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Trading with the World, Preserving a Kingdom: What Sri Lanka Can Learn from Thailand
Travelling through Thailand, I was struck by something that every visitor eventually hears: the country was never colonised by a European power. For a Sri Lankan, whose country experienced Portuguese, Dutch and British rule, this invites an interesting question. How did Thailand preserve its independence while so many other Asian countries lost theirs?
One possible answer lies in the way its rulers dealt with foreigners. They recognised that a foreign ship could carry customers, weapons, useful knowledge and diplomatic opportunities, as well as danger. Their task was to obtain the benefits while containing the risks.
There is considerable wisdom in this approach. However, the comparison requires care. Europeans did not always remain peaceful traders, and Sri Lankan rulers did not invariably reject commerce. Thailand’s achievement arose from a combination of trade, negotiation, reform, strategic circumstances and concessions. Its experience nevertheless demonstrates how flexibility can sometimes protect what courage alone cannot.
The merchant and the soldier
The Portuguese, Dutch and English came to Asian waters seeking profitable commerce. Spices, textiles and other valuable products promised enormous rewards. Yet the distinction between merchant and conqueror was often uncertain. Armed ships protected cargoes, but they could also blockade ports, destroy competitors and compel rulers to grant privileges.
The Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1511 illustrates this combination. Trade was central to their ambitions, but military conquest was one means of securing it. Commercial motivation did not necessarily imply peaceful methods.
Therefore, Asian rulers faced a difficult problem. Refusing all contact could sacrifice wealth and useful alliances. Accepting every demand could lead to dependence. The essential question was how to trade without surrendering the authority to decide the country’s future.
Thailand’s history offers examples of rulers attempting precisely that balance.
Welcoming the Portuguese
Portuguese diplomatic contact with Siam, as Thailand was then known, began in 1511. The Siamese court received envoys and sent a mission to Goa. An agreement in 1516 linked Portuguese access to settlement and trade with the provision of guns and ammunition and guarantees of religious freedom. Portuguese merchants and military specialists subsequently established themselves in Ayutthaya.
This was a practical exchange. The Portuguese gained commercial opportunities. Siam acquired access to military technology and foreign expertise.
The court did not have to approve of everything Portuguese society represented. Nor did it have to abandon Buddhism to permit foreigners to practise Christianity. It could distinguish between maintaining its own identity and allowing useful outsiders to live within its territory.
That distinction remains valuable. A society confident in its traditions need not regard every foreign practice as an attack upon them. Confidence can make selective acceptance possible.
The lesson is not that hospitality automatically prevents conquest. It is that engagement gives a government more instruments with which to manage a relationship.
Commercial openness required boundaries
Siam’s dealings with Europeans were far from uniformly peaceful. Dutch commercial pressure produced a blockade and the treaty of 1664, which granted the Dutch East India Company privileges, including protections that challenged Siamese understandings of royal jurisdiction. An Indonesian national archival publication discussing King Narai’s correspondence records this tension between foreign commercial demands and the king’s authority.
This is an important qualification to any simple account of friendly traders and accommodating hosts. The Siamese also encountered coercion.
Their experience suggests that commercial openness needed to be accompanied by vigilance. A trading privilege could become a political claim. A foreign settlement could acquire demands for special protection. An ally could become too influential.
Diplomacy therefore involved continual adjustment. The object was to prevent any single relationship from leaving the kingdom without alternatives.
For a smaller country, having several partners can create room to manoeuvre. Dependence on one powerful protector can gradually remove that room.
Mongkut and the difficult choice of compromise
The nineteenth century brought a much greater danger. European imperial power had expanded enormously, and Siam could see the consequences of military inequality around it.
King Mongkut’s government concluded the Bowring Treaty with Britain in 1855. It opened a new phase of commercial relations, but imposed serious limitations on Siamese autonomy. British subjects enjoyed extraterritorial privileges, and the kingdom’s freedom in fiscal and judicial matters was restricted. Other Western powers obtained comparable arrangements.
These were substantial concessions. They should not be romanticised as an entirely equal partnership.
Nevertheless, the decision illustrates an uncomfortable responsibility of leadership: choosing among imperfect possibilities. A government may have to decide whether accepting an immediate disadvantage offers a better prospect of national survival than fighting a war it is unlikely to win.
The argument in favour of compromise is strongest when compromise preserves the capacity to act again later. Retaining a functioning national government can make future recovery possible.
That does not make every concession wise. It means that a concession must be judged against the available alternatives, rather than against an imaginary world in which no sacrifice is necessary.
Preserving independence by strengthening government
Diplomacy would have been a fragile defence if Siam had remained unable to administer its own territory effectively.
Under King Chulalongkorn, reforms replaced older administrative arrangements with ministries possessing clearer responsibilities. Accounting and bureaucratic procedures were improved, while railway construction helped connect Bangkok with distant provinces. Historian Ian Brown identifies effective administration as a central element in the effort to preserve political independence.
Here lies another powerful lesson. Independence depends partly on the quality of government.
A country may proclaim its sovereignty loudly while weakening it through disorder, poor revenue administration and institutions that cannot carry out decisions. Conversely, a government that learns from foreign methods may become better able to resist foreign control.
Borrowing an administrative technique does not require surrendering national identity. The useful question is whether it improves the country’s ability to govern itself.
Thailand’s achievement involved adaptation at home as well as negotiation abroad. Keeping the national flag required strengthening the institutions beneath it.
The price paid in 1893
The limits of accommodation became painfully clear during the confrontation with France in 1893.
French warships advanced towards Bangkok, Siamese defences resisted, and the crisis escalated into an ultimatum and blockade. Siam eventually renounced its claims to territories east of the Mekong and accepted other burdensome conditions. French forces also occupied Chanthaburi as a guarantee of compliance.
This episode disproves the suggestion that Thailand escaped colonial pressure simply by being friendly. It faced force, fought back and suffered losses.
Yet its government survived.
From the perspective of state survival, accepting territorial losses helped preserve the kingdom’s central institutions. From the perspective of the inhabitants of the affected territories, however, the consequences cannot be reduced to a neat diplomatic success.
History’s compromises often distribute suffering unequally. Recognising that does not erase their strategic significance; it makes our assessment more honest.
The Thai experience demonstrates that survival can involve painful choices whose wisdom is easier to recognise afterwards than to accept at the time.
The advantage of geography
Thailand also benefited from circumstances that its rulers did not create.
Britain and France had competing interests in mainland Southeast Asia. In their declaration of January 1896, they agreed that neither would advance forces into a defined central region of Siam without the other’s consent. They also restricted the acquisition of exclusive advantages there. This arrangement helped preserve a separation between their imperial possessions.
Siam’s position thus acquired strategic value beyond its own commercial importance.
It would be misleading to attribute this entirely to superior diplomacy. Geography and imperial rivalry created an opportunity. Siamese diplomacy helped make use of it.
This distinction matters when comparing Thailand with Sri Lanka. Different locations produced different incentives for European powers. We cannot assume that an identical policy would have produced an identical result in both countries.
What can be compared is the ability of rulers to recognise the opportunities available to them and avoid unnecessarily narrowing their choices.
Sri Lanka also welcomed and negotiated
Our own history complicates the idea that Sri Lanka fought while Thailand traded.
The rulers of Kotte maintained commercial and political relations with Portugal. Bhuvanekabahu VII concluded a cinnamon agreement with the Portuguese in 1533. His dealings demonstrate that negotiation and trade were part of Sri Lankan policy from an early stage.
The danger was that a commercial relationship could become entangled with succession disputes and military dependence.
Dharmapala’s position provides a particularly sobering example. In 1580, he executed a will bequeathing Kotte to the Portuguese crown upon his death. Whatever his circumstances and intentions, Portuguese influence had developed far beyond the purchase of cinnamon.
Accommodation therefore offered no automatic protection. A ruler could welcome foreigners and still lose the power to determine the eventual outcome.
The important distinction was between maintaining a useful relationship and becoming dependent upon it. Trade under national authority and protection purchased at the expense of that authority were very different arrangements.
The Dutch alliance and its warning
Kandy’s dealings with the Dutch provide another example of active diplomacy.
In 1638, Rajasinghe II entered into an agreement with the Dutch against the Portuguese. Commercial interests, military expenses and control of captured forts became entangled in the relationship. The eventual removal of Portuguese power did not deliver the coastal independence the king sought; Dutch power took its place.
This was an attempt to use European rivalry, rather than a refusal to engage with Europeans.
Its outcome warns us that the enemy of an enemy may remain a danger. A foreign ally’s assistance has to be understood in relation to its own ambitions.
The comparison with Siam therefore concerns the results of managing foreign relationships, rather than a supposed Sri Lankan inability to conceive of diplomacy.
Sri Lankan rulers negotiated, traded and sought allies. They also confronted powerful outsiders whose commercial aims could be advanced through territorial domination.
The cinnamon tree and the politics of fear
The story attributed to King Senarat—that keeping cinnamon trees in home gardens attracted a death sentence intended to discourage Portuguese interest—is striking. However, without a reliable reference establishing its wording, date and attribution, it should remain an unverified account.
As a political idea, it raises a question worth considering. Should a country reduce the value of its resources to make itself less attractive to outsiders, or develop the capacity to benefit from those resources while protecting its independence?
Destroying economic opportunities may sometimes deny an immediate enemy supplies. As a lasting national strategy, however, deliberate impoverishment carries obvious costs. Fewer productive resources can also mean less revenue, weaker institutions and reduced defensive capacity.
The better aspiration is to make national wealth a source of bargaining power. Achieving that requires competent government, commercial alternatives and an understanding of foreign interests.
The cinnamon story can stimulate this discussion, but should not be used as historical proof until its source is established.
The lesson for us
Thailand’s experience supports the value of commercial engagement, intelligent compromise and learning from outsiders. It also shows that these policies work best when supported by strong institutions and a realistic understanding of power.
Sri Lanka’s experience deserves equal fairness. Resistance was often directed against genuine attempts at domination. Those who defended their country cannot reasonably be blamed for failing to treat invading armies as ordinary customers.
The more useful question is whether, at particular moments, different combinations of negotiation, trade, unity and reform might have improved the chances of preserving independence. That is a question for careful examination, rather than easy accusation.
What impressed me in Thailand was the possibility that flexibility could itself be a form of patriotism.
A ruler’s duty is not fulfilled merely by refusing every demand. Neither is it fulfilled by accepting them all. It lies in judging what must be defended, what can be negotiated and what must be strengthened before the next crisis arrives.
Thailand reminds us that the courage to compromise can sometimes serve a country as well as the courage to fight.
