65

Forestry as Foreign Policy

Anglo-Siamese Relations and the Origins of Britain’s
Informal Empire in the Teak Forests of Northern Siam,
1883-1925*

GREGORY A. BARTON & BRETT M. BENNETT**

Introduction

Nineteenth-century Europeans visiting Southeast and South Asia eulogised teak

trees (Tectona grandis) for their value and beauty. Diplomatic diaries, travel
memoirs, literary descriptions and geography books for children described the teak
as a universal sovereign of the sylvan world, the regal “lord” of the forests.1 With
dwindling supplies of oak in Britain, British elites saw teak as a vital component of
the country’s global naval supremacy in the nineteenth century. The fear of a
dwindling supply of teak during the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries
encouraged the creation of forestry departments and laws in British India that
attempted to preserve the finite amount of teak in the sub-continent.2 Yet the finite
ecologies of India and Burma could not supply all the teak required to fuel expand-
ing demand. Britain would have to look beyond its formal empire in Asia to find
more teak.
Teak grew abundantly amongst the hills and mountains in northern Siam, con-
trolled in the nineteenth century by a loose assemblage of vassal chiefdoms loyal to
the monarch in Bangkok, the centre of the Kingdom of Siam. The Government of
India and the Foreign Office started taking an interest in Siam’s northern teak
forests during the mid-1850s because of Siam’s close proximity to Burma.
Burmese labourers worked in Siam’s teak forests and a few intrepid British busi-
nessmen leased and purchased teak from chiefs in the 1860s.3 The Government of
India and the Foreign Office’s primary goal from the mid 1860s to the early 1880s
was to make sure that the monarchy in Bangkok ensured that Siam’s northern
chiefs adequately protected the rights of British subjects. The entry of the Borneo
Company Ltd and the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation Ltd (BBTC) into the
Siamese teak market in the 1880s signalled a new period of British-Siamese rela-
tions in the north. The Foreign Office’s strategy towards the teak forests of Siam
changed. Instead of just promoting the rights of British subjects, the Foreign Office
actively sought to help large British trading firms gain a foothold in the lucrative
northern Siamese teak market as a way of stopping French imperial expansion.
This article argues that the BBTC, the Foreign Office and the Government of
India worked together in the 1880s-1890s to create a monopolist hold over the teak

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 66 GREGORY A. BARTON & BRETT M. BENNETT

forests of northern Siam that was tantamount to informal empire.4 The concept of
informal empire best describes the creation of British vice-consular courts and offi-
ces in northern Siam, especially in Chiengmai, and explains the Foreign Office’s role
in the founding and running of the Royal Forest Department, which a Briton direc-
ted from 1896-1925. Britain was not the only beneficiary of this relationship. The
King of Siam, Chulalongkorn (1853-1910), and his growing centralised, bureaucra-
tic state centred in Bangkok used the threat of British annexation to create and
implement extraterritorial treaties and courts, a centralised model of state forestry,
and a British dominance of the teak trade that allowed Bangkok to “internally colo-
nise” the independence of northern Siam and stave off French advances. British
firms held a preponderance of teak leases in Siam by the late 1890s, a British
forester served as the Chief Conservator for the Royal Forest Department from 1896
to 1925, and the French could not easily expand into a northern Siam dominated
by British businesses.
Historians studying Britain’s relationship with Siam have debated vigorously
whether Siam was or was not part of Britain’s “informal empire”.5 Historians have
usually conceived of informal empire as the extension of imperial power beyond the
constitutional boundaries of formal empire. Britain’s informal empire in Siam is usu-
ally dated to King Mongkut’s signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855 which gave
British subjects extraterritorial privileges in parts of the Kingdom of Siam. In the
interpretation put forward in the Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Nicholas
Tarling writes:
King Mongkut in a famous metaphor said that the choice facing Siam was
whether ‘to swim upriver and make friends with the crocodile [the French]
or to swim out to the sea and hang on to the whale [the British]’. It is clear
that he and his royal successors down to 1932 opted for the whale, with the
result that Siam in some degree became a part of Britain’s informal empire,
in which British interests, particularly economic, predominated without the
exercise of formal sovereignty.6
Other historians reject the notion that Britain maintained an informal empire in
Siam. Ian Brown suggests that informal empire is characterised by “a deliberate
attempt on the part of a metropolitan power to determine the economic policies of
another state…‘Informal influence’ has a palpable form—direct action taken by
European consuls, merchants, residents, seconded officials”.7 Brown demonstrates
that this definition of informal empire does not describe the mechanisms by which
the British advised the Ministry of Finance during the reign of King Chulalongkorn.
This article demonstrates that the dominance of British merchants, the British
direction of the Royal Forest Department and Britain’s northern consular and inter-
national courts were mechanisms of control tantamount to informal empire. British
consuls, merchants, and advisors did take direct action to secure the teak leases in
northern Siam and to establish a forestry department responsive to British interests.
These actions allowed British firms to dominate the teak industry, created British
consular courts, gave British officials representation on the international court in
Chiengmai and enabled the Foreign Office to influence Royal Forest Department
policies and negotiations. Although the Bangkok monarchy and ministries had their
own internal policies towards northern Siam, these consistently required British

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 FORESTRY AS FOREIGN POLICY 67

capital and power to achieve during the 1870s-1890s, the critical period when
Chulalongkorn and his government integrated the diffuse vassalage Kingdom of
Siam into a centralised nation-state centred in Bangkok.
Informal empire remains an important concept for assessing the ability of one
nation to strongly influence, and at times dictate, another nation’s internal and
external policies. This article uses the term informal empire to describe a willing and
successful attempt by commercial and political elites to control a foreign region,
resource, or people. The means of control included the enforcement of extra-terri-
torial privileges and the threat of economic and political sanctions, often coupled
with the attempt to keep other would-be imperial powers at bay. For the term infor-
mal empire to be applicable, we argue, historians have to show that one nation’s
elite or government exerted extraterritorial legal control, de facto economic domi-
nation, and was able to strongly influence policies in a foreign country critical to the
more powerful country’s interests. All three of these forms of control existed in
northern Siam during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Informal empire functioned through networks of collaboration.8 The Foreign
Office used British timber merchants to help control a sensitive region bordering on
British Burma and French Indo-China. British timber merchants sought to protect
profits by keeping out French and other foreign competitors. King Chulalongkorn
and his coterie of ministers used British pressure in northern Siam to increase
Bangkok’s control over the region. Chulalongkorn used western ideas of gover-
nance and economics to assert his own power while maintaining Siam’s formal
independence.9 But despite modernisation, Chulalongkorn, his ministers and the
northern chiefs feared that Britain or France might annex northern Siam. This fear
of annexation is one of the main reasons why Chulalongkorn initially allowed British
trading firms to dominate teak leases in the 1890s and early 1900s. Britain’s
domination of teak leases in northern Siam also helped Bangkok gain more control
over the north, a process akin to internal colonisation.10 Economic factors, such as
the large capital reserves held by the BBTC and the Borneo Company, help explain
the dominance of British trading firms in Siam, but these economic factors must
be viewed in light of the Foreign Office’s purposeful strategic and political actions
to install British businesses combined with Chulalongkorn’s fear of annexation.11
The British domination of Siamese teak leases in the 1890s and 1900s, and the
Government of India and the Foreign Office’s influence in the creation and running
of the Royal Forest Department, are little understood mechanisms of Britain’s influ-
ence in Siam. This is also part of the larger history of how state forestry spread
throughout the entire world in the late nineteenth century. The state management
of forests became an important governmental programme throughout the world in
the nineteenth century. This was particularly true in the British Empire.12 Yet there is
no serious study of “forestry as foreign policy” that shows how British imperialists
encouraged forestry to spread outside of the formal British Empire. This article uses
the concept of informal empire to describe one important phase of the spread of
state forestry laws and scientific management practices into Asia.13

Siam, Teak, and the BBTC

The BBTC was founded in Bombay in 1863 as a joint-stock company with British

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 68 GREGORY A. BARTON & BRETT M. BENNETT

and Indian capital and was initially managed from Bombay and London by two
Scotsmen, William Wallace and his brother Andrew.14 The BBTC cut and exported
teak from Burma and sold it to the timber markets in India and Britain. Many of the
collateral resources—elephants, leases, timber processing plants and men—came
from William’s own holdings, giving him an immense control of the direction of the
BBTC throughout its early decades. The Wallace brothers, as they were known, also
acted as the primary stockholders, financiers and agents for a number of important
mercantile firms in Southeast Asia. This included rice production, timber extraction
and marketing, and later, oil extraction and refining.15 The BBTC moved much of its
operations north from British Lower Burma into the independent Kingdom of
Burma during the 1870s and 1880s, eventually gaining a monopoly over the
Kingdom’s teak leases.16 The BBTC entered into the Siamese teak market in the
late 1880s. The BBTC was the largest teak merchant in Burma and Siam by the
mid 1890s, a position it held until the middle of the twentieth century.
The BBTC dominated the timber trade in Southeast Asia from the late nineteenth
to the mid-twentieth centuries for three main reasons. First, the Wallace brothers
cultivated connections with leading British officials.17 Second, the BBTC, like its
British competitor, the Borneo Company, employed a decentralised business struc-
ture that allowed for men “on the spot” to make decisions about investments,
leases and business strategies.18 These social and political connections between the
BBTC and the Foreign Office, the Government of India and the India Office, com-
bined with a management style that allowed creativity and local flexibility, enabled
the BBTC to lobby the British Foreign Office effectively and to expand their busi-
ness operations throughout the period examined. Third, the BBTC had a larger
pool of capital and more modern production capabilities than did its competitors,
especially native competition in Burma and Siam. By buying out existing leases and
investing heavily in elephants, timber mills and shipping, the BBTC could outcom-
pete all but the largest of British firms.
The concept of “gentlemanly capitalism” is helpful for understanding the success
of the BBTC during the 1890s. P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins argue that during the
mid nineteenth through the mid twentieth centuries, aristocrats, parliamentary lead-
ers, financiers, and bankers from Southeast England, primarily London, dominated
British foreign and imperial policies.19 Instead of seeing industrialists and the search
for foreign markets as the driving catalyst for imperial acquisitions, Cain and
Hopkins suggest that men associated with London finance—like the Wallace broth-
ers—directed imperial policies. Using this thesis, Andrew Webster argues that
British imperial policy in Southeast Asia must be understood through the financial
imperatives of gentlemanly capitalism. Webster’s book shows how gentleman cap-
italists created an informal empire in Siam during the late nineteenth century, but it
does not show the specific mechanisms by which the British came to dominate the
teak industry in Siam.20 This article builds on these previous interpretations of gen-
tlemanly capitalism.
Like many of the large British merchant houses involved in trade throughout
Asia, the BBTC recruited its Burma and Siam employees from the elite schools of
Harrow, Eton, Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh. Unlike the merchants in George
Orwell’s Burmese Days, the company did not pay these recent recruits to drink gin
all day in European clubs.21 The company expected them to work long, hard days

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 FORESTRY AS FOREIGN POLICY 69

in the sweltering heat of Burma and Siam. In one candid memo, Andrew Wallace
wrote to his subordinates in Siam and Burma, that “[the] only principles that I feel
on sure ground about…[is that] all departments should come under the general
control of theoretically men of leisure (although practically they may not have
much leisure!)”.22
The Wallace brothers used their status as gentlemen to lobby the British govern-
ment tenaciously. A glance at the private correspondence of the Wallace brothers
in the nineteenth century reveals a voluminous letter-writing campaign to secre-
taries and under-secretaries at the India Office and the Foreign Office. These letters
conveyed confidential information about French activities, offered analysis of
Siamese politics and discussed how British business and foreign policy should pro-
ceed. These lobbying efforts went beyond letter writing. The BBTC entertained
leading Foreign Office, Government of India, and India Office diplomats in Rangoon
and Bangkok with tours, parties, and the exhibition of famous company elephants.23
In turn, Foreign Office, Government of India and India Office officials worked close-
ly with the BBTC because of their personal relationships.
The Wallace brothers used these connections to good effect. They tried, and
often succeeded, in lobbying the Government of India to overturn decisions dam-
aging the teak trade in the 1850s-1880s. When William Wallace failed to convince
Government of India officials to adopt a less stringent teak permit system in Lower
Burma during the early-1860s, he decided to expand operations into the significant-
ly less regulated teak market of the independent Kingdom of Burma.24 Throughout
the 1870s and early 1880s, the BBTC built up a monopoly of teak concessions in
the Kingdom of Burma while continuing to run operations in British Lower Burma.
In 1885 the King of Burma, Thibaw Min, levied a large fine on the BBTC for over-
harvesting its allotment of teak, underpaying its employees and bribing local offi-
cials. This occurred at a tense period of Anglo-Burmese relations in the summer/fall
of 1885 after the British discovered a secret Burmese-French agreement to supply
French arms through Indo-China in return for Burmese concessions, including teak
leases.25 After intense lobbying by the Rangoon and London Chambers of
Commerce, the Government of India and India Office rejected the Burmese ruling
against the BBTC and demanded that Thibaw allow a British arbiter to reconsider
the ruling, reappoint a British resident in Mandalay (recalled in 1879), give increased
commercial concessions to British businesses, and cede foreign policy control to
Britain or else face military intervention.26 When Thibaw balked at these extensive
demands, the British invaded Mandalay in November 1885. Official and journalistic
accounts from the time (which the BBTC discounted vociferously) portrayed the
BBTC as one of the war’s instigator. A recent historical analysis by Webster confirms
that the BBTC’s intelligence and lobbying pressure did indeed help convince
Randolph Churchill, Secretary of State for India, to approve the invasion of Burma
during the Third Anglo-Burmese War of 1885, which in turn led to the complete
annexation of Burma.27
The Wallace brothers turned their attentions next towards Siam. The BBTC
quickly entered the Siamese teak market in the late 1880s and early 1890s with the
help of Britain’s political and economic influence in the region. At that time, the
“Shan States” of northern Siam were nominally part of the Kingdom of Siam, a poli-
ty that increasingly was centred administratively in Bangkok during the last decades

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 70 GREGORY A. BARTON & BRETT M. BENNETT

of the nineteenth century.28 Bangkok’s relationship with Chiengmai and the other
northern Shan states had changed very little over first two quarters of the nineteenth
century. The northern states functioned as prathetsarat, or “tributary kingdoms”, of
the King of Siam.29 For most of the nineteenth century, northern chiefs exercised a
powerful sovereignty over their subjects and the resources of their domain, which
included the rich teak forests. The extraterritorial privileges extending to British from
1855 Bowring Treaty did not apply to the northern vassal states.
In the 1860s-1880s the British Foreign Office and Government of India pushed
for changes with their relations with northern Siam vis-à-vis Bangkok.30 In 1866,
T.G. Knox, the British Consul in Bangkok, responded to a complaint by R.C. Burn,
a British businessman from Moulmein, about the murder of his Burmese staff by
the Chief of Chiengmai by demanding that the British be allowed to create a Vice-
Consul in Chiengmai.31 This did not happen, but it laid the ground for later inter-
ventions. British officials continued trying to change the political relationship
between Britain, Bangkok and Chiengmai when in 1871 the Government of India
sent the Burmese Superintendent of Police, Captain Thomas Lowndes, to report on
allegations of violence by the Siamese against British Burmese subjects.32
Lowndes’s report raised questions about the balance of power between Bangkok
and Chiengmai, and he eventually came to the conclusion that it would be best to
deal with Chiengmai through Bangkok. The result of Lowndes’s trip was a highly
publicised consular court trial that described the harrowing and bloody deaths of
Burmese British subjects in Chiengmai. This court trial opened up a series of other
consular trials in which large damages were awarded to British plaintiffs. In 1873,
the young King, Chulalongkorn, had to assert himself and directly negotiate with
British officials when Somdej Chaophraya Borommahasrisuriyawong (Chuang
Bunnag), the conservative former regent to Chulalongkorn and Minister of War and
the Southern Provinces, refused to implement Siamese suzerainty in Chiengmai by
enforcing the punitive decisions of the British consular courts.33 The result of
Chulalongkorn’s contact, the court hearings and the political discussions led even-
tually to the signing of a treaty between the Government of India and Siam in 1874
that extended British extraterritorial jurisdiction to northern Siam. The treaty made
Bangkok responsible for enforcing and resolving British legal conflicts that
occurred in northern Siam. The treaty also assigned a Siamese judge-commission-
er from Bangkok to Chiengmai. This strengthened the power of Bangkok over the
northern chiefs.34
British Foreign Office pressure led to the next major integration of northern Siam
into the Bangkok-centred Siamese state: the 1883 Chiengmai Treaty.35 Even after
the signing of the 1874 treaty, legal issues still arose on a frequent basis in north-
ern Siam. British subjects who worked in the teak industry continued to complain
to British officials that northern chiefs still broke promises over leases and were
unable and unwilling to stop theft and violence in the region.36 While Chulalongkorn
hoped to keep the status quo of the 1874 Treaty, the British pushed centralisation
even further by creating a Vice-Consular office in Chiengmai, which opened in
1884.37 The 1883 Chiengmai Treaty opened the legal door for the entry of large
British teak merchants into Siam.
The first large British teak merchant in Siam, the Borneo Company Ltd., had
close ties to the King because the Company had suggested and supplied his

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 FORESTRY AS FOREIGN POLICY 71

favoured tutor, Anna Leonowens, who was made famous in the highly fictionalised
movie, “The King and I” (1956).38 From 1883 until the mid 1890s, the Borneo
Company remained the largest British teak firm in Siam until it was overtaken by
the BBTC. Yet even with the entry of British firms into the market, Burmese,
Siamese, and Chinese contractors held most of the leases with northern chiefs in
the late 1880s and early 1890s. Over the 1890s British firms won a growing share
of the teak market at the expense of native firms, becoming the leading holder of
leases by the mid 1890s.39 The Borneo Company and the BBTC expanded rapidly
because they entered the Siam teak market with unparalleled finance, extraterrito-
rial privileges and the support of the Foreign Office and the Government of India.40
Siamese teak coming into the Indian and London markets in the early 1880s
caught the attention of Alexander Wallace, who then funded an expedition to
explore the timber prospects of Siam. Wallace sent out J. A. Bryce in 1884 to scout
the commercial opportunity for gaining access to the teak forests in Siam.41 Bryce
arrived in Bangkok with a letter of introduction from the Foreign Secretary, Lord
Granville.42 He spent four months touring northern Siam, then a largely unmapped
country, and drew up a timber working plan for the whole of north Siam, indicating
where the principal teak forests lay, where to place future sawmills and strategies for
delivering teak logs to port.43 The BBTC entered the Siam market in the late 1880s.
In 1886, the BBTC started assessing the amount of teak in the Siamese market.44
A Bangkok branch of the BBTC opened in 1887, with a sawmill opening in 1889.45
The BBTC thought of Siam in terms of geo-politics as well as economics. Alexander
Wallace wanted Bryce to tie up this vast potential market, where much of the teak
reserves of the world grew, “before our neighbours [the French] have got a firm foot-
ing in the trade”.46
These developments did not escape the notice of the Bangkok monarchy. Nor
did the fact go unnoticed that men working for the BBTC quickly became army offi-
cers during the war, commanding British troops for the advance on Mandalay.
Conveniently, after hostilities ended, these same army officers reverted to their role
as employees for the BBTC. Thus the Siamese eyed the new Bangkok information
office opened by the Wallace brothers on the west side of the Chao Phraya River in
1889 with great suspicion. As the company put it, “The tale was spread that it [the
Bombay Burma trading corporation] had caused the overthrow of [King] Theebaw
and had brought the British power in its wake into neighbouring Burma”. The com-
pany protested such rumours, however, and assured the Siamese that they merely
wanted to enter legitimately into the teak trade.47 To the Siamese, an ominous cloud
hung over the BBTC for years to come because of the Corporation’s instigation of
the Third Anglo-Burmese War.
The BBTC’s business methods allowed it to quickly establish itself in Siam.
Wallace told the BBTC staff throughout Asia that “business should be decentralised
as much as possible so that responsibility may be spread”.48 This strategy enabled
talented company agents, such as Bryce, to make decisions based on local knowl-
edge within an international business framework of diffuse and often personal net-
works that stretched from London to Asia. Profits hinged on catching contracts and
leases quickly, as they came up, as evinced in the case of Dr. Marion Cheek. Cheek,
an American missionary and former agent of the Borneo Company, finagled lease
agreements from the Siamese government to start a teak trading company.49 When

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 72 GREGORY A. BARTON & BRETT M. BENNETT

Cheek’s business failed, he talked to different companies about buying out his leas-
es. Wallace, knowing the situation in 1892, wrote to his employees in Siam that
[I]t will be necessary if we are to profit thereby that we should be “on the
spot” when the time comes, and that our relations whether it be with the
Bangkok officials, or the Chiefs upcountry, should in the meantime have
got into such a position as to enable us to avail of our opportunities. I take
it is more a personal question than anything else, and I place very little
weight on the idea of the Corporation being at any serious disadvantage as
compared with other people consequent on their connection with
Burmah.50
The Wallace brothers considered their relationships with the Siamese authorities,
whether in Bangkok or the north, to be as good or better than any other timber
merchant. Moreover, they believed these connections over time would continue to
grow increasingly tighter.

The Foreign Office and the BBTC in the 1890s

The BBTC expanded rapidly into the Siam teak market in the mid 1890s because
of an increased lobbying campaign, Foreign Office intervention in northern Siam,
and its aggressive push to buy out and amalgamate existing teak leases.51 As the
BBTC expanded its presence in Siam, it tried to gain more leverage with the
Government of India. In 1894, when the Indian Forest Service renegotiated the
BBTC’s leases in Burma, some foresters suggested that the Government of India
should confiscate select forest leases. This infuriated Andrew Wallace. Wallace
threatened to abandon Burma entirely. They could, he blustered, move all of their
“elephants, staff, and capital from Burma to Siam [where] there is year by year an
increasing production”.52 Andrew Wallace concluded in the letter, “It cannot be for
the interest of the Indian government that Burma should lose such an organisation
and capital, and that such a great stimulus should be given to the production of
teak in Siam”. The threat was ultimately a bluff, and the BBTC ultimately gained
large lease concessions in Burma after negotiations with the Indian Forest Service.53
At the same time that the Wallace brothers lobbied the Government of India
in the early 1890s, they gathered intelligence for the Foreign Office about the
political and economic conditions in Siam. At the outbreak of the 1893 French
Crisis with Siam, the Wallace brothers reminded the Foreign Secretary, Lord
Rosebery, that British imports and exports in Siam were “greatly larger than any
other nation’s”.54 The Wallace brothers emphasised the danger of rioting that would
occur if the British navy let the French bring warships into Bangkok harbour. “Your
Lordship is aware what difficulties Oriental Governments, owing to defective
organisation, find in coping rapidly with popular disturbances”.55 The Foreign Office
quickly reciprocated with the Wallace brothers and assured them, “a British
man-of-war is at present stationed in the Bangkok River for the protection of the
lives and property of British subjects”.56 After the French threatened to blockade
Bangkok, the BBTC, the Borneo Company, and the associated chambers of com-
merce from throughout the United Kingdom appealed to the Foreign Office to sup-
port British business interests, which as a memorial from the associated chambers

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 FORESTRY AS FOREIGN POLICY 73

of commerce noted, formed “about 90 per cent of the trade in that country”.57
The French crisis of 1893 and France’s annexation of Laos served as a turning
point in Foreign Office-Siamese relations in northern Siam. Wary of another French
expansion into northern Siam, the Foreign Office actively sought to check the
advance of France while bolstering the Siamese monarchy’s ability to protect British
business and strategic interests. For example, the Foreign Office’s pressure in Nan
to establish a foothold for the BBTC reveals how the Foreign Office encouraged
business interests to promote larger geostrategic aims. Nan, in northern Siam, was
a hotspot for French and British competing interests.58 Siam conceded parts of
eastern Nan to the French in 1893 as a result of France’s territorial claims. The
Foreign Office wanted to stop France from taking more of Nan’s teak territory. The
Foreign Office believed that the most effective way to stymie French advances in
Nan was for the Chief of Nan or the Siamese Commissioner in Nan to let British
merchants work timber concessions so that the French could not make territorial
claims for Nan. The Foreign Office aggressively worked with the Siamese
Commissioner and with the Chief of Nan in the mid 1890s to gain concessions for
the BBTC in the teak forests of Nan. In a letter written late 1895, the British Chargé
d’Affaires in Siam, Maurice de Bunsen, told the Prime Minister and acting Foreign
Secretary, Lord Salisbury, about how the Foreign Office officials in Siam wanted to
protect Siamese sovereignty with British capital:
Mr. Black, in his General Report enclosed in my dispatch…mentions the
efforts which are being made by the Bombay-Burmah Trading Corporation
to establish a footing in the Province of Nan.
Mr. N.H. Johnson, Manager of the Corporation [BBTC] in Siam, has often
conferred with me on this subject, and in July last I called the special atten-
tion of Prince Damrong, Minister of the Interior, to the importance of allow-
ing British capital to be employed in the province [of Nan] if it was to be
preserved to the Siamese Crown.
…I have addressed to Prince Damrong a letter…urging him to combat the
growing influence of France in the province by introducing a powerful
English company as a counterpoise.59
In a number of letters to the Siamese Minister of the Interior, Prince Damrong, de
Bunsen advocated for the interests of British timber merchants. At the same time
British consular agents in Nan tried to convince the Chief of Nan to encourage
British timber interests.60 This lobbying had an effect on the Siamese Commissioner
in Nan, who told British consular officials in 1897 that “every precaution would be
taken to prevent the introduction into Nan of the French element”.61 Yet the
Commissioner, while warding off the French, warned that the Chief feared that the
introduction of the BBTC in the 1890s into Nan would eventually lead to the annex-
ation of the region by Britain; this fear was due to the popular belief that the BBTC
caused the British conquest of Burma in 1885. Despite these fears, the French
threat loomed great and British power could not be easily rejected if the Siamese
wanted to protect Nan from France. The BBTC eventually got the lease in Nan.62
Consular agents for the Foreign Office knowingly lobbied for new extraterritorial
courts to protect the BBTC’s trade interests. This can be seen clearly in the visit of
the Vice-Consular agent, J.S. Black, to Paknampo, a town east of the Burmese

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 74 GREGORY A. BARTON & BRETT M. BENNETT

border where the BBTC shipped and stored timber. BBTC officials had alerted
Foreign Office and Government of India officials about theft in the region. As
explained in J.S. Black’s 1894 Vice-Consular report on the teak trade, teak theft by
British Burmese subjects who came across the border remained a serious problem
for the BBTC and the Borneo Company.63 Black suggested opening up a vice-con-
sular court in Paknampo to try those caught stealing teak. The Government of India
discussed bluntly the reasons for the creation of a vice-consular court: “The estab-
lishment of a Vice-Consular Court in Paknampo is, therefore, advocated solely for
the purpose of dealing with British subjects who steal the timber of the Bombay-
Burma Trading Corporation.”64 Government of India and Foreign Office officials
would continue working “solely” for the interests of the BBTC in Siam into the last
half of the 1890s.

The Foreign Office, Gentlemanly Capitalism, and the Creation of

the Royal Forest Department 1894-1896
In 1895, the Minister of the Interior, Prince Damrong, invited Herbert Slade, a British
forester working in Burma, to come to Siam to help start and direct the Royal Forest
Department (RFD). The department used its powers to claim the forests of north-
ern chiefs as property of the Siamese government in Bangkok, and it determined
who could lease forests and how many and what trees a leaseholder could cut.
Historians explaining the origins of the RFD have ascribed a number of motivations
to its creation. Some imply that the creation of the RFD was one of the many diplo-
matic manoeuvres by the Bangkok monarchy to avoid imperial subjugation while
expanding its power.65 Others see the creation of the forestry department as part of
the British domination of Siam.66 But the scholars making these arguments have
never used sufficient archival evidence to prove or disprove whether British timber
merchants and the Foreign Office directly helped create the RFD or directed its poli-
cies after its inception.67 This section argues that the Government of India, the
Foreign Office, the BBTC and the Siamese government in Bangkok actively worked
together to create a forestry department that was responsive to British interests and
at the same time centralised power and money into Bangkok. The RFD was not just
an instrument of the Siamese government after its creation. A British forester on
loan from India directed the RFD for around thirty years. These British foresters,
despite their limited ability to instigate a rigorous scientific programme, worked
closely with the India Office, the Foreign Office and large British trading firms to
ensure the long-term dominance of British interests in northern Siam.
The founding of Siam’s RFD should be seen as an extension of the forestry con-
servation laws and management programmes that began in British India and
Burma in the 1840s-1860s. During this period, the East India Company and the
Government of India established a state conservancy in the teak forests of Lower
Burma by declaring many of the forests state property. After establishing a conser-
vation regime in Lower Burma, British foresters in India and Burma started to focus
on the long-term effects of deforestation in the independent kingdoms of Burma
and Siam.68 Although the idea of creating a state forestry department in Siam
appealed to professional foresters in India, the complex legal and political situation
in Siam precluded such a programme. The Foreign Office Consular-General in

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 FORESTRY AS FOREIGN POLICY 75

Bangkok, Earnest Satow, concluded in 1886 that the prospect of creating a system
of forestry conservation based upon the British system was dim.69 The attempt to
send a British forester to set up a forest conservancy in the contested Trans-
Salween region in the early 1890s led the Siamese commissioner in Chiengmai to
warn the British Burmese government not to send foresters into Siamese territory.70
The scramble for concessions during the 1890s led to increased deforestation in
Siam. Fear of continued French and British annexation in northern Siam still wor-
ried Chulalongkorn. Chulalongkorn began contemplating the creation of a forestry
department. A letter written by the Chulalongkorn to the Chief of Chiengmai in
1894 laid out Chulalongkorn’s reasoning for the creation of the RFD. In the letter,
Chulalongkorn remonstrated the Chief of Chiengmai for the disrepair of his forests.
Chulalongkorn explained how the pace of destruction of the forests in northern
Siam would lead to the collapse of the timber trade in ten years. This in turn would
exhaust the revenues of the Chief of Chiengmai, which would then hurt the
Bangkok monarchy. With Chiengmai in disarray, the British or the French could find
pretence to step in and fill the power vacuum. “The English will throw in our teeth
the reason that it is because we do not know how to rule our own state…It was
because the Burmese did not administer their state satisfactorily that the events [i.e.
conquest] came about in Burma”.71 Prince Damrong inquired with the Foreign
Office Consulate in Bangkok about the possibility of bringing over a British forester
from the Government of India to manage the forests of Siam half a year later in
December.72 At that time, the Foreign Office knew about the king’s desire to use
forestry as a means to centralise his state.73
The British Foreign Office and timber merchants were willing to help
Chulalongkorn centralise his state because it suited their strategic and economic
interests. The proposal by the king to create a forestry department agreed with
Britain’s attempt to create a legal framework to control the northern areas of Siam
near the Burmese and French borders. The Foreign Office also wanted the Siamese
government to create a forestry department to rationalise the teak industry for the
sake of British businesses. Continued complaints about the lawlessness and irreg-
ularity of the teak trade in northern Siam by the BBTC and the Borneo Company
caused the Foreign Office to send J.S. Black, the British Vice-Consular for Northern
Siam, to report on problems in northern Siam in 1894.74 Black trekked throughout
the northern Siamese countryside and met with Siamese and British government
officials, timber merchants, subjects from Burma and India, court officials and
chiefs. At the conclusion of this journey he wrote and published a report on the tim-
ber trade in northern Siam.75 This report became the basis for Foreign Office poli-
cy towards the teak forests of northern Siam in the last half of the 1890s.
Black’s 1894 tour of northern Siam and subsequent report made clear the diffi-
culties the BBTC and the Borneo Company faced owing to the lack of a formal
forestry department. The solution, Black suggested after talking with the BBTC and
the Borneo Company, was to create a centralised structure of state ownership and
oversight that enforced the same regulations throughout the whole of the teak-pro-
ducing regions of Siam. Black argued that the Siamese needed to copy “the
[forestry] regulations of Upper Burmah”, which meant making a forestry depart-
ment staffed by professional foresters, creating state forest reservations, and con-
serving and cutting the teak forests using scientific and economic principles. Black

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 76 GREGORY A. BARTON & BRETT M. BENNETT

had come to these conclusions after discussing the situation with the BBTC and the
Borneo Company. The Foreign Office published the report and the consular agent
in Bangkok, de Bunsen, communicated the regulations of these proposed forestry
laws directly to Prince Damrong with “the hope that they may assist him in his plan
for putting the Siamese forests under proper Government supervision”.76
In 1895 the Siamese government decided to create a forestry department head-
ed by a British forester from Burma, Herbert Slade.77 Choosing a British forester
from India to run the new forestry department was an important concession to the
British Foreign Office and British timber merchants. The Foreign Office never for-
mally told the Siamese to choose a British forester, but the decision to put a British
advisor in the position was implicit in Black’s initial proposal when he suggested the
new forest department be modelled on the Indian Forest Service. In a letter between
Maurice de Bunsen and Lord Salisbury, de Bunsen described the benefits of having
a British forester in place to protect British interests:
…in doing so [choosing a Briton to manage the department], I have
observed that the preservation of the Siamese teak forests is a British
Interest, the control of which should not be allowed to pass into foreign
hands as it is likely to do so if Siam is obliged to resort to Germany for the
assistance which she would prefer to receive from an English officer.78
Slade was an interesting choice to run the forestry department in Siam. He was the
lowest ranked student in his entire class at the French forestry school at Nancy in
the 1880s.79 He worked in Burma during his early career. Slade’s test scores might
have been lacklustre, but he turned out to be an energetic and able forester who
tried to establish a strict conservancy system in Siam. Yet his zeal and desire to cre-
ate and manage a forestry department with the professional standards of the Indian
Forest Service eventually made him enemies among the British timber merchants
and the Siamese Ministry of the Interior.
In a report to the Siamese government in August 1896, Slade suggested that
Siam establish the RFD following the legal and bureaucratic structure of the Indian
Forest Service. The department headquarters would be located in Chiengmai, close
to the teak forests. To protect the teak forests against wanton felling, Slade believed
that the forestry department needed to remove authority from northern chiefs and
put them under the centralised control of the government.80 Once this centralisa-
tion occurred, the forests would become state property, owned not by chiefs in the
north, but by the central government and monarch and managed ostensibly for the
public good.81 A slice of the royalties would fund these northern chiefs to buy their
loyalty. British-trained foresters would then run the department while young
Siamese men were trained at the Indian forestry ranger school at Dehra Dun to take
charge of the RFD at some undefined point in the future.
Foreign Office consular officials warmly approved the plan by Slade and the
Siamese government to set up a state forestry department. The Foreign Office
believed that Slade would help to maintain the British monopoly of teak leases in
northern Siam. A Foreign Office report in November 1896 painted a positive picture
about the plan: “He [Slade] is not likely to encourage proposals tending in the long
run to destroy the practical monopoly of the teak export trade which is now enjoyed
by the leading British firms in Bangkok.”82 The BBTC and the Borneo Company

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 FORESTRY AS FOREIGN POLICY 77

also supported the creation of a forestry department headed by a British forester.83

The desire to conserve the teak forests provided the lesser, though still a powerful,
reason for the support of the Foreign Office.84 Administrators in the British Empire
during the late nineteenth century widely supported the conservation of resources
through the creation of forestry departments.85

The Battle Between the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation

and the Royal Forest Department
While the Foreign Office worked in the late 1890s to balance the interests of the
BBTC, the RFD and the Bangkok monarchy to ensure the protection of Britain’s
financial and geostrategic informal empire in northern Siam, there was little need
to intervene actively on behalf of the British trading firms, for they were already
ingrained as the dominant teak firms in northern Siam. In 1896-7 all parties hoped
the new system of leasing and taxes would function smoothly. All sides reflected
positively about their positions. In 1897 Herbert Slade began trying to create an
effective forestry department in Siam. That year, the BBTC reported that the forests
of Siam yielded a total 45,000-50,000 trees by their estimate, 1/3 of which went
directly to them.86 They were also in “negotiations that would add considerably to
that supply”.87 The Bangkok monarchy continued to exert greater control over the
north.
Slade began posting notices of his intention to reassess leases in an attempt to
slow the rate of deforestation after arriving as the Chief Conservator in January
1896. Slade issued a decree stating that all leases in northern Siam had to be set-
tled by the RFD. By May 1898, timber merchants could only fell trees in forests in
which the claims of leasehold were settled. As a result, not all of the forests then
currently under lease from chiefs would remain open to felling. Slade wanted to
regenerate over-cut forests by stopping girdling and felling, while placing open
forests under a more rigorous and planned girdling and felling schedule The BBTC
ignored these posted rules and continued to girdle and cut teak after May 1898.
When the RFD stopped the BBTC from cutting and collecting its teak trees, the
BBTC quickly protested its treatment.
Slade enforced the ban because he believed his job was to conserve the teak
forests. The Minister of the Interior, Prince Damrong, supported Slade in his dis-
agreement with the BBTC because it gave the Siamese state a stronger hold over
northern Siam. BBTC agents realised Slade and the Siamese government both had
a differing agenda: Slade saw forestry as an issue relating to the scientific conser-
vation of resources whereas the Ministry of Interior saw forestry as a way to
centralise taxes and power.88 A frustrated internal memo lamented that Slade had
“the impression that the question was solely one of conservancy”, instead of seeing
it as a power and tax grab by the Bangkok monarchy.89
Slade was sensitive to the possibility that it might look to the Siamese like he had
colluded with British trading firms at the expense of the Siamese. He was a British
citizen on “loan” to the Siamese government; this already made him appear suspect
to many Siamese. Slade worried because he actually did give confidential informa-
tion to the Foreign Office and favoured British firms over native firms.90 Although
Slade admitted to helping British firms, the greed of the British firms enraged him.

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 78 GREGORY A. BARTON & BRETT M. BENNETT

By acting at cross-purposes with Slade, the British firms were likely to anger the
Siamese and encourage an anti-British sentiment in the country. Slade complained
bitterly to the BBTC agent, C.B. Lacey, during the dispute over teak leases:
It is always thrown in my teeth that I have killed out the small Siamese,
Chinese & Burmese traders to the advantage of a few big European firms.
I have frankly admitted it but said I preferred to deal with responsible firms
whom I could control than the small irresponsible native firms. Now they
have the laugh at me & say that directly I have established the European
firms they take everything up as a political matter...It is not for me to advise
you but I do not think that you can possibly lose by pulling with, instead of
against, the F. D. [Forest Department]. This does not mean taking all you
can get, smiling & then fighting us for the balance but studying our plans
& aims for the future backing us up without rushing to the Consul or
Minister on every little subject.91
Slade worried that the BBTC might try to lobby the Government of India or Foreign
Office to invade northern Siam from Burma. His letters warned the BBTC that their
actions strikingly resembled those taken just prior to the outbreak of the Third
Anglo-Burmese War. He told the BBTC that they “may be right & may score in the
long run but I cannot help thinking that you have made a fatal mistake & given a
colour to the old cry of ‘remember Mandalay’”.92 Later that November, Slade, fed up
from the constant barrage of letters, objected to their continued appeals for lenien-
cy and warned them about their actions: “I have no intention of further ‘hammer-
ing away officially’…If you can induce the British Government to take over the
Siamese forests a la Mandalay this may modify things but I think you would be
jumping out of the frying pan into the fire!”93
The BBTC agents worked hard in London to solve the crisis. They knew that
Slade was visiting England over the winter and spring of 1899-1900. Andrew
Wallace, a consummate gentleman capitalist, pulled every lever he could from
London to get Slade to compromise. In a personal letter Wallace tried to tempt
Slade to “name a day when you will dine with me and I will have those to meet you
who are better up in details than I am, and we can talk things over with our cigars
over dinner”.94 He explained to Slade that it would be best to deal between friends,
and that “legal proceedings and an official appeal in our Government are the last
things we desire”.95
The Foreign Office played a softer hand of diplomacy than did the BBTC, quiet-
ly supporting the BBTC in private while maintaining the disguise of neutrality in
public. A secret letter between BBTC agents reveals the closeness between the
Foreign Office and the BBTC. After talking privately with the Foreign Office’s
Minister Resident in Siam, George Greville, Lacey wrote that, “Greville is of course
very anxious to support us as he realises that we are practically the only British firm
who have & can offer any effectual check to French activity in Forest matter in Siam,
& this he will I fancy make a strong point with the Foreign Office”.96 Greville told
Lacy that he would, “make a point of seeing Slade and will try to get him to modi-
fy his ideas”.97
The British consular agents in Bangkok and Chiengmai remained aware of these
proceedings. They tried as much as possible to allow informal agreements between

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 FORESTRY AS FOREIGN POLICY 79

the Siamese government and the British trading firms to work properly. Dispatches
between consular officials in Siam kept the Foreign Office aware that Slade sought
to conserve forests by confiscating many of the BBTC’s logs and taking away some
of its original leases. On 10 August, the BBTC agent, C.B. Lacey, had contacted
W.J. Archer, a British Consular agent in Siam, about the course of the negotiations
between the BBTC and the Siam Government. In turn, Archer kept Salisbury, the
Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, informed of the BBTC and Slade’s
concerns. Archer also talked with Prince Damrong about the lease controversy,
telling him that, “I remarked that, so long as negations proceeded smoothly, there
could be no reason for official interference”.98 A few days later on 27 August, Archer
discussed the issue with Slade.99
Nudged by the Foreign Office, the BBTC finally agreed with Slade to give up all
special claims on forest leases in guarantee for six years of leases on the forests they
were already working. The BBTC grudgingly also allowed the RFD to close up to
half of the forest area of each lease for conservancy purposes.100 Although the
BBTC agreed to these terms, they disliked how Slade raised the royalty to offset the
loss of revenue from closed forests. BBTC agents argued correctly that Slade was
attempting to achieve two contradicting goals—revenue enhancement and conser-
vation—because of conflicting political conditions in Siam.101
On 10 September 1900, Archer confirmed that the Siamese government and the
BBTC arrived at a tentative agreement regarding teak leases.102 The Foreign Office
happily found out during the last stages of negotiations that Slade would be
leaving his job as the Chief Conservator. Slade’s “uncompromising ideas” on con-
servation, the Foreign Office reported to Salisbury in London, was “as much a
stumbling block to their own methods of administration [the RFD’s effective imple-
mentation of conservation policies] as a serious obstacle to an amiable settlement
with the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation”.103 After resigning, Slade turned his
ire toward his employers in Bangkok. Frustrated, he scolded the Ministry of the
Interior and threatened that if recommendations by an expert forester like himself
were not followed, Siam could expect that other European advisors would eventu-
ally take over policy decisions by internally reforming the government.104 Slade
clearly had British servants in mind when he made this threat, although his threat,
much like his belief that the BBTC might persuade Britain to invade Siam, misun-
derstood the nature of Britain and Siam’s common interests in teak trade and con-
servation: British and Siamese political and business elites merely wanted a
smooth, equitable and reliable system, not a complete overhaul.
In fact, the Foreign Office, like the Bangkok monarchy and the Ministry of the
Interior, sought to remove Slade before he damaged British-Siamese relations. The
Foreign Office asked the Government of India to quickly approve another British
forester to take over Slade’s role because of “the importance of British interests in
the teak trade and the delicate negotiations now in progress”.105 The Government
of India agreed to send another forester, William Tottenham, a concession happily
accepted by the King and the Minister of the Interior.106 And with the arch-conser-
vationist Slade out of the picture the draft agreements finally took effect at the
beginning of 1901, with the BBTC taking the most leases of any single teak firm.107
British firms continued to dominate the teak trade after 1901. British foresters
Tottenham (1901-4) and then W.F. Lloyd (1904-25) served as the Chief

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 80 GREGORY A. BARTON & BRETT M. BENNETT

Conservators until the mid 1920s. The British Foreign Office reflected happily on
the British monopoly over the teak during the first decade of the twentieth century.
In 1905, Ralph Paget, the Foreign Office Chargé d’Affaires in Siam, assured Lord
Landsdowne, the Foreign Secretary, that Britain dominated the teak trade in Siam:
“As it is scarcely worth while to take into consideration the small forests owned by
the East Asiatic Company [out of Denmark], it may practically be said that the
whole of the teak trade in north of Siam is now controlled by British Companies”.108
British firms signed new thirty year leases on teak forests in 1909.109 Until World War
II and the rise of Thai nationalisation in the late 1940s and 1950s, the only serious
rival to the BBTC was the Borneo Company, another British firm.110 It was no acci-
dent that the BBTC and other British firms came to dominate the teak trade for
much of the twentieth century; it was part of a conscious attempt by the Foreign
Office to use British companies headed by well-known gentlemen capitalists to
dominate the teak trade and keep France away from the borders of Burma and
India.

Conclusion
British timber merchants, the Foreign Office and the Bangkok monarchy all collab-
orated to create a British informal empire over Siam’s teak forests in the late 1890s
and early 1900s. Newly established forestry laws and institutions helped the monar-
chy in Bangkok create a strong central government with a rationalised style of tax
collecting and bureaucracy that supported an elite increasingly formed by and
dependent on the income and structures that it generated. Bangkok and Britain
both gained power over northern chiefs through the foundation of international
courts and the posting of various Siamese commissioners and British vice-consular
officials. The Foreign Office used the commercial interests and power of the BBTC
and other British merchants to maintain northern Siam as a buffer against expan-
sionary French interests. In turn, the BBTC and other British firms in Siam looked
warmly upon the Foreign Office’s support and tried to ward away French competi-
tion. The Government of India loaned foresters who served as the Chief Conservator
of the RFD until the mid 1920s. With the Foreign Office working actively on behalf
of British business interests, British merchants holding a virtual monopoly on teak
leases, and a Briton serving as Chief Conservator of the Royal Forest Department
for almost thirty years, Britain held such a vast sway over the teak forests of Siam
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the concept of informal
empire is required to explain its preponderance and longevity of power.

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 FORESTRY AS FOREIGN POLICY 81

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China, 1911-1937”. Environmental History 8 (2003): 452-73.
Tagliacozzo, Eric. “Ambiguous Commodities, Unstable Frontiers: The Case of Burma, Siam, and Imperial
Britain, 1800-1900”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2004): 354-77.

Notes Imperialism: The Robinson and Gallagher

* We would like to thank the Department of
History, the College of Liberal Arts, and the
Graduate School at the University of Texas at
Austin for funding Brett’s research in London.
We especially thank Wm. Roger Louis and
A.G. Hopkins for providing constant insight
and support for our research on the topics of
“informal empire” and “gentlemanly capital-
ism”.
** Gregory A. Barton is permanent Research
Fellow at the Research School of Social
Science at the Australian National University.
Brett M. Bennett is a doctoral candidate in
history at the University of Texas at Austin and
will take up duties as a lecturer in modern his-
tory at the University of Western Sydney in
2011.
1 But a few listings include: Robbins, The World
Displayed in its History and Geography,
427; Smyth, Five Years in Siam from 1891-
1896, 104; Thompson, Siam an Account of
the Country and the People, 280; Little, The
Far East, 270.
2 See Barton, Empire Forestry, 38-61; Bryant,
The Political Ecology of Forestry, 22-71;
Grove, Green Imperialism, 261.
3 Falkus, “Early British Business in Thailand”,
136.
4 The three Foreign Office secretaries were
Lord Salisbury (1887-92, 1895-1902), Lord
Rosebery (1892-4), and Lord Kimberley
(1894-5). Salisbury served as both the Prime
Minister and Foreign Secretary.
5 For an overview of the theory of informal
empire see Robinson and Gallagher, “The
Imperialism of Free Trade”, and Louis, ed.,
Controversy. Key works on Siam include:
Brown, “British Financial Advisers in Siam”;
Horowitz, “International Law and State
Transformation”; Sardesai, British Trade and
Expansion in Southeast Asia; Rajchagool,
The Rise and Fall of the Thai Absolute
Monarchy: Webster, Gentleman Capitalists.
6 Tarling, The Cambridge History of Southeast
Asia Vol. 2, 292.
7 Brown, “British Financial Advisers in Siam”,
214.
8 For a theoretical sketch of collaboration see
Robinson, “Non-European Foundations of
European Imperialism”.
9 One of the richest areas of inquiry into Thai
history has been the examination of how the
Kingdom of Siam warded off British and
French imperialism by modernising and cen-
tralising its state in the late nineteenth centu-
ry. Of special interest are books such as:
Wyatt, The Politics of Reform in Thailand;
Bunnag, Provincial Administration of Siam
1892-1915; Brown, The Elite and the
Economy in Siam; Winichakul, Siam
Mapped.
10 This is the argument of Iijima, “The ‘Inter-
national Court’ System in the Colonial History
of Siam”.
11 Brown, The Elite and the Economy in Siam,
118-9.
12 Barton, Empire Forestry; Drayton, Nature’s
Government; Dunlap, Nature and the
English Diaspora; Grove, Green Im-
perialism; Hodge, Agrarian Doctrines of
Development.
13 The Chinese drew on American precedent.
See, Songster, “Cultivating the Nation in
Fujian’s Forests”. Vandergeest and Peluso

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 84
have traced the comparative development of
forestry policies in Southeast Asia in
Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia during the
colonial period. Vandergeest and Peluso,
“Empires of Forestry”.
14 Appendix to the Report of the Directors of
The Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation.
There are two histories of the BBTC, both of
which were written by amateur historians with
connections to the BBTC. The best is
Macaulay, History of the Bombay Burmah
Trading Corporation. This book relies upon
the private archives of the BBTC, although it
does not give citations. See also Pointon, The
Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation
Limited.
15 A full listing of their activities can be found in
the only history of the Wallace brothers,
Pointon, Wallace Brothers, 4-5.
16 Webster, Gentleman Capitalists, 209-22.
17 Pointon, Wallace Brothers, 22.
18 Metcalfe, “The Borneo Company Ltd”.
19 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688-
2000.
20 Webster, Gentleman Capitalists, 229-45.
21 Orwell, Burmese Days.
22 Guildhall Library (GL), “Andrew Wallace to
R.H. Macaulay”, 16 Dec. 1892, BBTC, Secret
Correspondence, MS. 4062.2. Italics from
original quote.
23 For example, Lord Dufferin, one of the lead-
ing diplomats during the 1893-4 French-
Siam crisis, had visited the BBTC’s elephants
in Burma in the 1880s. See Nisbet,
Experiences of a Jungle Wallah, 24.
24 See “J. Connell Esq., for W. Wallace, Esq., to
Officiating Conservator of Forests, British
Burmah”, 29 Oct. 1863, in A Selection of
Despatches and their Enclosures to and
from the Secretary of state for India in
Council on Forest Conservancy in India, 2.
25 The reference for a discussion of the eco-
nomic and political pressures leading to
Thibaw’s decision see Myint-U, The Making
of Modern Burma, 163-85.
26 See Tagliacozzo, “Unstable Frontiers”, 374.
27 This is the interpretation of Webster,
“Business and Empire”.
28 Brown, The Elite and the Economy in Siam;
Bunnag, Provincial Administration of Siam
1892-1915; Wyatt, The Politics of Reform in
Thailand.
29 Iijima, “The ‘International Court’ System”, 40.
30 Brailey, “Chiengmai Part I”, 315-20.
31 Falkus, “Early British Business in Thailand”,
136.
32 Brailey, “Chiengmai Part II”, 443.
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GREGORY A. BARTON & BRETT M. BENNETT
33 Ibid., 444.
34 Webster, Gentleman Capitalists, 243-4.
35 See the correspondence related to the
Chiengmai Treaty. National Archives of United
Kingdom (NA), “Chiengmai Treaty 1882-
1883”, FO 69/95.
36 Brailey, “Chiengmai Part II”, 447.
37 Brailey, “Chiengmai Part II”, 450.
38 Longhurst, The Borneo Company Story, 49-
52.
39 Ingram, Economic Change in Thailand, 108.
40 See Brown, The Elite and the Economy in
Siam, 116-9.
41 Macaulay, History of the Bombay Burmah,
14. Brailey, “The Scramble for Concessions”,
516.
42 Bryce was already well connected. He was the
brother of James Bryce, a prominent Liberal
politician and writer. Ibid., 516. Bryce became
the director of the London and County Bank
upon his later return to London. See Cassis,
City Bankers 1880-1914, 275.
43 “The Bombay Burma Trading Corporation
Limited”, 19.
44 GL, “Teak Supplies and Prospects”, 31 Dec.
1886, BBTC, Secret Correspondence, MS.
4062.2. Also see Ingram, Economic Change
in Thailand, 106.
45 Macaulay, History of the Bombay Burmah,
51.
46 “The Bombay Burma Trading Corporation
Limited”, 19.
47 Ibid., 32.
48 GL, “A.J. Wallace to R.H. Macaulay”, 16 Dec.
1892, BBTC, Secret Correspondence, MS.
4062.2.
49 Brown, The Elite and the Economy in Siam,
112-4.
50 GL, “Internal Memo”, 31 March 1892, BBTC,
Secret Correspondence, MS. 4062.2.
Emphasis added.
51 At this time, both the BBTC and the Borneo
Company started lobbying against timber
thefts during this time as well. See, NA,
“Borneo Company to the Earl of Kimberly”,
26 Oct. 1894, FO 422/40; NA, “Messrs.
Wallace Brothers to the Earl of Kimberly”,
1 Nov. 1894, FO 422/40.
52 GL, “Andrew Wallace to H.H. Fowler Her
Majesty’s Principle Secretary for India”,
19 July 1894, BBTC Secret Correspondence,
BBTC, Secret Correspondence, MS. 4062.2.
53 Bryant, The Political Ecology, 99-103. As
noted by Macaulay, the BBTC historian and
former employee: “The interruption to work
in the Rangoon mills owing to the war was
not quite as serious as one might have
 FORESTRY AS FOREIGN POLICY
expected”, in Macaulay, History of the
Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation, 17.
54 NA, “Messrs. Wallace Brothers to the Earl of
Rosebury’, 19 June 1893, FO 17/1178.
55 NA, “Messrs. Wallace Brothers to the Earl of
Rosebury”, 22 June 1893, FO 17/1178.
56 NA, “Foreign Office to Messrs Wallace
Brothers”, 27 June 1893, FO 17/1178.
57 NA, “Memorial from the Associated
Chambers of Commerce”, FO 17/1186.
58 Saenluang Ratchasomphan, a high-ranking
official for the King of Nan, composed a
chronicle of Nan’s history in 1894 that was
published in Thai in 1918 and later translated
into English. For the English translation see
Wyatt, The Chronicle of Nan.
59 NA, “Mr de Bunsen to the Marquess of
Salisbury”, Bangkok, 27 Dec. 1895, FO
69/160. For a more internal discussion
among Consular officials in Siam also see
NA, “WRD Beckett to T.H. Lyell”, 1 Nov.
1896, FO 628/18/245.
60 NA, “WD Beckett to Consular-General”,
9 March 1897, FO 628/18/247.
61 Ibid.
62 On the BBTC in Nan see the chapter, “Siam”,
in Macaulay, History of the Bombay Burmah,
51-78.
63 NA, “Mr J.S. Black’s Journey in Siam –
Consular Courts 1894-5”, FO 69/162.
64 Foreign Department, Enclosures to a letter to
Her Majesty’s Secretary for India, 1 May
1895.
65 Ian Brown discusses the origins of the RFD
from the perspective of the Bangkok monar-
chy and Siamese state. See Brown, The Elite
and the Economy in Siam, 110-19; The
Creation of the Modern Ministry of Finance
in Siam, 1-3.
66 A number of scholars have argued that the
Foreign Office wanted to control much of
Siam. Two scholars, C. Rajchagool and
Banasopit Mekvichai, see Britain’s informal
empire in Siam as a conscious attempt to
exercise political domination. Both of these
studies offer incomplete pictures of the
mechanisms and strategies of British domi-
nation because their studies lack archival
sources. See Rajchagool, The Rise and Fall
of the Thai Absolutist Monarchy; Mevkichai,
“The Teak Industry in North Thailand”, 207.
67 For a historic analysis relating to the manage-
ment of the RFD after 1896 see,
Sunthornswat, “A Historical Study of Forestry
in Northern Thailand”.
68 “Memorandum on the Proposals for the
Reform of the Present System of Selecting
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85
and Girdling the Trees to be felled in the
Government Forests of British Burmah”, by
Dr. D. Brandis, Calcutta, 28 Jan. 1864. In A
Selection of Despatches.
69 Satow, A Diplomat in Siam, 162.
70 NA, “Phya Khrai Kosa to C.E.W. Stringer
Chiengmai”, 10 June 1891, FO 628/14/202.
71 The Foreign Office translated the letter
between the King and the Chief of
Chiengmai. NA, “King of Bangkok to Chief of
Changmai”, 9 April 1894, in “W.R.D. Beckett
to G. Grenville”, 26 Aug. 1897, FO 628/18/
247.
72 NQ, “Mr. de Bunsen to the Earl of Kimberley”,
7 Dec. 1894, FO 69/160.
73 For an explicit analysis of this see, NA,
“W.R.D. Beckett to G. Grenville”, 26 Aug.
1897, FO 628/18/247.
74 NA, “Mr J.S. Black’s Journey in Siam –
Consular Courts 1894-5”, FO 69/162.
75 Black, Report on the Teak Trade in Siam, 5.
76 Ibid., 6.
77 NA, “Mr de Bunsen to Lord Salisbury”,
22 July 1895, FO 69/159.
78 Ibid.
79 For Slade’s abysmal French rankings see,
British Library, India Office Records, Forestry:
Correspondence Prior to Admission of
Forestry Students, 1882-85, L/PWD/8/43, file
2.
80 NA, “W.R.D. Beckett to G. Grenville”, 28 Aug.
1897, FO 628/14/20.
81 For a Foreign Office letter discussing the
decline of the Chiengmai princes because of
the loss of their teak leases in the late nine-
teenth century see, NA, FO 69/209.
82 NA, “Mr de Bunsen to Marquis of Salisbury”,
24 Nov. 1896, FO 69/169.
83 Ibid.
84 For the expression of the Foreign Office’s
approval of conservation measures see NA,
“Mr de Bunsen to Prince Damrong”, 27 Nov.
1896, FO 69/169.
85 See Barton, Empire Forestry.
86 GL, “Company Memo”, 11 June 1897, BBTC
Secret Correspondence, MS. 4062.2.
87 Ibid.
88 See discussions by the BBTC. GL, “Memo”,
9 Oct. 1899, BBTC Secret Correspondence,
MS. 4062.2.
89 GL, “Siam Forest Case”, 3 Nov. 1899, BBTC
Secret Correspondence, MS. 4062.2.
90 See Slade’s report attached to NA, “W.R.D.
Beckett to George Grenville”, 10 July 1897,
FO 628/18/247.
91 GL, “Herbert Slade to C.R. Lacey”, 19 Nov.
1899, BBTC Secret Correspondence, MS.
 86 GREGORY A. BARTON & BRETT M. BENNETT

4062.2. Forestry”, 47.

92 Ibid. 105 NA, “Mr Archer to Lord Salisbury”, 22 Oct.
93 GL, “Herbert Slade to C.R. Lacey”, 30 Nov. 1900, FO 69/209.
1899, BBTC Secret Correspondence, MS. 106 Macaulay, History of the Bombay Burmah,
4062.2. 72.
94 GL “Andrew Wallace to Herbert Slade”, 107 Total Output of Teak No. Logs
2 March 1900, BBTC Secret Correspon- From Siam in 1908 Per Year
dence, MS. 4062.2. Bombay Burma Trading
95 Ibid. Corporation 35,000
96 GL, “C.B. Lacey to Bryce”, 28 Feb. 1900, Borneo Company 10-12,000
BBTC Secret Correspondence, MS. 4062.2. Chinese Producers 10-12,000
97 Ibid. “Native” Producers 20-25,000
98 NA, “Mr Archer to the Marquess of Salis- From Falkus, “Early British Business in
bury”, 28 Aug. 1900, FO 69/209. Thailand”, 143.
99 Ibid. 108 NA, “Mr Paget to Marquess of Lands-
100 Ibid. downe”, 11 March 1905, FO 422/59.
101 Ibid. 109 Falkus, “Early British Business in Thailand”,
102 NA, “Mr Archer to Foreign Office”, 10 Sept. 144-5.
1900, FO 69/209. 110 For discussions relating to the end of
103 NA “Mr Archer to Lord Salisbury”, 22 Oct. Britain’s dominance in Thailand’s teak
1900, FO 69/209. industry see NA, FO 371/101185 and FO
104 Vandergeest and Peluso, “Empires of 371/106912.

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