According to a currently dominant view, the causes of economic development are to be found in institutions. These include well-defined property rights in land, the substantive focus of this study. But what are the political origins of such growth-promoting underpinnings of capitalism? In an important strand of the literature it is argued that rulers will improve the institutional structure, thereby raising the rate of economic growth, when faced with national security threats. The case of Thailand, which faced the threat of colonialism in the latter half of the 19th century and of communism in the latter half of the 20th century, presents a puzzle in this regard. The response was non-developmental in the first episode, and developmental in the second. What accounts for the different outcomes? This study advances two paradoxical arguments. First, institutional underdevelopment is, under certain circumstances, a strategic advantage. Second, the (relative) failure of the Thai state to formalize property rights in land in the late 19th and early 20th century explains its (relative) success in the late 20th century. Indeed, in recent years Thailand has become something of a paradigmatic case in the literature on the economic benefits of granting formal land rights to poor farmers in low-income countries.
Based on extensive field and archival research, the dissertation develops an analytical historical narrative of the development of rural property rights in Thailand, based on the concepts of critical junctures, sequencing, and path dependence. The arguments developed in the context of Thailand are subjected to plausibility probes, in which the Thai case is compared and contrasted with experiences in Japan, Burma, the Philippines, and Ghana.
The dissertation contributes to the "second image reversed" literature by demonstrating that external threats and international institutions play an important role in shaping the development of rural land rights regimes. The domestic legacies, legal and socio-economic, engendered by state responses to the external environment are further shown to affect both the subsequent challenges faced by political actors as well as the resources at their disposal for addressing them, thus illustrating the path-dependent nature of the evolution of rural property rights institutions.