Abstract

Western accounts from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries abound with descriptions which portray the king of Siam and the Siamese nobility as the foremost merchants in their land. According to these accounts, rulers monopolized the foreign trade to and from their kingdom, much to the detriment of Western mèrchants attempting to gain an economic foothold. Captain Henry Burney, while negotiating a commercial treaty between Great Britain and Siam in the 1820s, noted that “the Siamese Government have no idea of what is called ‘a free and unrestricted trade’….” British commercial interests sought, moreover, the removal of all these restrictions, but found “the jealousy and mistrust which the Siamese entertain towards Europeans” a major stumbling block.

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