Events

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, and Department of History, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Peter Borschberg, Department of History, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In the 1680s, King Narai, ruler of the cosmopolitan kingdom of Ayutthaya, received a Persian embassy attempting to convert him to Islam and two French embassies determined to claim him for Catholicism. These were embarrassing failures, and helped precipitate a coup in 1688. Yet elsewhere kings have indeed converted: this was how Europe became Christian and island Southeast Asia Muslim. I will briefly attempt to indicate how the case of Siam fits into a larger project of global comparative history that sets out to explain why the rulers of some societies converted to monotheism and others did not (the other main case studies are Central Africa, Japan and Oceania, 1450-1850). The theoretical approach adopted here proceeds from a distinction between ‘transcendentalist’ and ‘immanentist’ religious traditions. But the empirical meat of the paper will be an investigation into what drove the uprising of 1688, for arguably it was more than simply a palace coup. To what extent was it driven by an assertion of Buddhist hegemony, and facilitated by the sangha? Did it involve a persecution of Christianity? And were the sangha-driven masses thereby ushered onto the stage of Thai political history for the first time?

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alan Strathern has just completed a term as a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute, NUS. He works in early modern global history as an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, and Tutorial Fellow in History at Brasenose College. Previously he held teaching and research positions in the University of Cambridge. Much of his work has concerned the history of Sri Lanka, including Kingship and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Sri Lanka (CUP 2007) and various articles on issues such as ethnicity and origin myths. However, for the last ten years he has been at work on a book of comparative global history, Unearthly Powers: Sacred Kingship and Religious Change in Global History (CUP). This will explain why the rulers of some societies converted to monotheism and others did not, analysing cases ranging from Kongo to Hawaii, and develop a theorisation of the relationship between religious change and political authority in pre-modernity.

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