Chandler - A History of Cambodia, 4th Edition

This book will examine roughly two thousand years of Cambodian history. through 5 carry the story up to the end of the eighteenth century; the remaining chapters deal with the period between 1794 and 2007.

One reason for writing the book has been to close a gap in the historiography of Southeast Asia. No lengthy history of Cambodia has appeared since the publication of Adhmard Leclres Histoire du Cambodge in 1914. through 7 has often been ignored even though it clearly forms a bridge between Angkor and the present.

The time has come, in other words, to reexamine primary sources, to synthesize other peoples scholarly work, and to place my own research, concerned mainly with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, into the framework of a general history, with a nonspecialist audience, as well as undergraduates, in mind.

As it stands the book examines several themes. One of these has to do with the effects on Cambodian politics and society of the countrys location , has been crucial since the second half of the eighteenth century and has recently faded in importance. For over two hundred years, beginning in the 1780s, the presence of two powerful, antagonistic neighbors forced the contentious Cambodian elite either to prefer one or the other or to attempt to neutralize them by appealing to an outside power. Cambodian kings tried both alternatives in the nineteenth century. Later on, Norodom Sihanouk, Lon Nol, and Pol Pot all attempted the second; the regime of the State of Cambodia (SOC), formerly the Peoples Republic of Kampuchea, which lasted from 1979 until 1991, committed itself to the patronage of Vietnam. A UN protectorate (199193) neutralized the contending foreign patrons of Cambodia by removing it from Cold War rivalries. In the late 1990s Cambodia and Vietnam joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the Kingdom of Cambodia, established under that name in 1993, has so far avoided seeking a dominant foreign patron, although in recent years China has emerged as an increasingly important ally and benefactor of the regime.

Another theme, really a present-day one, has to do with the relationship of contemporary Cambodians to their past. The history of Angkor, after all, was deciphered, restored, and bequeathed to them by their French colonial masters. Why had so many Cambodians forgotten it, or remembered it primarily as myth? What did it mean to have the memories and the grandeur brought back to life, in times of dependence? What happened to the times between Angkor and the modern era? And in what ways are the post-Angkorean years, the colonial era, and what has happened since 1954 connected to these earlier periods? How are the revolutionary events of the 1970s to be remembered, taught, and internalized? There has even been pressure from the government to play down the teaching of Cambodian history as too controversial.

A third theme arises from the pervasiveness of patronage and hierarchies in Cambodian thinking, politics, and social relations. For most of Cambodian history, it seems, people in power were thought (by themselves and nearly everyone else) to be more meritorious than others. Older people were also ideologically privileged. Despite some alterations these arrangements remained unchanged between Cambodias so- The widespread acceptance of an often demeaning status quo meant that in Marxist terms Cambodians went through centuries of mystification. If this is so, and ones identity was so frequently related to subordination, what did political independence mean?