Forestry as Foreign Policy Anglo-Siamese Relations and the Origins of Britain’s Informal Empire in the Teak Forests of Northern Siam, 1883-1925* GREGORY A. BARTON & BRETT M. BENNETT** Introduction Nineteenth-century Europeans visiting Southeast and South Asia eulogised teak trees (Tectona grandis) for their value and beauty. Diplomatic diaries, travel memoirs, literary descriptions and geography books for children described the teak as a universal sovereign of the sylvan world, the regal “lord” of the forests. 1 With dwindling supplies of oak in Britain, British elites saw teak as a vital component of the country’s global naval supremacy in the nineteenth century. The fear of a dwindling supply of teak during the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries encouraged the creation of forestry departments and laws in British India that attempted to preserve the finite amount of teak in the sub-continent. 2 Yet the finite ecologies of India and Burma could not supply all the teak required to fuel expand- ing demand. Britain would have to look beyond its formal empire in Asia to find more teak. Teak grew abundantly amongst the hills and mountains in northern Siam, con- trolled in the nineteenth century by a loose assemblage of vassal chiefdoms loyal to the monarch in Bangkok, the centre of the Kingdom of Siam. The Government of India and the Foreign Office started taking an interest in Siam’s northern teak forests during the mid-1850s because of Siam’s close proximity to Burma. Burmese labourers worked in Siam’s teak forests and a few intrepid British busi- nessmen leased and purchased teak from chiefs in the 1860s. 3 The Government of India and the Foreign Office’s primary goal from the mid 1860s to the early 1880s was to make sure that the monarchy in Bangkok ensured that Siam’s northern chiefs adequately protected the rights of British subjects. The entry of the Borneo Company Ltd and the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation Ltd (BBTC) into the Siamese teak market in the 1880s signalled a new period of British-Siamese rela- tions in the north. The Foreign Office’s strategy towards the teak forests of Siam changed. Instead of just promoting the rights of British subjects, the Foreign Office actively sought to help large British trading firms gain a foothold in the lucrative northern Siamese teak market as a way of stopping French imperial expansion. This article argues that the BBTC, the Foreign Office and the Government of India worked together in the 1880s-1890s to create a monopolist hold over the teak Itinerario volume XXXIV, issue 2, 2010 doi:10.1017/S0165115310000355 65