At the turn of the nineteenth century in Southeast Asia, the Kingdoms of Burma and Siam were largely stable, independent polities: powerful in relation to their neighbors, self-sufficient in terms of food, and possessing little reason to believe that these parameters would be changing within the clearly foreseeable future.' A century later, Burma as an independent entity had disappeared off the map, and Siam-at least in terms of its official foreign trade-was an economic satellite of the British Empire. Burmese teak now floated downstream to British Rangoon, while Siamese rice was carried to the world in the hulls of British ships. The Burmese monarchy had been disbanded; 93 percent of all official Siamese imports and exports were in the hands of London's merchants.2 How did these transformations occur, and why? Were the processes of domination geared toward the economies, politics, or geobodies of these two countries, or toward an integrated combination of all three? What role did material objects of trade themselves play in this process, objects that were often deemed illegal as they passed through unstable, liminal spaces along the frontier? This paper approaches these questions through the intertwined threads of boundary-formation, political maneuvering, and quasi-legal commodities. I show how an initial British priority of protection for India and the sea-routes to China gradually evolved into a demand for open markets, and finally, into territorial dominion. Burma's geography, in one sense, put her at a disadvantage Acknowledgments: I wish to thank the SSRC for inviting me to their Beyond Borders workshop in Paris, where an earlier version of this paper was initially presented. Special thanks to Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel, David Atwill, and Sun Laichen for their comments at that gathering. Thanks also to CSSH's three anonymous referees, and Michael Charney, Robert Kubicek, and Tamara Loos, historians of Burma, Imperial Britain, and Siam, respectively, for reading and commenting on this article.