Forgery and Formalism in Early Capitalist Bangkok

• In Event: For Love, Money or Drugs: Policing Illicit Activities in Colonial Southeast Asia

Abstract

The thrills of fast cars, electrified nightlife, department stores, foreign goods, and moving pictures defined life in early twentieth century Bangkok. To partake of these new entertainments, individuals needed money, printed on paper with the latest technologies of mechanical representation. Whether the genuine money of the state or the fake money of a forger, paper currency was the ticket to a changing symbolic order. The counterfeit crisis that hit the city immediately after the introduction of paper currency in 1902 attests to this. In response, the Siamese government adopted a strategy to protect its nascent capitalist economy that relied heavily on new technologies of representation, particularly photography, to make the design of money increasingly complex and thus theoretically more difficult to forge. In the process, exchange value became tied to appearances, determining the authenticity of which became a key task of successive governments. The result has been the emergence of a technologically enabled formalism in administration, a feature common to different degrees in most modern bureaucratic and capitalist societies.

Author

• Samson Lim, Singapore University of Technology and Design