This collection of eleven essays by senior Asianist Craig Reynolds features debates about meaning in Southeast Asian and Thai history. He explores themes that have hitherto been treated superficially in Thai historical writing, including Siam’s semicolonialism in the late nineteenth century, the concepts of militarism and masculinity, collective memory and dynastic succession, the relationship of manual knowledge to ethnoscience, and the dialectics of globalization. Other more familiar topics under Reynolds’s microscope, treated with new material and approaches, include cultural nationalism and religious history.

The first edition of this book was hailed as original and challenging in its analyses of Thai national identity. The topic is today no less worthy of discussion and comment. The essays boldly offer insights into the formation of Thai identity from the perspectives of history, political science, anthropology, linguistics, social psychology, human geography, and media and religious studies. Written in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, a new chapter reflects on the way older concepts of Thai identity were transformed by the economic boom as well as by the financial crisis that followed. Topics include the debates among public intellectuals about the perils and opportunities of globalization, the dynamic relationship between local and global knowledge, and perceived challenges to Thailand's sovereignty, all of which have deep roots in the country's modern history.

A collection of the classic essays of O. W. Wolters, reflecting his radiant and meticulous lifelong study of premodern Southeast Asia, its literature, trade, government, and vanished cities. Included is an intellectual biography by the editor, which covers Wolters's professional lives as a member of the Malayan Civil Service and, later, as a scholar. This volume displays the extraordinary range of Oliver Wolters's work in early Indonesian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Thai history.

A collection of the classic essays of O. W. Wolters, reflecting his radiant and meticulous lifelong study of premodern Southeast Asia, its literature, trade, government, and vanished cities. Included is an intellectual biography by the editor, which covers Wolters's professional lives as a member of the Malayan Civil Service and, later, as a scholar. This volume displays the extraordinary range of Oliver Wolters's work in early Indonesian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Thai history.

In these two monographs, first presented as part of the Frank H. Golay Memorial Lecture series sponsored by the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University, Craig J. Reynolds and Ruth McVey each review Southeast Asian Studies as an academic enterprise and offer their proposals for adapting and revitalizing the academy's approach to Southeast Asia in particular and area studies generally.

Using Jit Poumisak's The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today (1957), Reynolds both rewrites Thai history and critiques relevant historiography. Discussing imperialism, feudalism, and the nature of power, Reynolds argues that comparisons between European and Thai premodern societies reveal Thai social formations to be "historical, contingent, and temporally bounded."

Includes a Thai-English glossary of over 3,500 words.