Phuket

Phuket's economic history is a textbook case of ecological succession—when one dominant species collapses, another colonizes the vacant niche. For over a century, tin mining defined this Andaman Sea island. In the late 1800s, an Australian engineer developed the world's first tin dredge here, making Siam a leading global exporter. Chinese workers and British engineers flooded in. Then in 1985, global tin prices crashed, shuttering 90% of southern Thailand's mines within months.

The transition to tourism was not gradual—it was a phase transition. Backpackers had arrived in the 1960s, but the infrastructure wasn't ready. When tin collapsed, the substrate suddenly became available: former miners retrained as hotel staff, mining land converted to resorts, and the labor force shifted overnight. The Banyan Tree luxury resort now sits on what was a tin mine. Today Phuket hosts over 5 million visitors annually against a resident population of roughly 1.2 million.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the vulnerability of this monoculture economy. When Thailand closed borders in 2020, hotels collapsed, and the island's economy essentially stopped. Recovery since 2022 has been strong, but Phuket demonstrates the biological principle that specialists thrive in stable conditions but suffer in disturbance. The former tin mines, now reservoirs, physically constrain water infrastructure—a literal case of path dependence where yesterday's extraction shapes today's limitations.