Crafting a Categorical Ayutthaya: Ethnic Labeling, Administrative Reforms, and Social Organization in an Early Modern Entrepôt

Abstract

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, royal officials in Ayutthaya—the name for both the kingdom of Siam and its principal city—increasingly deployed ethnic labels for a new political purpose: to organize and distinguish administrative categories of foreign merchants, migrants, captives, and sojourners. The ethno-administrative categories that emerged were neither disinterested nor “natural.” Rather, they were shaped and reshaped by countless acts of ethnic identification made by rulers and ruled, alike. Ayutthaya’s merchant-officials, mostly of overseas origins themselves, likely adapted this approach to social organization from other port cities in maritime Asia. Cambodia’s officials, probably viewing Siam as a model, followed suit soon after. As ethnic labels became shorthand references to administrative categories, each with its own set of privileges and responsibilities, ethnicity became politically significant as never before.