ENGLISH
THAI
INDONESIAN
JAPANESE
FILIPINO

by Katherine A. Bowie

"Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Northern Thailand: Archival Anecdotes and Village Voices," which appeared in Monograph 44 of the Yale Southeast Asia Studies series. This monograph is entitled "State Power and Culture in Thailand" and was edited by E. Paul Durrenberger (1996).

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passed through a sort of wooden collar. Those men who had their families with them were allowed the free use of their limbs.

Great numbers died from sickness, starvation and exhaustion on the road. The sick when they become too weak to struggle on were left behind. If a house happened to be near, the sick man or woman was left with the people in the house. If no house was at hand which must have been oftener the case in the wild country they were traversing, the sufferer was imply flung down to die miserably in the jungle. Any of his or her companions attempting to stop to assist the poor creatures were driven on with blows.

Thus the slave gangs were driven down to Pichai. There they were placed on rafts and brought down the river to the place where I saw them. A good many have not yet completed the journey and are, I was told, scattered about at various places on the upper waters of the river.

As to those I saw active ill-treatment by their masters is for the present at an end and indeed there is now some show of humanity towards them. They have been supplied with a staff of Siamese doctors from Bangkok and they are given daily a sufficiency of rice and fish.

For all the smaller necessaries which go to make up a native curry they are obliged to depend upon the charity of the country people among whom they go about begging and upon whom their sad story is not without effect. Still their condition even now is in the last degree pitiable.
They are nearly all in a state of disease aggravated by being compelled to live upon the low country rice instead of the glutinous rice "kow neeo" to which alone they are accustomed. Some of the middle-aged people only seemed to have retained their health. All the rest were very thin and wretched. Great numbers had every joint swollen up to a great size and numbers more were covered with a foul erruption on the skin often extending over the entire body. The little children of whom there were still a great many were in a condition of terrible emaciation.

Fever and dysentery were still at work among them and many more will probably die. Already I was told, more than half of the original 5,700 so treacherously seized are dead.

My information as to the present condition of the prisoners was of course obtained by direct inspection. The particulars of their history I gained from many conversations with individual

captives among whom was the son of the Governor of Wieng Kang who shared the fate of his countrymen and was still possessed of some authority over them. (Gould 1876 FO 69:#64).

If there is considerable evidence of the importance of war captives to the nineteenth century northern Thai kingdoms, there is also evidence that war captives played a role in nineteenth century Siam. Wales describes such war expeditions as "the regular occupation of the dry season (1934:64). Captives included soldiers and civilians, males and females: "The Siamese equally carry off the peasantry of the open country of both sexes" (Crawfurd 1915:145; Turton 1980:255). After the Siamese capture of Vientiane in 1826, some six thousand families were removed to Thailand (Turton 1980:255). Garnier mentions that after an uprising in Cambodia, the Siamese "profited by it by making an incursion into Cambodia from whence they took away a rather big number of Annamite prisoners" (1873:147). Bowring estimated that during the reign of Rama III (1824-1851), there were 46,000 war slaves; he lists some 5,000 Malays, 10,000 Cochin Chinese, 10,000 Peguans, 1,000 Burmese, in addition to 20,000 Laos (1969 [1857]:190).

The captured slaves became the property of the king, which he either kept or distributed as rewards to favored underlings (Turton 1980:256; Colquhoun 1885:54; Hallett 1890:203). The evidence regarding the treatment of war captives is ambiguous. According to Bowring, war captives belonged primarily to one of the two kings and saw themselves as superior to other classes of slaves. In contrast Turton suggests that the

treatment of war slaves, "perhaps especially the first-generation slaves may have been harsher than other classes of slaves" (1980:256). As Turton writes:

Wales claimed that "no regard was paid to the sufferings of the persons thus transported" (1934:63). Lingat refers to frequent mistreatment and Crawfurd considered that war captives were better treated by the Burmese than the Siamese, despite his judgement that in war the Burmese were "cruel and ferocious to the last degree"; and none were condemned to work in chains as in Siam (Crawfurd 1830, Vol 1:422, Vol 2:134-135).

Crawfurd writes, "At the Siamese capital we daily saw great numbers of these unfortunate persons [war captives] employed in sowing, ditching, and other severe labour" (Crawfurd 1915:145).

Given the present state of scholarship, I do not believe it is possible to reach a definitive conclusion of the conditions and numbers of war captives in other parts of Thailand, in part because they have been merged into general discussions of debt-slavery by virtue of the law declaring them as redeemable slaves and also because their conditions may well have changed over the course of the century. Only when more local histories which include some effort to record the experiences of villagers become available will it be possible to venture more sensible opinions about the relative positions of slaves to serfs, and relative positions of war captives and others captured by force to those enslaved by indebtedness.

Nevertheless, I believe there is sufficient evidence to suggest the importance of war captives in the central Thai state, as well as the kingdoms of northern Thailand. The forced march which Gould so movingly recounted occurred in 1876, during the reign of King Rama V, the king most famous for his efforts to abolish slavery. In 1881, this same central Thai king also gave the orders that the kingdom of Chiang Saen be repopulated by the descendants of the original captives. His order met with considerable resistance, both from the northern Thai rulers who didn't want to loose their population and from the descendants themselves. Nonetheless his order was executed. Some idea of the scale of relocation is given by Hallett, who estimated some 30,000 people from Lamphun province alone were involved (see Hallett 1988[1890]:202-5 for a fascinating discussion). The heartbreak these orders entailed was movingly recounted in oral histories. Villagers told of the tears shed when villagers who had originally been captured from the Chiang Saen area at the beginning of the nineteenth century were given orders to resettle decades later. As villagers explained, by the time the orders were given, these war captives had intermarried with other villagers in the Chiang Mai region. The king's orders meant that families were once again torn apart.

On Kidnapping:

Although the evidence from oral histories suggests that a smaller percentage of people were enslaved through individual kidnapping as opposed to capture en masse in warfare, archival sources nonetheless suggest that kidnapping took place on a considerable scale. So great was the commerce in kidnapped slaves that Colquhoun suggests that the reason the territories to the east of the Mekhong seem less populated than the

territories to the west "may be accounted for by the shameful practice of slave-hunting which exists, the Anamites, Chinese, Cambodians, and Shans making a hunting-ground of the Mois Hills, which lie between Cambodia and Siam, and Anam" (1885:13). Colquhoun himself also describes a considerable slave trade in other regions. Thus he writes "there is little doubt that the sparsity of the hill-tribes in the hills neighbouring Zimme [Chiang Mai] has been chiefly caused by their having been, in the olden time, systematically hunted like wild cattle, to supply the slave-market" (1885:257-58). Of the Karennees, on Siam's western border, Colquhoun writes:

The Karen-nees, like the Kachyens, their neighbours to the northwards, are renowned for their kidnapping propensities. At least one-third of the slaves are taken from the Burmese Shan States, and the remainder from the adjoining hill-tribes. (1885:40).

Few accounts survive from which to regain the perspective of the victims themselves. One villager recounted a young kidnapped woman who committed suicide soon after her arrival in his village, giving some sense of her loneliness at being violently uprooted. Some sense of the human impact of this slave trade can also be gained from gleaning archival passages. For example, on one of his trips, Richardson passed an outpost of 10-12 men from Mawkmai, Burma on the lookout for Karen slave dealers. He writes:

Though the town contains many inhabitants, they are in perpetual dread of their attack, and are, in fact, carried off daily (during the last month they have been unmolested) . . . They make no secret of their fear and weakness, and told many tales of the Kareans' skill in kidnapping; among others, of the Kareans who came on a party of 6 of their people, and seeing they were the weaker party waited till night, when they made bundles of bamboos, interwoven with thorns, which they threw over them when asleep, and standing over them, with their spears picked them out one by one, tied their hands and marched them off. (Mangrai 1965:179; see also Colquhoun 1885:71).

Similarly, Colquhoun continues:

The slaves who are captured become slaves in the fullest sense of the word; they are carried off, with no hope of deliverance save death or escape. Trapped by ambush, and driven off after capture, like fallow-deer, by the man-hunters, they are from their forests, chained, and taken to the chief places of the Shan country (KAB: Chiang Mai], Siam, and Cambodia, for disposal. (1885:53; see also Garnier 1873:171-72).

Richardson also gives some insight into the callousness of the slave traders. His diary reads:

Met several slave merchants with 8 or 10 young slaves on their return to Labong and Zimmay from the Kareenee country. One poor little child had been seized and sold by a creditor of his father's for part price of a gong!! I am told that if a Kareen cannot get a good price for any decent looking female slave, he will take her into his house as a concubine and when the markets are better will sell her and any children she may have had to him without the slightest remorse. (Ms:41)

Although it is easy to dismiss kidnapping as the lawless activities of slave-traders acting independent of the state, in fact kidnapping also must be understood within the context of state power. At a certain point, the distinction betweeen the acts of small bands of "lawless" men capturing neighbouring peoples and "legal" war parties returning home from war with large contingents of enslaved war captives is merely a difference of scale. Some sense of this ambiguity is seen in Cushing's description of the principality of Main Loongyee (Muang Nium in Shan) in 1870. Due to raiding by the Shans and Karens, Hallett writes, "the Siamese Shans and our foresters had been shut up in the city for six months, not daring to venture into the district except in large bodies capable of defending themselves" (Hallett 1890:31). Wales summarizes the parallel more succinctly when he writes of military expeditions "that were little more than slave raids" (1934:64).

The state could play a variety of roles in regard to the commerce in kidnapped slaves. First of all, territories without a strong centralized authority appear to have been more vulnerable to slave raids. Both the slaves and their immediate captors appear to have come from such areas. For example, the Karen had a reputation both as kidnappers and victims. As Colquhoun writes, "no one single individual of them but is ready on all occasions to avail himself of the opportunity to seize the person of any one of the Karen and Shan tribes which occupy the country in their vicinity" (1885:69-70; see also Hallett 1890:30). Slaves from independent hill populations of Cambodia were "hunted incessantly and carried off as slaves by the Siamese, the Anamites, and the Cambodians" (Colquhoun 1885:53). Similarly, certain upland chiefs were willing to sell their own people into slavery (e.g. Garnier 1873:171-72). According to several contemporary accounts, the threat of kidnapping prompted many independent populations to submit to the authority of outside rulers. As Colquhoun explains:

...several of the tribes living between the Mekong and the crest of the main Anam range (the boundary between Anam and Siam) had submitted to the King of Siam, and paid him a light tribute. For this they had received substantial advantages, for they need no longer fear the incursion of the slave-dealers, who still drive a flourishing trade amongst the independent tribes. (1885:53).

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