As a way of opening this critique of historical writing on early Southeast Asia, I ask, What interest do today's historians have in studying early Southeast Asia? What are they looking for in the early past? An essay by F. R. Ankersmit, in which he talks about what the modern reader brings to evidence from the past, serves as a point of departure for my answer. Rather than labor at accumulating more and more evidence about the past, historians should reflect on the difference between our own mentality and that of an earlier period. The past acquires point and meaning “only through confrontation with the mentality of the later period in which the historian lives and writes.” The experience of confronting this mentality Ankersmit calls “the historical sensation,” “which is accompanied by the complete conviction of genuineness, truth” (Ankersmit 1989:146). “A phase in historiography has perhaps now begun,” he says, “in which meaning is more important than reconstruction and genesis.”
In the past decade Thailand’s bubble of prosperity expanded beyond the wildest dreams of investors and burst in the faces of those who had inflated it. By being the fastest growing economy in the world as well as the epicentre of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Thailand became a cautionary tale of hypergrowth. During the boom and especially after the bubble economy burst there were heated debates in Thailand’s highly energised public sphere about the accelerating pace of change, about political reform, and about the possible futures for the country and its people. All Asian countries subjected to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) regime of austerity saw their national economic sovereignty compromised, and in this respect the financial crisis of 1997 had clear parallels with previous threats to Thailand’s sovereignty in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then, as in the late 1990s, the ruling elites allowed sovereignty to be compromised. In this essay I endeavour to map out the intellectual contours of post‐boom Thailand. While accepting that these public debates are concentrated in the Bangkok megalopolis, I would suggest that it would be a mistake to dismiss the dominant themes of these debates as fatally elitist or Bangkok‐centric. The public intellectuals engaging the issues have close ties to non‐governmental organisations (NGOs) and other activists elsewhere in the country. At the core of these debates is the need to empower local communities in order to contend with the pressures of international financial organisations such as the IMF, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
Analyses of Thai political economy since World War II have sought to define the stages of Thai social evolution from earliest times to the present and to determine whether or not the Bowring Treaty of 1855 and the 1932 coup mark changes in the social formation and/or the mode of production. Over the past decade, as a consequence of political change in the mid-1970s, a new generation of historians has rejuvenated Marxist methodology, using it to pry the chronicles and archives away from royalist and nationalist myth-making concerns, to dismantle the court-centered historiography, and to erect a new historical paradigm for the late twentieth century.
In Thai studies to date there has been little attempt to discuss the changes that took place during the nineteenth century in terms of what Western historiography would call intellectual history. The reasons for the scant attention paid to this subject are various, having as much to do with the infancy of the field of Thai studies as with the lack of speculative literature (in Siamese) that would attract the curiosity of intellectual historians. For example, we hardly know what books—especially what Western books—were read by the nineteenth-century Siamese elite, let alone how such books shaped its outlook and its perceptions of change. Because Siam has been a predominantly Buddhist state, it might be advisable to begin with Buddhist materials—in particular, with Buddhist cosmography and the Siamese reassessment of it that has taken place since the encounter with the West in the middle of the nineteenth century.
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