In Siam, the first third of the twentieth century marked a time in which vernacular concepts of the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ were replaced by translated and appropriated Western ideas. An expanding public sphere, a growing sense of individuality and a new urban intelligentsia created a climate in which contentious ideas of a national society emerged.

From the mid-nineteenth century, the development of Siam as a nation-state owed a large debt to the desire of the monarchs and their governments to catch up with the modern West. The absolutist monarchical state and the exponents of traditional society hoped to increase their legitimacy by appropriating Western technology, transnational knowledge and concepts. The dynamism of global and regional development thoroughly changed the power and economic relations between Siam and the rest of the region. Furthermore, the winds from the West not only swept the shores of South-East Asia, but also penetrated the hinterland of Siam, bringing with them the economic and political practices of the modern world. By the turn of the twentieth century, the dominance gained by the monarchs and the ruling class over localizations of modernity was called into question when the global economic crisis shattered confidence in the efficacy of royal policies and even in the legitimacy of absolutism itself, particularly among the new urban intelligentsia. In this context, conceptual and social changes proceeded in tandem.