial village communities" to "subsistence village economies" under Thai feudalism. The two subsequent chapters considers the impact of the Bowring Treaty of 1855. While Chatthip describes the rise ofa . . . parasitic form ofcapitalist development in the central region, he argues that the northern, southern and northeastern regions ofThailand resisted capitalist encroachments and remained independent subsistence economies well into the twentieth century. By shifting the traditional focus away from the utban centers to the villages, Chattip argues, as Baker and Pasuk summarize, that the village "has its own society and culture which are profoundly different from those ofstate and city. (p. 121) In their "Afterword", Baker and Pasuk include a well-considered summary of the major counter-arguments that were inspired by this book. As they note, I am among thosewho have disagreedwith Chattip's interpretations. To some extent our differences are those of emphases. Chattip's concern is to highlight the independence ofvillages from the state; my emphasis has been on the impact ofstate penetration on village life. Although we share the view that an understanding ofthe means 332Book Reviews and relations ofproduction provides the...