Ayutthaya : A Trade Relation with the West

Ayutthaya was founded in 1351 by King U Thong. Located in the valley of the Chao Phraya River, Ayutthaya grew rapidly within several years after it was founded. By the time it was 1600, Ayutthaya has reached the population of 300,000 and by the time it was 1700, their population has reached around 1,000,000 lives. Their reign of glory ended in 1767 when the city is destroyed by the Burmese Army.

Brief history aside, let’s talk about their foreign trading. During their years of development, Ayutthaya maintains a great foreign trading relationship. The King, King Narai (1656-1688), was known to have strong links with the King of France at that time, Louis XIV. Ayutthaya was widely known by foreigners as one of the biggest and wealthiest cities in the East. 17th century was their peak trading period with the Europeans. Their trade mainly involves modern firearms like riffles and cannons in exchange of woods, rice, and deerskins.

During this period of time, King Narai’s court welcomes foreigners to come and invest in Ayutthaya. However, they regulate their relationship as to avoid influence from a single party or power. They allow English and Dutch trading companies to establish factories and they send diplomatic missions to places like Paris and The Hague as well and they leave their commercial ties with Japan. With these strategy, they put each respective party to have their own parts in the trading system. Therefore, no party overpower the other and they have their own things to attend to. Despite this strategy to avoid influence from the outside, there are still certain intervention and influences that happened in the end. Ayutthaya started to employ foreign mercenaries to help them fight their wars. It became clear that foreigners start to take part in their politics. Other than that, in 1664 when the Dutch starts to use force in order to get more freedom in the trading policy, King Narai asked for assistance from the French. This triggered a deeper political involvement between France and Ayutthaya. However, this triggered other Thai nobles and Buddhist clergy to raise their concerns over the relationship.

Ayutthaya’s foreign trading relation with the West ended when the 1688 Siamese revolution happened. King Narai was already dying at the time and Phetracha (1688-1693) who lead the revolution killed Narai’s designated heir. During this period of time there were two arguments that were made regarding Ayutthaya’s foreign relation with the West. The first one is that their relation ended because Phetracha cuts all foreign affairs with European parties, starts a period of alienation from all Western trade parties and only welcome trades with the Chinese traders. The second argument that was made discuss that the wars and conflicts happening during the mid-18th century in Europe affected the West’s trading activity in the East and thus resulting the withdrawal of these Western traders from their foreign relation with Ayutthaya.

sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phra_Nakhon_Si_Ayutthaya_(city)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayutthaya_Kingdom
https://www.ayutthaya-history.com/Geo_River_Noi.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siamese_revolution_of_1688