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.