Seditious Histories: Contesting Thai and Southeast Asian Pasts (Critical Dialogues in Southeast Asian Studies)

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.

Craig J. Reynolds is a reader in the Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra. He is the author of Thai Radical Discourses and National Identity and Its Defenders: Thailand, 1939-1989.

"This absorbing collection of essays reflects the range and depth of Craig Reynolds's long engagement with Thailand and Southeast Asia. Reynolds is a masterful historian, a lucid, provocative thinker, and a stylish writer. Seditious Histories has been over thirty years in the making. It's a reader's feast." - David Chandler, Monash University

"The essays that Reynolds has brought together in this volume constitute one of the most outstanding works in the study of Thai history and in the historiography of the region more generally." - Charles F. Keyes, University of Washington

"A must for Thai specialists and for historians of the region. Reynolds combines a density of historical research and breadth of knowledge in each essay to make a cumulatively rich contribution to our understanding of Thailand and Southeast Asia." - Tamara Loos, Cornell University