Canter Bridge

The authors of this compact Cambridge University Press history of Thailand deliver on their promise. This is a vintage CUP product: balanced, full of measured opinion, error-free in typography and layout, sweeping without shallowness.

There is not a better one-volume entrance to this fascinating but lesser-known South East Asian Country.

Taking the nation-state seriously, the authors show how an ethnically diverse region with formidable Chinese influence and lineage gradually took shape as the somewhat mythical ‘Thai people’. Known as Siam until modern times, Thailand was an ally of the US during its Vietnam era with mixed results when the GIs arrived for R&R and even more traumatic adjustments when they took their dollars and left.

Later the hot money of the greater Asian Tigers moved here from Taiwan and Japan, only to migrate to China when cheaper labor became available to foreigners in that country.

The Thai are nothing if not survivors. Nor were they ever fully colonized, a badge of honor in a region that knew perhaps too much of European and Asian pretenders to do just that.