Books by Trais Pearson, Ph.D.
Sovereign Necropolis: The Politics of Death in Semi-Colonial Siam, 2020
This introductory chapter briefly discusses the major themes of this book. It argues that the inv... more This introductory chapter briefly discusses the major themes of this book. It argues that the investigation of unnatural death was an early—and unlikely—site of direct interaction between the state and its subjects. Furthermore, the chapter illustrates how the emergence of a necropolitical regime at the turn of the twentieth century offered a troubling rebuke to the master narrative of modern Thai historiography: namely, the doctrine of Siamese/Thai exceptionalism. Thailand's status as the only nation-state in Southeast Asia to avoid direct control by European imperial power marks it as a singular state with an exceptional past. And it is within this context that the chapter addresses certain morbid subjects—alluding not merely to death but also to the social, cultural, and political lives of the dead.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020
By the 1890s, Siam (Thailand) was the last holdout against European imperialism in Southeast Asia... more By the 1890s, Siam (Thailand) was the last holdout against European imperialism in Southeast Asia. But the kingdom’s exceptional status came with a substantial caveat: Bangkok, its bustling capital, was a port city that was subject to many of the same legal and fiscal constraints as other colonial treaty ports. _Sovereign Necropolis_ offers new insight into turn-of-the-century Thai history by disinterring the forgotten stories of those who died “unnatural deaths” during this period and the work of the Siamese state to assert their rights in a pluralistic legal arena.
Based on a neglected cache of inquest files compiled by the Siamese Ministry of the Capital, official correspondence, and newspaper accounts, Trais Pearson documents the piecemeal introduction of new forms of legal and medical concern for the dead. He reveals that the investigation of unnatural death demanded testimony from diverse strata of society: from the unlettered masses to the king himself. These cases raised questions about how to handle the dead—were they spirits to be placated, or legal subjects whose deaths demanded compensation?—as well as questions about jurisdiction, rights, and liability.
Exhuming the history of imperial politics, transnational commerce, technology, and expertise, _Sovereign Necropolis_ demonstrates how the state’s response to global flows transformed the nature of legal subjectivity and politics in lasting ways. _Sovereign Necropolis_ is a compelling exploration of the troubling lives of the dead in a cosmopolitan treaty port, and a notable contribution to the growing corpus of studies in science, law, and society in the non-Western world.
https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.bc.edu/book/73091
Reviews of _Sovereign Necropolis_ by Trais Pearson, Ph.D.
The British Journal for the History of Science v.56, no. 1, 2023
"Pearson relates a key episode in the process of legal modernization in Siam: how did
the Siames... more "Pearson relates a key episode in the process of legal modernization in Siam: how did
the Siamese state become interested in the fate of its dead and injured subjects and how were progressively more systematic ways established in which the causes of their death or injury were examined?"
[...]
"Pearson presents a compelling study of medico-legal practices and legal subjectivity in an environment characterized by limited sovereignty and transnational flows of expertise, while at the same time giving space to subaltern voices. This book is a noteworthy contribution to studies of medicine, law, society and politics in the colonial and semi-colonial worlds."
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , 2022
"Along with fatal injuries, wounds, and bruises, this book investigates unnatural death in late n... more "Along with fatal injuries, wounds, and bruises, this book investigates unnatural death in late nineteenth century Siam. In vernacular perspective, unnatural death is seen as inauspicious and could be categorised as 'tai hong' (death caused by an accident, or any violent intentional means) or 'tai ha' (death by an infectious disease). Trais Pearson's study is an investigation into the former category of unnatural death, in particular, tai hong involving foreign residents, either Europeans or Asians registered as legal subjects of European imperial powers in the treaty port of Bangkok. The book traces the transition from the traditional Siamese authorities' handling of inauspicious death to a new international approach, drawing on Western-style forensic investigations into suspicious deaths, in order to 'assert [their] sovereignty in the face of particular constraints imposed by unequal treaties' (p. 7)."
Pacific Affairs , 2023
"This is a book that is full of surprising and intriguing insights into Siam’s peculiar semi-colo... more "This is a book that is full of surprising and intriguing insights into Siam’s peculiar semi-colonial status in matters concerning accidental death. It will contribute to the now burgeoning literature on the history of Thai law, and may encourage greater interest in “death studies” in Thailand."
Social History of Medicine , 2021
Reframing Thai historiography by reading cohorts of the unrecognised dead into the record, _Sover... more Reframing Thai historiography by reading cohorts of the unrecognised dead into the record, _Sovereign Necropolis_ explores the social and political production of unequal life chances during the period of British influence in Siam. Tracing the sociology of 'unnatural' death in fin-de-siècle Bangkok, this work privileges accounts of subaltern city residents who died or were injured in ambivalent circumstances. Using archival reports of these casualties to illuminate the Siamese capital's complex social world, Pearson shows how European technologies and actors generated new forms of risk, injury and premature death among less advantaged populations while asymmetrical trade treaties enabled immunity and impunity for overseas commercial interests and foreign residents. His analysis also sheds light on the changing role of legal, political and medical institutions--vectors of modernisation that also often served to reinscribe the foundational inequities of Siam's political situation.
[...]
Despite its morbid and often sorrowful subject matter, _Sovereign Necropolis_ is crisply written, even lively; despite the work’s stakes in area studies literature and sociocultural theory, the discussion is accessible for non-subject-matter experts. While this work is most likely to be consulted by scholars in Thai Studies and historians of medicine, it
should also reach readers in medical anthropology and postcolonial studies as it provides a granular account of how quasi-colonial arrangements impacted the health and welfare of Bangkok’s diverse inhabitants. The volume also contributes an important case study to
the comparative history of health and medicine under British rule, thus deserving an audience that includes critical scholars of global health.
Isis , 2021
In late nineteenth-century Bangkok, European subjects enjoyed legal privileges that Siamese ones ... more In late nineteenth-century Bangkok, European subjects enjoyed legal privileges that Siamese ones did not. For example, British subjects, including those of Asian descent, were tried in a British consular court and were entitled to a postmortem inspection by a trained medical doctor. This plural legal situation was created by a series of unequal treaties between Siam (Thailand after 1939) and foreign nations. Despite Siam never having been fully colonized, the government did face very real constraints in its ability to administer the kingdom.
Trais Pearson’s _Sovereign Necropolis_ is a well-researched historical study that examines the adoption of European legal practices related to postmortem examinations in the context of this political reality.
Journal of the Siam Society / New Mandala , 2020
Asian Journal of Law and Society , 2021
_Sovereign Necropolis_, by Trais Pearson, is a remarkable, compelling, and engaging study about t... more _Sovereign Necropolis_, by Trais Pearson, is a remarkable, compelling, and engaging study about the politics of death in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Siam. Drawing upon cases of unnatural or suspicious deaths compiled by the Siamese Ministry of the Capital beginning in 1890 (p. xii), Pearson explores the ways in which the Siamese state investigated the dead and, in so doing, he uncovers how death became "a matter of transnational concern and expert intervention" (p. 2).
Treaty port Bangkok was a vibrant cosmopolitan city "full of doctors, lawyers, newspapermen, judges, jurors, but also limited liability corporations, managers, shareholders" all of whom enjoyed extraterritorial legal protections (p. 154). Foreign lawyers were trying to impose law and order in the capital city; foreign residents, administrators, and consular officials were looking for ways to make life more manageable (p. 108). These actors thus played an important role in shaping social life and political culture in Siam (and were integral to the formation of the kingdom's modern legal system) (p. 61). Pearson effectively argues that the reforms made in the arena of civil law and legal medicine were the direct result of "the practical challenges faced by the Siamese elite in their ongoing engagement with imperial powers" (p. 4). [That a bilingual dictionary of Siamese language published by a British barrister helped to shape Siamese civil law is worth noting.]
Pearson brilliantly captures throughout the book the ensuing tensions between the Siamese elite and the foreign powers, and documents how those conflicts and negotiations played out in the plural legal arena of civil law and forensic medicine. The interest of the state in death thus led to "the emergence of a necropolitical regime at the turn-of-thecentury" (p. 4).
Articles/Chapters by Trais Pearson, Ph.D.
Global Forensic Cultures: Making Facts and Justice in the Modern Era, 2019
"'DNA Evidence Cannot Lie': Forensic Science, Truth Regimes, and Civic Epistemology in Thai Histo... more "'DNA Evidence Cannot Lie': Forensic Science, Truth Regimes, and Civic Epistemology in Thai History" (chapter 8), uses the controversial case of two Burmese migrant workers convicted of a double-murder in 2014 as an opportunity to explore the history of forensic expertise in relation to broader claims about truth and authority in Thai society. It was published as chapter eight in _Global Forensic Cultures: Making Facts and Justice in the Modern Era_, edited by Ian Burney and Christopher Hamlin and published by Johns Hopkins University Press (2019).
Journal of the Siam Society, 2016
In December 1842, the American missionary-physician Dan Beach Bradley (1804-1873) watched helples... more In December 1842, the American missionary-physician Dan Beach Bradley (1804-1873) watched helplessly as his eight-month old daughter succumbed to smallpox. Although Bradley was well acquainted with the use of both variolation and Jennerian vaccination to inoculate against smallpox, he had been unable to locate either active smallpox or cowpox in Siam, and his daughter succumbed to the disease. Thereafter,
his campaign to introduce vaccination to Siam took on a new urgency. He turned to the printing press to document his efforts and publicize his campaign. Bradley’s Treatise on Vaccination was published in Bangkok in 1844 in an original press run of 500 copies.
Bradley’s treatise is at once distinctive and generic, recounting a local iteration of a global undertaking. Reading the treatise we are privy to the peculiar circumstances of the missionary-physician and his doubled efforts to spread both Western medicine and the gospel in a foreign land. The text reveals clues about the main challenges that Bradley envisioned his campaign would face, notably the supposition that Siamese bodies were fundamentally differently constituted than those of Westerners, and that Western medicine might therefore not be suitable. The treatise also provides a record of Bradley’s engagement with traditional Siamese medical practices and materia medica. It is therefore useful for considering the question to what extent did the practitioner
of Western medicine seek out and recognize homologous therapeutics in indigenous traditions. In an era of rapid change in both Western and Siamese medicine, the treatise also bears closer scrutiny for what it might reveal about medical understanding of disease vectors in the era before the germ theory of disease. Bradley’s efforts to describe the nature of both smallpox and cowpox as well as the operations of the vaccination procedure seem to cohere with contemporary
notions of communicable illness, in spite of his unequivocal commitment
to a miasmatic theory of disease origination.
At the same time, Bradley’s text is representative of a global campaign
predicated on networks that included physicians, missionaries, bureaucrats, and kings, who were all allied in the effort to eradicate the scourge of smallpox. From this perspective, Bradley’s treatise might be seen as but one entry in a genre of medical treatises inspired by Edward Jenner’s own submission. In their zeal, Jenner’s acolytes evinced a cultish following that seemed to prefigure the work of another biomedical pioneer, Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). And, like Pasteur, there is good reason to reconsider the work of the “Jennerians” in light of recent theoretical insights into the relations between science and society. [...]
This article examines the question of Siamese sovereignty in the era of high imperialism through ... more This article examines the question of Siamese sovereignty in the era of high imperialism through the lens of medical jurisprudence. Although Siam (Thailand) was never formally colonized, it was subject to unequal trade treaties that established extraterritorial legal rights for foreign residents. In cases where a foreign resident was suspected of having harmed a Siamese subject, the Siamese state had to appeal to foreign consular officials to file charges against the suspect. Standards of forensic evidence were crucial in such cases. While medical jurisprudence helped to bolster racial privilege in other colonial legal jurisdictions, this article argues that these disputes rendered the dead and injured bodies of Siamese subjects into potentially powerful pieces of leverage against foreign residents and their political representatives. The dead bodies of Siamese subjects became grounds for challenging foreign courts and asserting Siamese sovereignty.
Bulletin of the History of Medicine , 2016
This article focuses on the historical confrontation between Western obstetrical medicine and ind... more This article focuses on the historical confrontation between Western obstetrical medicine and indigenous midwifery in nineteenth-century Siam (Thailand). Beginning with the campaign of medical missionaries to reform Siamese obstetrical care, it explores the types of arguments that were employed in the contest between these two forms of expert knowledge. Missionary–physicians used their anatomical knowledge to contest both particular indigenous obstetrical practices and more generalized notions concerning its moral and metaphysical foundations. At the same time, by appealing to the health and well-being of the consorts and children of the Siamese elite, they gained access to the intimate spaces of Siamese political life. The article contends that the medical missionary campaign intersected with imperial desires to make the sequestered spaces of Siamese political life more visible and accessible to Western scrutiny. It therefore reveals the imbrication of contests over obstetrical medicine and trade diplomacy in the imperial world.
Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia , Sep 1, 2014
Rian Thai: Journal of the Institute of Thai Studies, Vol. 5, 2012
Prizes by Trais Pearson, Ph.D.
SEAP Bulletin, 2015
2014 – Quentin (Trais) Pearson
Dissertation: "Bodies Politic: Civil Law & Forensic Medicine in Co... more 2014 – Quentin (Trais) Pearson
Dissertation: "Bodies Politic: Civil Law & Forensic Medicine in Colonial Era Bangkok"
Set in the culturally diverse and politically charged context of late nineteenth century Bangkok, historian Quentin (Trais) Pearson’s dissertation offers a riveting account of how injuries and deaths caused by
novel forms of urban mobility such as streetcars led to new forms of medico-legal expertise designed to assign blame and compensation. “Bodies Politic: Civil Law and Forensic Medicine in Colonial Era
Bangkok” is a fine-grained account of how collisions between new technologies and Siamese royal elite, subaltern, and expatriate lives produced new assertions of class, race, and national boundaries
and hierarchies. In conversation with postcolonial theory and Science and Technology Studies, the dissertation also addresses broad questions about the emergence of modern concepts of accident, injury, legal subjectivity, rights, and national sovereignty.
Book Reviews by Trais Pearson, Ph.D.
Bulletin of the History of Medicine , 2020
Online Publications/Blogs by Trais Pearson, Ph.D.
Cornell University Press Author's Blog , 2020
In this Q&A, we ask author Trais Pearson some questions about the research for his book and the h... more In this Q&A, we ask author Trais Pearson some questions about the research for his book and the handling of the dead in semi-colonial Siam.
1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?
Among the colorful characters in the book, the British barrister E.B. Michell (1843–1926) stands out. A champion boxer, rower, and expert on falconry, Michell somehow wound up practicing law before the British Consular Court in Bangkok. He also took up the essential challenge of translating British law into the Thai language. In fact, he published an English-Siamese dictionary (1892) that includes some of this work. When I returned to the U.S. to write up my dissertation, I was surprised to find a book that was once owned by Michell in Cornell University’s library collection! The Siam Directory for 1892 bears Michell’s name inside the cover and his annotations on Thai law in the back matter.
2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?
Parts of the book are based on archival documents dealing with compensatory payments for accidental injury and death. A legal mind would have recognized—and perhaps dismissed—them as typical products of tort law. I did not have a background in law, so I took a more labor-intensive, inductive approach. I saw Siamese and European parties speaking two different languages (literally and figuratively), as they grappled with fundamental social and cultural problems: questions about fault, liability, and the value of a human life. My lack of legal training forced me to confront these questions in much the same way as the historical actors themselves.
3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?
At its best, history is a promiscuous affair, borrowing insights and methods from other disciplines and using contemporary problems as a guide to pose new questions about the past. This is the force behind the exciting work being done in the history of capitalism and environmental history, for example. There is incredible potential in harnessing this energy in the history of science, technology, medicine, and law as well. We tend to cede too much ground to scholars in interdisciplinary fields who level the charge that “historians are afraid of theory.” We should be prepared to defend the value of deeply contextual and situated forms of knowledge against the lure of abstraction and universality.
Cornell University Press Author's Blog , 2020
While many in the United States anticipate a "Blue Wave" in the November [2020] elections, Bangko... more While many in the United States anticipate a "Blue Wave" in the November [2020] elections, Bangkok, the Thai capital, is already awash in one. In recent days, authorities have unleashed water-cannons on anti-government demonstrators in the city center, drenching them in jets of chemically treated water dyed an uncanny blue. These "blue waves" sting the eyes and stain the skin and clothing of demonstrators so that police might identify and apprehend them afterwards.
Uploads
Books by Trais Pearson, Ph.D.
Based on a neglected cache of inquest files compiled by the Siamese Ministry of the Capital, official correspondence, and newspaper accounts, Trais Pearson documents the piecemeal introduction of new forms of legal and medical concern for the dead. He reveals that the investigation of unnatural death demanded testimony from diverse strata of society: from the unlettered masses to the king himself. These cases raised questions about how to handle the dead—were they spirits to be placated, or legal subjects whose deaths demanded compensation?—as well as questions about jurisdiction, rights, and liability.
Exhuming the history of imperial politics, transnational commerce, technology, and expertise, _Sovereign Necropolis_ demonstrates how the state’s response to global flows transformed the nature of legal subjectivity and politics in lasting ways. _Sovereign Necropolis_ is a compelling exploration of the troubling lives of the dead in a cosmopolitan treaty port, and a notable contribution to the growing corpus of studies in science, law, and society in the non-Western world.
https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.bc.edu/book/73091
Reviews of _Sovereign Necropolis_ by Trais Pearson, Ph.D.
the Siamese state become interested in the fate of its dead and injured subjects and how were progressively more systematic ways established in which the causes of their death or injury were examined?"
[...]
"Pearson presents a compelling study of medico-legal practices and legal subjectivity in an environment characterized by limited sovereignty and transnational flows of expertise, while at the same time giving space to subaltern voices. This book is a noteworthy contribution to studies of medicine, law, society and politics in the colonial and semi-colonial worlds."
[...]
Despite its morbid and often sorrowful subject matter, _Sovereign Necropolis_ is crisply written, even lively; despite the work’s stakes in area studies literature and sociocultural theory, the discussion is accessible for non-subject-matter experts. While this work is most likely to be consulted by scholars in Thai Studies and historians of medicine, it
should also reach readers in medical anthropology and postcolonial studies as it provides a granular account of how quasi-colonial arrangements impacted the health and welfare of Bangkok’s diverse inhabitants. The volume also contributes an important case study to
the comparative history of health and medicine under British rule, thus deserving an audience that includes critical scholars of global health.
Trais Pearson’s _Sovereign Necropolis_ is a well-researched historical study that examines the adoption of European legal practices related to postmortem examinations in the context of this political reality.
JSS Direct Link: https://so06.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/pub_jss/article/view/246592
New Mandala: https://www.newmandala.org/book-review/sovereign-necropolis-the-politics-of-death-in-semi-colonial-siam/
Treaty port Bangkok was a vibrant cosmopolitan city "full of doctors, lawyers, newspapermen, judges, jurors, but also limited liability corporations, managers, shareholders" all of whom enjoyed extraterritorial legal protections (p. 154). Foreign lawyers were trying to impose law and order in the capital city; foreign residents, administrators, and consular officials were looking for ways to make life more manageable (p. 108). These actors thus played an important role in shaping social life and political culture in Siam (and were integral to the formation of the kingdom's modern legal system) (p. 61). Pearson effectively argues that the reforms made in the arena of civil law and legal medicine were the direct result of "the practical challenges faced by the Siamese elite in their ongoing engagement with imperial powers" (p. 4). [That a bilingual dictionary of Siamese language published by a British barrister helped to shape Siamese civil law is worth noting.]
Pearson brilliantly captures throughout the book the ensuing tensions between the Siamese elite and the foreign powers, and documents how those conflicts and negotiations played out in the plural legal arena of civil law and forensic medicine. The interest of the state in death thus led to "the emergence of a necropolitical regime at the turn-of-thecentury" (p. 4).
Articles/Chapters by Trais Pearson, Ph.D.
his campaign to introduce vaccination to Siam took on a new urgency. He turned to the printing press to document his efforts and publicize his campaign. Bradley’s Treatise on Vaccination was published in Bangkok in 1844 in an original press run of 500 copies.
Bradley’s treatise is at once distinctive and generic, recounting a local iteration of a global undertaking. Reading the treatise we are privy to the peculiar circumstances of the missionary-physician and his doubled efforts to spread both Western medicine and the gospel in a foreign land. The text reveals clues about the main challenges that Bradley envisioned his campaign would face, notably the supposition that Siamese bodies were fundamentally differently constituted than those of Westerners, and that Western medicine might therefore not be suitable. The treatise also provides a record of Bradley’s engagement with traditional Siamese medical practices and materia medica. It is therefore useful for considering the question to what extent did the practitioner
of Western medicine seek out and recognize homologous therapeutics in indigenous traditions. In an era of rapid change in both Western and Siamese medicine, the treatise also bears closer scrutiny for what it might reveal about medical understanding of disease vectors in the era before the germ theory of disease. Bradley’s efforts to describe the nature of both smallpox and cowpox as well as the operations of the vaccination procedure seem to cohere with contemporary
notions of communicable illness, in spite of his unequivocal commitment
to a miasmatic theory of disease origination.
At the same time, Bradley’s text is representative of a global campaign
predicated on networks that included physicians, missionaries, bureaucrats, and kings, who were all allied in the effort to eradicate the scourge of smallpox. From this perspective, Bradley’s treatise might be seen as but one entry in a genre of medical treatises inspired by Edward Jenner’s own submission. In their zeal, Jenner’s acolytes evinced a cultish following that seemed to prefigure the work of another biomedical pioneer, Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). And, like Pasteur, there is good reason to reconsider the work of the “Jennerians” in light of recent theoretical insights into the relations between science and society. [...]
Link: http://kyotoreview.org/yav/dead-body-politics-forensic-medicine-and-sovereignty-in-siam/
Prizes by Trais Pearson, Ph.D.
Dissertation: "Bodies Politic: Civil Law & Forensic Medicine in Colonial Era Bangkok"
Set in the culturally diverse and politically charged context of late nineteenth century Bangkok, historian Quentin (Trais) Pearson’s dissertation offers a riveting account of how injuries and deaths caused by
novel forms of urban mobility such as streetcars led to new forms of medico-legal expertise designed to assign blame and compensation. “Bodies Politic: Civil Law and Forensic Medicine in Colonial Era
Bangkok” is a fine-grained account of how collisions between new technologies and Siamese royal elite, subaltern, and expatriate lives produced new assertions of class, race, and national boundaries
and hierarchies. In conversation with postcolonial theory and Science and Technology Studies, the dissertation also addresses broad questions about the emergence of modern concepts of accident, injury, legal subjectivity, rights, and national sovereignty.
Book Reviews by Trais Pearson, Ph.D.
Online Publications/Blogs by Trais Pearson, Ph.D.
1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?
Among the colorful characters in the book, the British barrister E.B. Michell (1843–1926) stands out. A champion boxer, rower, and expert on falconry, Michell somehow wound up practicing law before the British Consular Court in Bangkok. He also took up the essential challenge of translating British law into the Thai language. In fact, he published an English-Siamese dictionary (1892) that includes some of this work. When I returned to the U.S. to write up my dissertation, I was surprised to find a book that was once owned by Michell in Cornell University’s library collection! The Siam Directory for 1892 bears Michell’s name inside the cover and his annotations on Thai law in the back matter.
2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?
Parts of the book are based on archival documents dealing with compensatory payments for accidental injury and death. A legal mind would have recognized—and perhaps dismissed—them as typical products of tort law. I did not have a background in law, so I took a more labor-intensive, inductive approach. I saw Siamese and European parties speaking two different languages (literally and figuratively), as they grappled with fundamental social and cultural problems: questions about fault, liability, and the value of a human life. My lack of legal training forced me to confront these questions in much the same way as the historical actors themselves.
3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?
At its best, history is a promiscuous affair, borrowing insights and methods from other disciplines and using contemporary problems as a guide to pose new questions about the past. This is the force behind the exciting work being done in the history of capitalism and environmental history, for example. There is incredible potential in harnessing this energy in the history of science, technology, medicine, and law as well. We tend to cede too much ground to scholars in interdisciplinary fields who level the charge that “historians are afraid of theory.” We should be prepared to defend the value of deeply contextual and situated forms of knowledge against the lure of abstraction and universality.
Based on a neglected cache of inquest files compiled by the Siamese Ministry of the Capital, official correspondence, and newspaper accounts, Trais Pearson documents the piecemeal introduction of new forms of legal and medical concern for the dead. He reveals that the investigation of unnatural death demanded testimony from diverse strata of society: from the unlettered masses to the king himself. These cases raised questions about how to handle the dead—were they spirits to be placated, or legal subjects whose deaths demanded compensation?—as well as questions about jurisdiction, rights, and liability.
Exhuming the history of imperial politics, transnational commerce, technology, and expertise, _Sovereign Necropolis_ demonstrates how the state’s response to global flows transformed the nature of legal subjectivity and politics in lasting ways. _Sovereign Necropolis_ is a compelling exploration of the troubling lives of the dead in a cosmopolitan treaty port, and a notable contribution to the growing corpus of studies in science, law, and society in the non-Western world.
https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.bc.edu/book/73091
the Siamese state become interested in the fate of its dead and injured subjects and how were progressively more systematic ways established in which the causes of their death or injury were examined?"
[...]
"Pearson presents a compelling study of medico-legal practices and legal subjectivity in an environment characterized by limited sovereignty and transnational flows of expertise, while at the same time giving space to subaltern voices. This book is a noteworthy contribution to studies of medicine, law, society and politics in the colonial and semi-colonial worlds."
[...]
Despite its morbid and often sorrowful subject matter, _Sovereign Necropolis_ is crisply written, even lively; despite the work’s stakes in area studies literature and sociocultural theory, the discussion is accessible for non-subject-matter experts. While this work is most likely to be consulted by scholars in Thai Studies and historians of medicine, it
should also reach readers in medical anthropology and postcolonial studies as it provides a granular account of how quasi-colonial arrangements impacted the health and welfare of Bangkok’s diverse inhabitants. The volume also contributes an important case study to
the comparative history of health and medicine under British rule, thus deserving an audience that includes critical scholars of global health.
Trais Pearson’s _Sovereign Necropolis_ is a well-researched historical study that examines the adoption of European legal practices related to postmortem examinations in the context of this political reality.
JSS Direct Link: https://so06.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/pub_jss/article/view/246592
New Mandala: https://www.newmandala.org/book-review/sovereign-necropolis-the-politics-of-death-in-semi-colonial-siam/
Treaty port Bangkok was a vibrant cosmopolitan city "full of doctors, lawyers, newspapermen, judges, jurors, but also limited liability corporations, managers, shareholders" all of whom enjoyed extraterritorial legal protections (p. 154). Foreign lawyers were trying to impose law and order in the capital city; foreign residents, administrators, and consular officials were looking for ways to make life more manageable (p. 108). These actors thus played an important role in shaping social life and political culture in Siam (and were integral to the formation of the kingdom's modern legal system) (p. 61). Pearson effectively argues that the reforms made in the arena of civil law and legal medicine were the direct result of "the practical challenges faced by the Siamese elite in their ongoing engagement with imperial powers" (p. 4). [That a bilingual dictionary of Siamese language published by a British barrister helped to shape Siamese civil law is worth noting.]
Pearson brilliantly captures throughout the book the ensuing tensions between the Siamese elite and the foreign powers, and documents how those conflicts and negotiations played out in the plural legal arena of civil law and forensic medicine. The interest of the state in death thus led to "the emergence of a necropolitical regime at the turn-of-thecentury" (p. 4).
his campaign to introduce vaccination to Siam took on a new urgency. He turned to the printing press to document his efforts and publicize his campaign. Bradley’s Treatise on Vaccination was published in Bangkok in 1844 in an original press run of 500 copies.
Bradley’s treatise is at once distinctive and generic, recounting a local iteration of a global undertaking. Reading the treatise we are privy to the peculiar circumstances of the missionary-physician and his doubled efforts to spread both Western medicine and the gospel in a foreign land. The text reveals clues about the main challenges that Bradley envisioned his campaign would face, notably the supposition that Siamese bodies were fundamentally differently constituted than those of Westerners, and that Western medicine might therefore not be suitable. The treatise also provides a record of Bradley’s engagement with traditional Siamese medical practices and materia medica. It is therefore useful for considering the question to what extent did the practitioner
of Western medicine seek out and recognize homologous therapeutics in indigenous traditions. In an era of rapid change in both Western and Siamese medicine, the treatise also bears closer scrutiny for what it might reveal about medical understanding of disease vectors in the era before the germ theory of disease. Bradley’s efforts to describe the nature of both smallpox and cowpox as well as the operations of the vaccination procedure seem to cohere with contemporary
notions of communicable illness, in spite of his unequivocal commitment
to a miasmatic theory of disease origination.
At the same time, Bradley’s text is representative of a global campaign
predicated on networks that included physicians, missionaries, bureaucrats, and kings, who were all allied in the effort to eradicate the scourge of smallpox. From this perspective, Bradley’s treatise might be seen as but one entry in a genre of medical treatises inspired by Edward Jenner’s own submission. In their zeal, Jenner’s acolytes evinced a cultish following that seemed to prefigure the work of another biomedical pioneer, Louis Pasteur (1822-1895). And, like Pasteur, there is good reason to reconsider the work of the “Jennerians” in light of recent theoretical insights into the relations between science and society. [...]
Link: http://kyotoreview.org/yav/dead-body-politics-forensic-medicine-and-sovereignty-in-siam/
Dissertation: "Bodies Politic: Civil Law & Forensic Medicine in Colonial Era Bangkok"
Set in the culturally diverse and politically charged context of late nineteenth century Bangkok, historian Quentin (Trais) Pearson’s dissertation offers a riveting account of how injuries and deaths caused by
novel forms of urban mobility such as streetcars led to new forms of medico-legal expertise designed to assign blame and compensation. “Bodies Politic: Civil Law and Forensic Medicine in Colonial Era
Bangkok” is a fine-grained account of how collisions between new technologies and Siamese royal elite, subaltern, and expatriate lives produced new assertions of class, race, and national boundaries
and hierarchies. In conversation with postcolonial theory and Science and Technology Studies, the dissertation also addresses broad questions about the emergence of modern concepts of accident, injury, legal subjectivity, rights, and national sovereignty.
1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?
Among the colorful characters in the book, the British barrister E.B. Michell (1843–1926) stands out. A champion boxer, rower, and expert on falconry, Michell somehow wound up practicing law before the British Consular Court in Bangkok. He also took up the essential challenge of translating British law into the Thai language. In fact, he published an English-Siamese dictionary (1892) that includes some of this work. When I returned to the U.S. to write up my dissertation, I was surprised to find a book that was once owned by Michell in Cornell University’s library collection! The Siam Directory for 1892 bears Michell’s name inside the cover and his annotations on Thai law in the back matter.
2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?
Parts of the book are based on archival documents dealing with compensatory payments for accidental injury and death. A legal mind would have recognized—and perhaps dismissed—them as typical products of tort law. I did not have a background in law, so I took a more labor-intensive, inductive approach. I saw Siamese and European parties speaking two different languages (literally and figuratively), as they grappled with fundamental social and cultural problems: questions about fault, liability, and the value of a human life. My lack of legal training forced me to confront these questions in much the same way as the historical actors themselves.
3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?
At its best, history is a promiscuous affair, borrowing insights and methods from other disciplines and using contemporary problems as a guide to pose new questions about the past. This is the force behind the exciting work being done in the history of capitalism and environmental history, for example. There is incredible potential in harnessing this energy in the history of science, technology, medicine, and law as well. We tend to cede too much ground to scholars in interdisciplinary fields who level the charge that “historians are afraid of theory.” We should be prepared to defend the value of deeply contextual and situated forms of knowledge against the lure of abstraction and universality.
[Full text:] Opening to page 99 of Sovereign Necropolis, readers will find a full-page black and white picture of a distinguished Siamese (Thai) gentleman in his civil servants’ uniform. His impeccable posture gives him a commanding air, but his eyes reveal a certain world-weariness. He is flanked to his immediate right by a young woman, his daughter, whose arms are gingerly draped across her father’s, her cheek resting affectionately against his right shoulder.
The image on page 99 is the final image in the book, which contains only eight images in total. The book is based primarily on archival documents including inquest files, or records of police investigations into unnatural death in the Siamese capital, Bangkok, in the 1890s. Image criticism is not at all central to the research methodologies or arguments in the book. My first inclination is therefore to conclude that the page-99 test does not work for Sovereign Necropolis.
On second thought, however, the image of the Siamese government minister and his daughter presents a rather striking combination of eminence and intimacy. That dynamic is actually quite a useful one for thinking about the central subject matter of the book, which is the ways in which the Siamese state began to take an interest in the dead and injured bodies of its subjects in the final decades of the nineteenth century.
Here eminence refers to the ways in which representatives of the Siamese state, including Prince Naret Worarit, (the subject of the photograph, who was the government minister in charge of municipal governance for the capital city), worked to adopt new medical, legal, and institutional practices and procedures for dealing with death and injury. These reforms were part of a broader effort to perform good governance and statecraft at a time when Siamese sovereignty was under threat by expansionist European imperial powers with designs on mainland Southeast Asia. These new legal and medico-legal forms of concern, however, intruded on the intimate social and cultural practices surrounding ‘bad’ or ‘inauspicious’ death (Thai: tai hong) as observed by the cosmopolitan classes of people who inhabited the capital.
In the most abstract sense, this performance of eminence through a concern for the intimate is not so different from the workings of European imperial projects in places like the Dutch East Indies (as Anne Stoler’s work has revealed). But the peculiar performance of eminence in the intimate realm of death was perhaps more exceptional, and it would reconfigure Siamese political life in troubling and enduring ways.