Showing 1 - 10 of 14
Judging by the cover
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 02/09/2022
» We first published A History Of Thailand in 2005, 17 years ago. We have just prepared a fourth edition, adding a new chapter on the extraordinary events since 2005, and over 200 other changes based on new research, mostly by Thai historians. We needed a new cover to signal that this edition is really different.
A personal reflection on Thailand as a nation
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 20/05/2022
» Historian alone is an inadequate description. Charnvit Kasetsiri is a historian-activist. In 1973, he wrote a pioneering history of Ayutthaya as a Cornell University doctorate, published by Oxford University Press. He taught at Thammasat University for five decades and briefly served as rector. He has presented on Thai history at countless international gatherings. He has promoted the work of his students and colleagues so often that his prefaces for their works fill a fat book.
The Bunnag clan from the inside
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 01/04/2022
» Bunnag may be the best-known surname in Thailand because of the size of the clan, its historical role, and the name's blessed two-syllable brevity. The resounding title of this book suggests a grand tale of the clan marching through history. Not so. This is an intensely personal account of one person refinding himself in the shadow of the past.
Putting the humanity into history
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 21/01/2022
» The King Of Bangkok is a graphic novel that tells the story of Thai politics over a generation from 1982 to 2012 from the angle of a trio of northeastern villagers drawn to Bangkok. The book aims to subvert more conventional accounts by using fiction rather than "history", by leading with pictures rather than words, and by focusing on ordinary people rather than generals, tycoons and politicians.
Two deaths in Bangkok in 1856 and their consequences
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 17/12/2021
» The Bowring Treaty of 1855 is a landmark of Thailand's modern history. The treaty opened the door for the colonial invasion of Siam's economy, and helped drag Siam into the modern world. It's a story about the great wheels of history, especially of colonial expansion and the cultural collision of East and West. But such events of great practical and symbolic significance are also about people, about the "big people" who shape these events, and the "little people" who get caught up in them by fate.
A slice of social history
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 06/08/2021
» Members of the household kept sneaking off with this book but were betrayed by their giggles and sighs of nostalgia. It is great fun. Its creation was clearly a labour of love and joy. But it is also the work of a serious and skilled historian.
Too cruel to contemplate
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 07/08/2020
» The silhouette at the top right of this achingly beautiful book cover recalls a famous photograph from the Thammasat massacre of Oct 6, 1976. The photo showed a dead man hung from a tree being beaten by a chair while a ring of people watch. The silhouette is deliberately ghostly. The incident is well-known but little known. The photo is famous but the dead man, the man wielding the chair, and the prominent bystanders have never been identified. Even the location of the tree is uncertain. The whole event is full of "unanswered questions". The memory of the incident is in a limbo which Thongchai Winichakul calls "the unforgetting".
At the crossroads of justice and virtue
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 10/07/2020
» The judiciary is the least studied element of the Thai polity. That did not matter much 25 years ago because it played almost no political role. But now the courts bring down governments, exile leaders, dissolve political parties, punish protesters and jail people for thought crimes. This book is long awaited and does not disappoint.
A love letter to a city in flux
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 21/02/2020
» Very Thai (2005) was about things. About teasing the meaning of Thai out of objects and signs, ranging from the sublime symbolism of Thai design to the question why the paper napkins in all everyday Thai eateries were pink in colour and stupidly small in size.
Safeguarding a saga
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 04/02/2020
» Under the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s, Cambodian arts were almost crushed out of existence. The Royal Ballet was famously revived in the 1980s, but Cambodia also had popular traditions of music, dance, drama and puppetry. In 1998, a group started to revive these. They located surviving artists to teach a new generation of children in villages, schools and temples.