This essay sketches the changing relationships among the Dutch Colonial Government and among native chiefs and their people in early 19th Century Priangan. This is a time when paddy fields were rapidly spreading to this area.
Wet rice cultivation in Priangan started to spread in the middle of the 18th Century, and after the turn of the century, Dutch officials reported construction of various scale irrigation facilities. The Dutch Government began to construct large irrigation canals and dams, limiting its role to planning the works and supplying the necessary funds and goods for the projects. The native chiefs, who had been organizers of irrigation works throughout the 18th Century, undertook the projects. They organized their people's corvee labor, and arranged for native irrigation specialists to supervise the work. Besides these large facilities, many small scale irrigation facilities were constructed; some of them were planned by the chiefs, and others by the people. These small facilities seem to have contributed to the expansion of paddy fields far more than did the Govern ment's large facilities.
Although irrigated paddy fields expanded with these facilities, the basic tax system in Priangan didn't change in these decades. Dutch sources show that most of the arable lands irrigated with these facilities were reclaimed by individual settlers who owned the lands. The poll-tax system survived as the main tax system in Priangan at least to the 1820s.
During these decades the Government succeeded in expanding coffee cultivation with the people's corvee labor. This was not done by introducing land tax system, but by extending its patronage through the chiefs to the people. The chiefs obeyed the goverment because of their economic dependency. They could'nt manage their finances without the rights and interests given by the Government, which included funds for irrigation works and coffee plantations, concessions of coffee transport and trade, and a coffee production percentage. The people in turn obeyed their chiefs by producing coffee. The reason of their obedience partly because they could get far more profit from wet rice cultivation than from slash and burn. And partly, most of them couldn't run the rice cultivation without agricultural credits given by the chiefs, and part of them couldn't run the cultivation without the facilities constructed by the chiefs.
Thus, the relationships between the chiefs and their people in early 19th Century Priangan seemed to be far different from M. C. Hoadley's “Feudal Mode of Production” (1994). On the other hand, this chief to people relationship shows some similar points to these depicted in Y. Breman's “patron-client relationships” (1978, 1982). However, the relationships in early 19th Century are not the same ones as the pre-colonial relationships, but are relationships transmuted under the influence of Dutch colonial rule.

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Interference by Dutch colonial authority in Java's village administration was indirect in comparison with that in higher levels of administration. Chiefs of the higher administrative units such as kabupaten, kewedanaan and kecamatan were appointed as local administrative officials called pangreh praja. On the other hand, a village headman was a man of renown in his village who was elected through an election for mere form's sake. And a newly-elected village headman often had a blood relationship to his predecessor. So naturally he was not a modern administrative official.
Assuming he was a modern administrative official, he must have had the two essential qualifications, namely occupational skills and the occupational loyalty. But village headmen had neither occupational skills nor occupational loyalty, because he was not a modern administrative official.
After the beginning of Japanese occupation, Java's society rapidly became involved in the wartime economy. And village headmen, whose title was changed to kucho, meaning the head of ku, were made to bear the responsibility for all of the demands that the Japanese authorities made of the villages. In short, a village headman was required to be the lowest-level administrative official.
The Japanese demands seemed to have two aspects. On one hand, a kucho was required to be a capable official with occupational skills to handle new tasks. On the other hand, he was supposed to be a spokesman with occupational loyalty to the Japanese authorities. But in fact, the majority of kucho could not sufficiently adapt themselves to these new conditions. For example, most kuchos were illiterate. Furthermore, many kuchos were dismissed or arrested on suspicion of non-cooperation with Japan.
In February 1944, a new ordinance on the election and dismissal of kucho called Kucho Senkyo Himen Rei was promulgated in order to save this situation, but this ordinance had a structural defect. According to this ordinance, every incumbent kucho was allowed a tenure of 4 years starting on the 1st of March 1944. Consequently, an election was not expected unless an incumbent kucho was dismissed, retired or died.
At this point, a short training course for kuchos called Kucho Koshukai was prepared to save this immediate situation. But these short training courses were usually only for a few days. In such a short time period, it was impossible for a kucho to improve his occupational skills such as literacy. I think the main purpose of this Kucho Koshukai was to cultivate the occupational loyalty of kuchos to the Japanese authorities, the other essential qualification for modern administrative officials.
I assumed that the main requirement of kuchos was to have occupational loyalty. Thus, a kucho was merely a spokesman for Japanese rule in his village, and it was in fact difficult for him to improve his occupational skills.
I used Sinar Baroe, an Indonesian daily newspaper, as the main historiographical source for this research. Sinar Baroe was published in Semarang city between July 1942 and September 1945 with permission of the Japanese authorities.

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Transportation development is one of the crucial elements in the political and economic integration of a territory. During the Chakri Reformation which began in the late 19th century, Thailand sought to hold firmly on her sover-eignty all over her territory in order to create a nation-state centered in Bangkok and to keep her independence. For this purpose, she began to develop her transportation network by introducing new means of transportation, that is, railways and motor-cars, to ensure the reduction of travel time and transport cost between Bangkok and the peripheries. This paper highlights the development of railways and motor-roads in the era of their introduction by employing the concept of travel time-distance between Bangkok and the peripheries.
To illustrate time-distance from Bangkok in a map, I gathered a number of records of travels written by Kings, officials, and foreigners and calculated average travel speed of every means of transportation taken during in that period. After computing the average speed, I estimated time-distance between Bangkok and important peripheral cities all over the Thailand and plotted their positions in concentric circles centering in Bangkok.
Prior to the introduction of railways, ferry boats and steamers were the chief means of transportation in Thailand. With the invention of steamers, navigation time was remarkably reduced. This was especially true for marine navigation. In contrast to navigation, inland transportation hardly developed except in areas where steamers were available as river transportation. Under these circumstances, maritime cities along the gulf of Siam in the southern and eastern regions were situated “close” to Bangkok, while inland cities in the northern and northeastern regions remained relatively “isolated” from Bangkok.
To bring these isolated areas close to Bangkok, the Thai Government constructed the first national railway from Bangkok to Khorat, the urban center in the northeastern region which the people could access only by the means of land transportation. After the construction of the Khorat line, railway networks were extended to the north and south, respectively. Needless to say, these railways played very important roles of connecting Bangkok and the peripheral cities and dramatically reduced the time-distance between them. Apart from railways, many motor-roads were also constructed as feeder lines to the railways.
By combining roads with railways, tree-shaped modern transportation networks centered on Bangkok were completed by the 1930s. The time-distance maps from the late 19th to the early 20th century show Thailand's efforts at transportation development which guaranteed and facilitated rapid communication, and movement of people, goods and information within the territory and established a physical base of Bangkok as the core of Thai territory. These transportation networks facilitated the political and economic centralization in Bangkok which was to become the peculiar feature of contemporary Thailand.

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On June 24th 1932, the ‘People's Party’, which consisted of middle and low level military officers and civilians, seized power from the government under the despotic monarchy and established the constitutional monarchy. Most studies, both in the modernization approach and Marxist school of socio-economic history, regarded the Revolution merely as the substitution of oligarchic elite, without any change in the social and economic structure. Recently, this interpretation of the Revolution and society during the Revolution is being questioned by some scholars. The purpose of this paper is to show there was a rise of political consciousness among officials and intellectuals who did not participate in the Revolution directly before and after the Revolution by ‘khwam khithen (opinion)’ they submitted.
In Siam, to submit petitions to the King was the custom of all the subjects who had suffered from hardships. In 1930, petitions which included opinions were submitted to the King first. Such opinions were written mainly by officials and intellectuals. Their aim was not to ask for help from the King but to advise and suggest how to improve financial and rural economic situations damaged by the Great Depression, and some of them were critical about policy of the government. They argued that their opinions would be helpful for the King and the nation (‘chat’). After the Revolution, more than 500 opinions were submitted to the new government. People who submitted those opinions included many officials and intellectuals and more than 40% of them lived in Bangkok, while others lived in other districts. They also offered suggestions and views regarding many problems in the country and insisted that their opinions would benefit the state (‘prathet’) and the nation.
The old regime made little effort to solve the problems following the opinions. From 1933, the new government began to show more interest in them and some of the opinions were discussed by the Ministries and the Cabinet. Moreover, some of those who submitted the opinions before and after the Revolution achieved direct participation in politics later.
It is clear therefore that there was a rise of political consciousness among many officials and intellectuals who did not participate in the Revolution directly. They were not indifferent to politics, but tried to work on the government and to let it utilize their opinions, and they shared common value that they worked on for the cause of the nation and the state.

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This essay examines the religious significance of Buddhadasa Bhikkhu's (1906-1993) thoughts in contemporary Thai Buddhism. He advocated the understanding and practice of “Dhamma”, instead of the unconscious, routine practices of conventional Buddhism, to annihilate the internal sufferings. His teachings marked an epoch in Thai society.
Buddhadasa's trials had historical precedings in the last century. The Thammayut Movement headed by Prince Mongkut had been critical of the ‘superstitious’ beliefs and the lack of knowledge about Buddhist philosophy since the early nineteenth century. His son and successor, Prince Patriarch Wachirayan Warorot continued this movement to promote scriptural knowledge. The authorized understandings of Buddhist doctrine had been diffused through the educational hierarchy of the centralized national sangha by the beginning of this century.
Along with this expansion of Buddhist education, questions on the unnatural religious discourses like heaven and hell in the next life were often discussed with suspicion among intellectuals in 1930s. All of three viewpoints on the next life, either positive, negative or neutral, agreed that the moral order of social life in this world would suffer if the actual existence of the next world is denied. It was Buddhadasa who made a break-through on the question of morality and mysterious religious discourses by teaching “Dhamma”: the essence of Buddhism.
Buddhadasa started to search for the “Dhamma” of Buddhism, instead of conventional “practical religion” of Thai Buddhism, in Thailand's national Buddhist education which had been prepared by Wachirayan. First, Buddhadasa tried to learn essential Buddhism in scriptural orthodoxy, but he came to its dead end. He found his way out in the “practice” of Dhamma through meditation practice and Zen style of everyday life. He revived meditation practice in the modern world as a means of capturing the insight necessary to extinguish internal sufferings; rather than a means of cultivating magical power as traditional meditation monks had practiced. Also, he taught to look within oneself by introducing Zen Buddhism to the Theravada Buddhists who were more concerned with merit-making practice to achieve better rebirth. Now his teachings play an active role in the mission of Buddhism to the born Buddhists of Thailand, rather than to the non-Buddhists of foreign countries.
In Buddhadasa's thoughts, the “Dhamma” of Buddhism which is Buddhism for extinguishing one's internal sufferings, was essential. On the perceptual level, Buddhadasa denied earthly expectations of religious practice, such as a wish for heaven and a fear for hell, which prevented one's awareness of internal sufferings. He preached that the unnatural religious discourses about subjects like hell, the hungry ghost and even the nibbana, were all psychological phenomena within the self of individuals living in this world, whose existence was the only tangible reality for the modern intellectuals. On the practical level, he invited people to achieve emptiness of mind by staying away from attachment, either through meditation practice or in conscious everyday life. He believed that it was the practice of internal emptiness that sustained the moral order in this world, instead of behavior based on the religious reward.
Buddhadasa's disciples and followers remarked that they have been attracted to Buddhadasa's teaching on practice of Dhamma, rather than his rational, demythologized interpretations of unscientific religious discourses. This suggests that the Buddhadasa's efforts to bring the internal practice of “Dhamma” to people's attention, was significant for the contemporary Thai Buddhists.

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