A Kingdom in Crisis: Thailand's Struggle for Democracy in the Twenty-First Century.

• Author: Walker, Andrew
• Position: Book review

A Kingdom in Crisis: Thailand's Struggle for Democracy in the Twenty-First Century. By Andrew MacGregor Marshall. London, New York: Zed Books, 2014. Softcover: 230pp.

There is a long tradition in Western commentary on Asia pointing to the reprehensible behaviour of oriental despots. Advocates for colonial expansion often built their case around the need to liberate the Asian masses from their rapacious, and sometimes unhinged, rulers. Andrew MacGregor Marshall's A Kingdom in Crisis sits firmly within this orientalist tradition.

A Kingdom in Crisis provides a salacious chronicle of royal brutality and "murderous violence" in pre-modern Siam (p. 53). Princes who fell out of favour were put in velvet sacks and beaten to death with sandalwood clubs (p. 43); petty criminals were slow-roasted alive (p. 53); the owners of dogs whose barking disturbed the king were "killed in the cruellest fashion on earth" (p. 52); and unsuspecting maidens were arbitrarily sacrificed to meet the king's superstitious whim (p. 122). There were also "blood-curdling punishments" for those bold enough to engage in "immoral intercourse with a lady of the Palace" (p. 51). Palace intercourse --MacGregor Marshall shows us that there was an awful lot of it --was the prerogative of extraordinarily randy monarchs. Prasart Thong, who seized the throne in 1629, was a pervert, selecting the "prettiest maidens and daughters of the greatest men" (p. 124) as his concubines! And even the scholarly Mongkut, released from his monastic sublimation at the ripe old age of 46, begat 82 children by 35 women in his "harem" (p. 129). Do not be misled by the imagery of the "land of smiles" MacGregor Marshall helpfully warns those who mistake tourism slogans for reality: Thais are very good at staging political theatre, but behind the scenes a violent and libidinous orient is lurking.

The core objective of A Kingdom in Crisis is to challenge Thailand's royalist mythology. In simple terms, the core myth is that the king is a unifying, integrating and benevolent force in Thai society. Drawing extensively on Thailand's long royal history, MacGregor Marshall shows that, in fact, the monarch in Siam/Thailand has been a powerhouse of intra-elite conflict, while at the same time providing an ideological figurehead to facilitate the oppression of the masses. The book's far from flattering account of Thai history draws on the accounts of Westerners resident in pre-modern Siam (with surprisingly little...