The Birth of Commodification Through Free Trade

Fig.3

5 Askew, Marc, Bangkok Place, Practice and Representation (Routledge, 2002) p.27 6 Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space (Blackwell, 1991) p.263 7 Lynn, Marty, British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011) p. 103

The Birth of Commodification Through Free Trade

European Imperialists first started to trade with Southeast Asian countries in the sixteenth century. The first empire to set foot on the territory known today as the Philippines was the Portuguese. The VOC (Dutch East Indies Company) out-powered the Portuguese empire and built its main trading port in Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1619. The VOC then erected trading ports in many cities concurrently to conduct trade with other kingdoms. Ayutthaya, a former capital city of Siam, now Thailand, played an important role in trading rice and forest products with other colonial cities. In 1782, fifteen years after the invasion and devastation of Ayutthaya by Burma, the Siamese rulers established their new capital city on the west side of Chao Praya River, 200 kilometres further down from the old capital. After an initial period of instability, a stable political constitution was established. 73 years later, Siam saw a fundamental change in its trading system when it agreed to a treaty with Sir John Bowring, a governor of Hong Kong, to open its country to a free trade policy in 1855. This treaty paved the way for other Imperialist countries to sign treaties with Siam, which allowed them to start trading in this region5. Various companies such as the British East India Company, Danish East Asiatique Company and Chinese Companies established ports, warehouses, factories and rice mills in the region, and started trading in agricultural and forest resources. In his book, The Production of Space, Henry Lefebvre described how, since the 12th century, the space of European territory has transformed from an ‘absolute space,’ that represents the symbolic religious ideology, to the ‘space of accumulation,’ which aims to acquire resources of wealth, knowledge, technology and money6 . This reading of space as a space of accumulation is also relevant to the territories under colonial rule. In Southeast Asia, its territory was seen as a potential extending space of accumulation from the European territories. The apparatus of trading had a social, economic and political impact on the transformation of what would become the Siamese modern state and has changed the logic of urban development of Bangkok, the capital city of Siam. Once Siam accepted the treaty with the British Empire, it brought about a new economic model under the free trade system. Free trade can be described in the broadest sense as an allowance of the optimally minimal regulation over the market. The British empire tended to adopt a free market system as a political tool in those countries that they could negotiate with7, for instance, China, Japan, Zanzibar and Siam. This type of negotiation was more beneficial to the expansion of Britain’s economy than attempts to formally gain control over the territory, which required a high investment in military force. Under the contract with the Imperialists, the major resources that were commodified were from the agricultural and forestry sector. This was the first step toward the industrialisation of agricultural processes, that repressed the economic power of farmers in the food production system.