Capitalism, the nation and the possibility of citizenship In the mid-to-late nineteenth century the monarchy emerged as the orga nizing centre for the rise of a modern state system in Thailand. By a process of adaptation and control over other social forces, it was able to a hegemonic project of state modernization. In doing this, new ways of seeing emerged. Although Thailand escaped formal colonization, the mili tary, industrial an ocial progress of the West greatly influenced the elite Their actual engagement with the West and their selective application of Western-derived ideology (nationalism, constitutionalism) and technology (state apparatuses, armies) ensured that elite were caught in the discursive frame of Orientalism. They saw the society over which they ruled as somehow delinquent and inferior, and in need of form and rationality, seen as attributes of the West 4 As Carol Breckenridge and Peter Van Der Veer note, Orientalism was not merely a way of thinking, but a way of conceptu alizing the landscape of the colonial world that makes it susceptible to certain kinds of management'. In bringing under heel the disparate popula tions that made up the kingdom, elites increasingly embraced a civilizing posture towards their subjects. A form of internalized Orientalism may be said to have informed the practice of "developing' states and their intelli gentsia. Additionally, Occidentialism, or an imagined West of rational order and progress, animated this Orientalism, providing it with goals and indices of progress and new political rationalities. These basic points have some appli cation in the Thai context, particularly because Siamese elites experienced an epistemic rupture such that the tasks of modernity could only be refer to Western conditions. As active participants in this Orientalist frame and with its necessarily hybrid disposition vis-d-vis the peculiari ties of Siam, the elite emerged as a historical class of state modernizers. With the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932, 'democracy emerged as a troubled component of national ideology. The broader social and economic basis for a discourse of citizenship and democracy had been developing for generations. King Chulalongkorn (1868-1910) had built the administrative structure of the nation-state in the late nineteenth century in