Ethnic Heterogeneity and Elephants in Nineteenth-Century Lanna Statecraft: Katherine A. Bowie

Although historians have long recognized that obtaining war captives was the motivation of many military campaigns, the numbers of captives and their consequent significance for South East Asian statecraft have not been much considered. Recent work is establishing that war captives were a sizeable portion of the northern Thai population in the nineteenth century (see Bowie 1988, 1996; Grabowsky 1994; Ratanaporn 1989).