The Limits of Empire? - Siam's Reversal in Malaya
When the Siamese king Bawonratchao ascended the throne in 1828, he had a great example to emulate. His father had been the legendary king who had humbled the Burmese once and for all, establishing Siam’s position as the greatest of all the Southeast Asian powers. As well as living up to the great legacy of his father, Bawonratchao had to navigate Siam’s position in a world that was beginning to change faster than it had ever done before. While not a brilliant warrior like his father, Bawonratchao was nevertheless an intelligent ruler, if one given over to heavy drinking. In the second year of his reign, he had established a commercial treaty with the French, partially due to a desire to smooth trade with the growing economic powers of Europe but also due to the fear of the British, who besides the Spanish were the only European power with a serious territorial presence within Southeast Asia.
Siam also continued her expansion into those areas of Southeast Asia ruled by lesser states. Bawonratchao ordered a number of invasions of the Laotian states, culminating in the final defeat of Luang Prabang in 1837, which put Siamese forces in striking distance of Hanoi and ensured that the core territories of Siam would not be threatened by foreigners. The victories over the Laotians, although made more complicated by the difficult terrain east of the Mekong River, had been made easier by the lack of firearms among the Laotian armies. Reports to the Siamese king described “heaps of Laotian dead”, unable to answer the muskets of the Siamese. Buffeted by European support, as well as his victories against some of the remaining small states in Southeast Asia, the Siamese king now prepared for the war that would almost be his undoing, the Malayan War.
Malaya should not have presented a significant challenge to Siam’s armies. At the beginning of the 1840s, the Peninsula was a collection of small states which even combined had a population of less than a million. Growing prosperity in the 18th and early 19th centuries had given rise to some urban centres, but by and large Malays were sustenance farmers, with no access to the growing market economies seen in Central Siam. Although styled as
Sultans, the rulers of the Malay Peninsula were glorified chieftains, with the most powerful of them ruling a mere 200,000 subjects. By this point, Siam had a population of over 7 million, and an army that was larger than the populations of the smaller Malay Sultanates. In the decades that had seen Chakri Siam transform from a small state on the Chaophraya River into the most powerful empire that Southeast Asia had yet seen, Siam had defeated enemies far more powerful than the Malays.
In comparison to the Laotians however, the Malays had a number of key advantages. While the Laotian states were by and large cut off from the rest of the world, the same was not true of the Malay Sultanates. They had long engaged in trade, and had successfully established ties with foreigners, including those from Europe and the Middle East. The British maintained a base in the old Malay trading city of Malacca, and by the 1840s was in the process of establishing closer ties with some of the Malay sultanates of the Peninsula as well as Sumatra, bringing them together in a loose informal empire. The Malays links to the outside world gave them access to guns, money and in the case of Kedah, even an old British frigate which would prove to be of great use in the war. On a psychological level, increased contact with the Middle East had produced a greater Muslim identity, particularly amongst those Malays which had traditionally been in contact with Thai Buddhists to the north.
Siam’s initial plan for the invasion was not necessarily un-sound however. The aim of Bawonratchao’s invasion was not annexation, but rather the extension of the “Bunga Mas” tribute across the whole of the Malay Peninsula, Malacca excepted, as well as the annexation of various parts of Pattani and Kedah. Two armies would make their way down the Malay Peninsula, extracting tribute from the Sultans as they made their way down the coasts. There were almost no professional soldiers standing between the Siamese Kingdom and Johor, the southernmost of the Malay Sultanates. Indeed, the task looked to be a simple one for the Siamese armies, which combined numbered around 37,000 men. By contrast, it is likely that the Malays did not anticipate an invasion at all, and there were certainly no preparations amongst any of the Malay Sultans. It was not until a Siamese force raided the town of Terang in Northern Kedah that there was any hint of the untoward happening [1]. When word spread that the Sultan of Pattani had accepted to give an enlarged tribute to Bangkok, the reality of the Siamese invasion gradually dawned on Malaya.
Initially the old Sultan of Kedah, Mohammed Jiwa Shah, wanted to find an accommodation with Siam similar to that of Pattani’s, where he could continue his rule as a Siamese vassal. His intention was not shared by his twenty-seven year old son Abdullah Tajuddin, previously a suspected
Anak Raja pirate who now presented himself as a willing Ghazi. Later chronicles boasted of his bravery and piety in opposing the Siamese, though it was just as likely that he saw an opportunity to improve his position in the court. After all, a man who had proved his military prowess defensively would make a good Sultan in many people’s minds. Abdullah Tajuddin got his way, and led a small force of Kedahan warriors on the road to the Kedahan plain. Rather than stand against the much larger Siamese army, he instead led hit and run attacks which aimed to weaken the Siamese force. The sheer size of the Siamese army allowed it to enter the Kedahan plain without any real opposition however, and over the course of the next few months, over 100,000 Kedahans fled the plain to the island of Penang where the Kedahan capital was, protected by the water and Kedah’s small navy.
Unable to bring the Kedahans into total submission, the Siamese satisfied themselves with her mainland territories, and progressed down the Malay Peninsula. 1842 saw the submission of Kelantan, Perak and Selangor, and in 1843 both the Sultan of Pahang and Negeri Sembilan became vassals of the king of Siam. The Sultan of Johor, traditionally the most powerful of the Malay rulers since the fall of Malacca desperately attempted to sign a treaty with the British in Malacca but failed. Running out of options, he instead secured the aid of the King of Burma, who were themselves eager to avenge their prior defeat. Forced to divert troops to secure his northern flank, Bawonratchao’s efforts to force the submission of Penang and Johor were temporarily frustrated.
By 1846 the war was most definitely a stalemate. The Burmese had captured Chiang Mai, Siam’s northern capital but was unable to progress any further. Johor’s continued survival was precarious, but the dire situation of both her and the exiled Kedahans on Penang had aroused the attention of the British, whose chief resident in the region was concerned over the increasing influence of the French in Bangkok. When visited by a delegation from Kedah offering a naval base on Penang in return for arms and money to support their struggle against the Siamese, the offer was accepted if not without some protest from London. Their resistance now bankrolled by a much richer power, Abdullah Tajuddin was in a position to train many of the male refugees on Penang into soldiers, soon giving him the second largest force on the Malay Peninsula. Unhappy with what he saw as British interference, Bawonratchao launched a raid against the British territory of Malacca, as an attempt to dissuade them from further interference with his war in Malaya.
Of course, this gambit had the opposite effect. When word reached London that the King of Siam had attacked a British territory, the foreign office in particular called for a harsh retaliation. A force of almost 13,000 men were dispatched, with its commander ordered to “cut Siam down to size”. Although there was little in the way of British coordination with the Burmese, there was some cooperation with the remaining forces of the Malay Sultanates. A British-Kedahan intervention in Perak led to an anti-Siamese Sultan ascending to the throne, and Kedah’s sole modern ship joined the British in a bombardment of Siamese forces on the shore opposite to Penang. However in the decisive battle at Perai, it was Abdullah Tajuddin’s army which inflicted heavy losses on the Siamese force, jeopardising their position in Malaya. Although it was not until the British bombardment of Bangkok that the Siamese king was brought to the negotiating table, the victory won Abdullah Tajuddin in particular a great amount of prestige amongst the other Malay rulers, as well as with the general population even outside Kedah. When peace finally came, it had left Kedah as the dominant Malay state, and the British as the most influential European power on the Peninsula.
[1] – Modern Trang in Thailand, which in OTL remained Kedahan until the early 19th century.
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The Beginnings of Modernity in Southeast Asia - State Reform
As was the case in South Asia, it was European military achievements in Southeast Asia that seemed to herald changing times. However, unlike in Bengal, the British had only played a relatively minor role in Siam’s defeat, with the Burmese providing the majority of the manpower to defeat the armies of King Bawonratchao. Nevertheless, it was British guns and money that had enabled the tiny Malay Sultanates to hold off and then advance against Siamese forces in the south, and the British ships that shelled Bangkok certainly made their impact on more than just its buildings. The last time that enemies had reached the capital had been in the last Burmese invasion late in the 18th century, and the psychological blow that a renewed sense of vulnerability brought the concerns of both the Siamese people and nobility to the fore. As later Siamese Reformist leader Luang Bunnang put it “
Previously, we had thought ourselves a great nation second only to China. After those British bombs fell on the homes of our great city, only then did we realise just how small we really were”.
There was still no question of a greater reform of the Siamese political system, but it was not long after the defeat that King Bawonratchao announced a far-reaching series of reforms known as the “New Order”, which aimed to import European (and especially French) advisors to reform Siam’s educational, administrative and especially military systems. In Malaya however, the change was very much political in its nature. The years of Siamese occupation in much of the country had devastated many of the Sultanates, and the fact that Kedah had been left as a military-heavy state with an ambitious heir to the throne seemed to be a recipe for further war and disruption. And indeed when the old Sultan of Kedah died and his son Abdullah Tajuddin became Sultan, he vowed to unite all the Muslims of the Peninsula under his rule to avoid any future subjugation. In this he was encouraged not only by the British Chief Resident in the region, who warned him that any successor was likely not to be as pre-disposed to Malayan Unification, but also by the temporarily strong position of Kedah.
Most of Malaya’s Sultanates agreed to submit to the Sultan of Kedah, who by the early 1850s was calling himself the
Yang di-Pertuan of Malaya. Only Johor, the traditional power on the Malay Peninsula following the downfall of Malacca provided much in the way of resistance. Its few warriors outnumbered by Abdullah Tajuddin’s more professional army were soon crushed, and by 1854 the whole of the peninsula outside of Siamese rule was under the rule of Kedah’s Sultan. What Abdullah did not intend however was the simple extension of Kedahan rule over the other Malayan states on the peninsula, vowing to keep the other Sultans in their positions. To illustrate his point, he began the construction of a new capital on the island of Pulau Ujong, naming the city after the old Malay Kingdom known as Singapura [2]. Conscious of the many questions of his legitimacy to dominate the other Malay states in such a fashion, he commissioned a number of works to complement the Malay Annals to justify his own rule of a unified Malaya.
In Java, the largest and most significant of the Southeast Asian Muslim states, there was a great deal of change though it was not as dramatic as Malaya’s or Siam’s. Diponegoro had managed to conquer a state that encompassed most of the island of Java (the mostly Sundanese speaking areas in Western Java were under the rule of the British East India Company), yet his lack of support amongst the Javanese aristocracy continued to hamper attempts to solidify his state. To some extent, Diponegoro empowered the Ulema and gained legitimacy from his contacts with foreign Muslim rulers. However his task of firmly establishing his rule was only half-finished when he died in 1855. His successor Pakubuwono was left with a country that was still divided, despite its relative ethnic and linguistic unity. Indeed only months after the news of the succession, an uprising in Bali had managed to secure the whole of the island, and rumour had it that the self-appointed King of Bali had petitioned the British for protection.
[2] – No prizes for guessing where this is. Interestingly enough about Singapura, its very existence as described in the Malay Annals is questionable which is startling considering the time period the kingdom is supposed to have existed (1299 to 1402). Perhaps an even more extreme version of Japan, Nusantara is something of a “late bloomer” when it comes to attestable history, with legendary kingdoms appearing in the same times that we have physical documentary resources from other parts of the world.
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Author's Notes - Siam's big reversal has come, and it is due to a combination of Burmese military might, British naval might as well as a lot of luck on the side of the Malays, and the Kedahan Malays in particular. It's worth noting now that this unified Malay does not to any extent resemble a "Nation State", and the primary identity of Malays at this point is still regional and religious, and it is on this latter basis that a unified Malayan State has been founded. It's still a very minor player at the moment however, and is ultimately vulnerable to Siam.
Siam will be a big one to watch, as it is now embarking on a serious campaign of reform wider-reaching than that of OTL. Indeed, at this point in the timeline Siam's westernising reforms may well be the most extensive outside of the Ottoman Empire's, and this is going to have a major impact down the line.
