The development of the police detective unit in Siam during the King Chulalongkorn’s reign to the end of 1932

This paper explores the development of the detective unit of the police in Siam during the reign of King Chulalongkorn up to the end of 1932. Using archival sources and relevant secondary source material, this paper argues that police detectives, who were initially employed by the government to investigate incidents of banditry and other ‘ordinary’ crime during the 1880s, quickly became a political intelligence unit essential to the centralization efforts of the
governments of both King Chulalongkorn and King Vajiravudh. This
transformation took place in large part because of the threat of uncontrolled information, including especially rumors, which proliferated throughout the kingdom during that period. In this light, it is therefore possible to think of the government’s centralization efforts under Kings Chulalongkorn and Vajiravudh through the lens of knowledge creation and control in addition to the more conventional lenses of modernization and westernization.