Widely perceived as an anachronism since the nineteenth century, monarchy is a regime type that scholars of modern politics have paid scant attention to. This is not entirely surprising. Where they survive, such as in Scandinavia and Britain, monarchies often serve mainly ornamental functions, with sovereign power resting in fully democratic bodies. The persistence of politically powerful monarchies in some parts of the world is therefore something of a puzzle. Nowhere is that puzzle greater than in the country formerly known as Siam, the subject of Puangchon Unchanam’s Royal Capitalism: Wealth, Class, and Monarchy in Thailand. Here the resilience of monarchy has gone hand in hand not with the extraction of resource rents, as is the case for many of the resilient monarchies in the Arab world, but rather with rapid industrialization, economic globalization, the emergence of a strong domestic bourgeoisie, and a fitful process of democratization. Such socioeconomic development, which accelerated dramatically in the 1960s, would be expected to lead to a decline in the political role of the monarchy. Yet the Thai monarchy has continued to exercise a degree of political power that vastly exceeds that associated with constitutional monarchies. Its continuing capacity to legitimate nondemocratic forms of government was most recently revealed following the 2006 and 2014 military coups, which toppled democratically elected governments led by Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck Shinawatra, respectively.

Given that the Thai monarchy is protected by draconian lese majesty and national security laws, few scholars, Thai or non-Thai, have thought it worth the personal risk to subject the Thai monarchy to more intense scrutiny and critical analysis. Unchanam is therefore to be lauded for writing the first book-length study of its kind to take stock of the entirety of King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s reign from 1946 to 2016, as well as the subsequent succession to the throne by his son King Vajiralongkorn. Much of the considerable value of Royal Capitalism lies in its mobilization of a wide range of primary sources, from official yearbooks and banknotes to poetry and songs, to shed new light on the shifting position of the Thai monarchy as a political actor, economic concern, and cultural and ideological icon. In this respect Royal Capitalism constitutes an important contribution to the Thai radical tradition, following in the footsteps of scholars such as Chit Phumisak (assassinated in 1966), Somsak Jeamteerasakul (in exile since 2014), and Kasian Tejapira.

In framing Royal Capitalism, Unchanam draws on the classical political economists, including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Max Weber. He seeks to “challenge the conventional wisdom that monarchy must eventually give way to capitalism” by positing the Thai monarchy as an “emblematic embodiment” of a “novel form of monarchy” (p. 4). More specifically, the emergence of a “bourgeois monarchy” in Thailand is interpreted as evidence of a more general “underestimation of the ability of a monarchy to adapt itself to capitalism” and a corresponding “overestimation of the power of the bourgeoisie” as a “progressive and revolutionary” class (p. 6).

These are difficult arguments to bring home in the context of a single-country study. The Thai monarchy may of course yet prove the conventional wisdom correct. It is not clear that the concept of bourgeois monarchy, as developed in the Thai context, travels beyond the kingdom’s borders. And it is not clear who, today, fails to recognize the highly contingent nature of capitalist and middle-class support for political causes of whatever kind.

As the subtitle of the book also suggests, it is primarily positioned as a contribution to Marxist thought. In pursuit of this theoretical agenda, Unchanam complements the Marxist conceptual toolbox by elaborating on Ernst Kantorowicz’s notion that the king has “two bodies” (The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, 1957). To the corporeal monarch and the monarchy as political institution, Unchanam adds a third body: the capitalist body of the Thai monarchy. This is constituted through direct and indirect monarchical control over the largest business conglomerate not only in Thailand but also in Southeast Asia (p. 18). The bulk of this wealth is held by the Crown Property Bureau (CPB) over which the monarchy, since the late 1940s, has exercised discretionary power with minimal public oversight. The Thai monarchy is, by some estimates, the world’s wealthiest.

Royal Capitalism consists of five substantive chapters, plus an introduction. Drawing on the secondary literature, chapter 1 describes how the Siamese monarchy managed the dual transition from a “feudal” to a capitalist mode of production and from a premodern polity to a modern nation-state. This involved both an attempt at the “bourgeoisification” of the monarchy, with the predecessor of the CPB, the Privy Purse Bureau, acting as a capitalist entrepreneur pioneering investment in banking, manufacturing, and real estate development (p. 43), and the creation of a centralized state bureaucracy. Although these reforms were remarkably successful, the consequences proved disastrous for the absolute monarchy, which was toppled in 1932 by a group of civilian bureaucrats and military officers. At this juncture, Unchanam notes, it seemed as if the Thai monarchy would conform to the expectations of classical political economists by being reduced to, at best, a symbolic “remnant of the feudal past that would not play a dominant role in the political and economic realms of the bourgeois state” (p. 63).

The subsequent two chapters describe and analyze the Thai monarchy’s remarkable rise from this nadir. Chapter 2 focuses on the revival of the monarchy beginning in the late 1950s. Although this was instigated and aided by military regimes allied with the United States, King Bhumibol in due course proved able to transcend that subordinate role, emerging as an autonomous and eventually hegemonic actor in domestic politics—not beholden to foreign sponsors and enjoying extraordinary power, prestige, prosperity, and popularity across all segments of society, from rural peasants to the Sino-Thai middle class. Chapter 3 makes the point that the monarchy’s comeback in no small part was due to skillful image management that responded to new social circumstances and evolving cultural expectations. Over time, Bhumibol was presented to the Thai public less as a Hindu god-king, Buddhist righteous ruler, or anticommunist warrior-king and “more as a beloved and ordinary father figure who embraced the bourgeois ethic of hard work, frugality, prudence, and self-reliance” (p. 107).

The book’s final two chapters detail what can only be described as the decline of the Thai monarchy. Chapter 4 notes how the past 15 years have been characterized by political turmoil, strife, and harsh military repression—and serious alienation from the monarchy by sections of the population. The considerable limitations to Thailand’s bourgeois monarchy as a provider of political order have thus been exposed. In Unchanam’s Marxist vocabulary, this is a question of its “intrinsic contradictions” (p. 215). As chapter 5 makes clear, the new king has responded to the looming threats to the hegemonic position of the Thai monarchy by exercising power in a much less subtle way than his father ever did, centralizing political, economic, and coercive power into his own hands to a degree unseen since the days of the absolute monarchy. The chapter, and the book, concludes by arguing that the Thai case provides “lessons for rethinking the other monarchies of the world, their relationships with social classes, and their prospects in the age of global capitalism” (p. 233) and also in relation to the increasingly monarchical style of politics that has emerged in republics such as the United States, Russia, Turkey, and China (pp. 235–36). Here the arguments become exceedingly vague, and the concept of monarchy is stretched such that it loses analytical value.