Conventional perspectives[edit]
Thai political history is perhaps one of the least researched by Western Southeast Asian scholars in the 1950s and 1960s. Thailand, as the only nominally 'native' Southeast Asian polity to escape colonial conquest, was deemed to be relatively more stable than compared to other newly independent states in Southeast Asia.[17] It was perceived to have retained enough continuity from its 'tradition', such as the institution of the monarchy, to have 'escaped' from the chaos and troubles caused by decolonisation and to resist the encroachment of revolutionary Communism.[18] By implication, this line of argument suggests the 1932 Revolution was nothing more than a 'coup' that simply replaced the absolute monarchy and its aristocracy with a 'commoner' elite class made up of Western educated generals and civilian bureaucrats and essentially that there was little that was revolutionary about this event. David K. Wyatt for instance described the period of Thai history from 1910 to 1941 as “essentially the political working out of the social consequences of the reforms of Chulalongkorn's reign”.[19] The 1932 revolution was generally characterised as the ‘inevitable’ outcome of “natural consequences of forces set in motion by Rama IV and Rama V.[20]