ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the space now defined as Thailand in the longue durée of a thousand years or more under five headings: landscape and resources; population and settlement; political organisation; language and identity; and belief and power. For most of the millennium, the key features were a low population constrained by disease and warfare, an economy based on low-intensity exploitation of the fecund tropical environment, a highly varied society from waves of immigration, and a loose political structure. Over the past century, the changes have been dramatic. A resource-rich territory with a sparse population has been transformed by medicine and by resource-hungry economic development. The prevailing landscape of forests has disappeared. The population, once clustered mainly in urban settlements, was first spread across the territory along a moving “land frontier” and is now being gathered back to the cities and towns. Colonial-style bureaucracy and the idea of the nation-state have imposed central control over the loose coalitions of city-states. The jumble of languages and ethnicities has been subsumed under a concept of Thai identity through mass education and media.