Projecting Sea Space: States, Littoral Communities and Meanings of Maritime Realm Between Southern Vietnam and Siam over the Gulf of Thailand from 1767 to the 1840s

Abstract

This article investigates the eastern coastline of the Gulf of Siam as a historically significant maritime space that shaped the political and economic dynamics between Siam and Vietnam from the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries Following the fall of Ayutthaya in 1767, the emerging Siamese state (Thonburi and early Bangkok) and the Nguyễn regime in Vietnam competed for influence over this strategic sea space, particularly focusing on key ports such as Chanthaburi and Hà Tiên. The region became a dynamic zone of interaction marked by naval warfare, commercial expansion, and population mobility. Central to this transformation were overseas Chinese migrants, including Cantonese, Teochew, and Hokkien groups, who established influential littoral communities, contributed to maritime trade, shipbuilding, and local governance, and served as intermediaries between local rulers and broader transregional networks. Drawing on diverse historical sources—maps, chronicles, travelogues, and oral histories in Thai, Vietnamese, French, and English—this study highlights how both Siamese and Vietnamese polities projected power across the Gulf and secured economic resources, particularly during the interregnum between older kingdom collapse and colonial encroachment. Conceptually, the article integrates the frameworks of the water frontier and hydrarchy. While the water frontier emphasizes the Gulf’s fluidity, interconnectedness, and strategic importance, hydrarchy highlights the ways maritime power was organized, negotiated, and contested both from above, through state authority, and from below, through the mobility and autonomy of seafarers, migrants, and coastal communities. By linking these two frameworks, the study challenges land-centric national historiographies that have long marginalized the maritime dimension of state-building. It foregrounds the agency of littoral communities and transnational actors, reinterpreting the eastern Gulf of Siam as a dynamic arena of regional integration, political negotiation, and historical mobility.

Highlights

• This research article reinterprets the eastern Gulf of Siam as a dual arena of governance, demonstrating how Siamese and Vietnamese rulers projected maritime authority across this strategic sea space while littoral communities sustained their own autonomous systems of exchange, mobility, and negotiation.
• The strategic importance of eastern Gulf ports during the interregnum is evident in the ways leaders such as Taksin and Mạc Thiên Tứ relied on coastal bases, transregional trade, and Chinese maritime networks to rebuild power after dynastic collapse. This period also reveals how overseas Chinese communities—Teochew, Cantonese, and Hokkien—emerged as pivotal political actors who shaped regional sovereignty, expanded naval capacity, and formed new Creole elites whose authority rested on commercial influence rather than hereditary lineage.
• This paper interprets the eastern Gulf of Thailand through the concepts of the water frontier and hydrarchy, showing how overlapping commercial, ethnic, and political networks exercised fluid, negotiated maritime authority that both supported and challenged Siamese and Vietnamese state power. The littoral communities, with their autonomy and navigational reach, established bottom-up hydrarchical structures that extended across ports, islands, and trading fleets, often beyond the control of territorial states.
• The Gulf functioned as a zone of high mobility and refuge, where seafaring communities facilitated political flight, cross-border interactions, and crucial roles for women in providing resources, mediation, and sanctuary during instability.
• Littoral society in the eastern Gulf of Siam was cosmopolitan and hybrid, with diverse groups forming fluid, semi-independent communities that anchored a bottom-up maritime order, reshaping power, identity, and economic life in the region.