Accumulation Process of Landlessness in Rural Central Thailand

This paper has purpose to throw light upon the accumulative process and factors of the landlessness in Rural Central Thailand by a case study-Village Lanlaem in Nakhonpathom Province. It is true that the differentiation of peasantry under "Green Revolution" in the 1970's is gradually creating the landlessness, but we must pay attention to follows; the large quantities of the landlessness have been already accumulated before the start of the peasantry differentiation, probably in the 1930's〜40's. Thailand was forced to open a country to foreign intercourse by Bowring Commercial Treaty in 1855, and was incorporated into the trade within Southeast Asia Area as a rice supplier. This Treaty made an epoch that many canals for reclamation was diged in all directions, farmer settlers emigrated under conditions of confusion and lawless, and large swampy land in Chaophraya Delta was brought under cultivation. The land-lessness households were derived from the front line of reclamation, and accumulated in large scale as a social class in the 1930's〜40's when the unclaimed lands had been exhausted. That is why we should analyze the process and factors of landlessness accumulation in relation to the formation and characteristics of village. The logic of deriving the landlessness households will be explained by advancing the concepts of "Baan (village)" and "Khroobkhrua (household)", examining J. F. Embree's "Loose Paradigm" and the dispute about rural community in Thailand after that, especially Kouichi Mizuno's "Multihousehold Compound". The alternation of generations brought about cell division of households and own lands under the succession customary of ultimogeniture and the inheritance customary that divides the land into equal parts among all the children, and Khroobkhrua that had not lineage of initial settlers almost changed into landlessness household. They took off to the thinly populated periphery where uncleared land was still available, could establish new Khroobkhrua and new Baan to support themselves untill the 1910's〜20's. But this mechanism of proliferating villages and households has no longer acted function since the 1930's when the unclaimed lands were exhausted, the landlessness class has been consequently accumulated as Baan has come loose. In this paper, such process as ≪alternation of generations → cell division of households and own lands → accumulation of landlessness≫ is concretely investigated by following the lineage of each landlessness household.