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Sovereign Necropolis

Pearson S20 cover.jpg

My first book, Sovereign Necropolis: The Politics of Death in Semi-Colonial Siam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), is an historical monograph that grew out of my dissertation research. The book analyzes the Kingdom of Siam's (Thailand's) relations with European imperial powers as matters of life and especially death. Based on inquest files compiled by the Ministry of the Capital beginning in 1890, the study uses records of anonymous deaths to document the pathologies of life in a colonial treaty port.

 

Foreign residents (and their commercial ventures) enjoyed extraterritorial legal privileges exempting them from local (Siamese) law. When foreigners were suspected of being responsible or liable for the death of Siamese subjects there was little legal recourse. The Siamese state therefore turned to new forms of legal and medico-legal expertise in order to assert the rights of the dead. Forensic investigations and legal interventions in death constituted direct relations of concern between the state and its subjects, replacing the hierarchical patron-client ties of the waning feudal order.
 

​A host of foreign profiteers (lawyers, doctors, and entrepreneurs) and Siamese bureaucrats were party to these medico-legal arrangements, each claiming to speak for the dead; so too were the city’s subaltern denizens who resisted their efforts. From these contests over what I call the “semantics of death,” Sovereign Necropolis distills a new model of sovereignty in the (semi-)colonial world. Breaking with traditional fixations on territory, it locates claims to sovereignty in the pragmatic work of the state to assert the rights of the dead.

(Also available via Amazon here).

REVIEWS of Sovereign Necropolis

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  1. "Pearson is a fine writer, at times an elegant one, and he has made so much of the fragmentary record he discovered that he has taken this splendid study well beyond a simple tale of courtroom battles between the Western powers, the Siamese state, the Bangkok Tram Company and foreign litigants. His curiosity has led him to read up on actor-network theory, the history of the legal subject in Western liberalism, and death studies."

  2. "Reframing Thai historiography by reading cohorts of the unrecognised dead into the record, Sovereign Necropolis explores the social and political production of unequal life chances during the period of British influence in Siam... Despite its morbid and often sorrowful subject matter, Sovereign Necropolis is crisply written, even lively; despite the work’s stakes in area studies literature and sociocultural theory, the discussion is accessible for non-subject-matter experts."

  3. "Trais Pearson’s Sovereign Necropolis is a well-researched historical study that examines the adoption of European legal practices related to postmortem examinations in the context of this political reality... Pearson’s book does justice to the accident victims whose unfortunate deaths he describes in such fascinating detail."

    • Samson Lim (Singapore University of Technology and Design) in Isis v. 112, no. 2 (June 2021).

  4. "Sovereign Necropolis, by Trais Pearson, is a remarkable, compelling, and engaging study about the politics of death in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Siam... Pearson brilliantly captures throughout the book the... tensions between the Siamese elite and the foreign powers, and documents how those conflicts and negotiations played out in the plural legal arena of civil law and forensic medicine."

  5. "Along with fatal injuries, wounds, and bruises, this book investigates unnatural death in late nineteenth century Siam... Pearson argues that novel technologies such as the electric tramway transplanted to fin de siècle Bangkok had transformed the vernacular concept of ‘inauspicious’ death—connected to potent spirits—to the modern phenomena of suspicious death caused by a spectrum of fatal accidents, from acts of god to negligence, and crimes needing scientific investigation."

  6. "What Trais Pearson does in this unusual book is describe how expansion of [Siamese] state power [in the late nineteenth century] extended to recording and managing cases of unexpected death in Siam... This is a book that is full of surprising and intriguing insights into Siam’s peculiar semi-colonial status in matters concerning accidental death. It will contribute to the now burgeoning literature on the history of Thai law, and may encourage greater interest in “death studies” in Thailand."

  7. "Pearson presents a compelling study of medico-legal practices and legal subjectivity in an environment characterized by limited sovereignty and transnational flows of expertise, while at the same time giving space to subaltern voices. This book is a noteworthy contribution to studies of medicine, law, society and politics in the colonial and semi-colonial worlds."

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