Paths to Conflagration: Fifty Years of Diplomacy and Warfare in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, 1778-1828.

AuthorCHARNEY, MICHAEL WALTER
PositionReview

Paths to Conflagration: Fifty Years of Diplomacy and Warfare in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, 1778-1828. By MAYOURY NGAOSYVATHN and PHEUIPHANH NGAOSYVATHN. Ithaca, N.Y.: CORNELL UNIVERSITY SOUTHEAST ASIA PROGRAM, 1998. Pp. 270.

With this work, the authors, Mayoury and Pheuiphanh Ngaosyvathn, offer us a wealth of information on the history of a small kingdom, the Lao, centered at Vientiane, in modern Laos, caught between expanding core states (Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam) in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century. The authors draw upon a wide literature and an impressive range of languages to present a clear and careful picture of a very complex period in Lao and Southeast Asian history.

This book is really the story of Chou Anou, the last of the Lao kings of Vientiane and his struggle against rivals on all sides. Chou Anou played a political game between the expansionist Thai and Vietnamese states in the late eighteenth and ear]y nineteenth centuries, a game that his kingdom eventually lost. Because of the Tay Son, Vietnam was out of the picture for decades; the central Thai court was Chou Anou's chief antagonist. When Vietnam does enter the picture again under Minh Mang, it is as a supporter of Chou Anou, in the context of a larger Thai-Vietnamese competitive hostility. Fighting between Thailand and Vientiane appears on an extremely personal level in the text--the authors stressing at one point Rama III's anxiety that a massacre of Vietnamese emissaries and Lao guides by a Thai officer had not left enough dead, considering an earlier massacre of Thai by Chou Anou in Vientiane (p. 242); they stress also the personal nature of the fighting between Chou Anou and the Thai general Bodin. Furthe r, the text seems almost to replicate, anachronistically, aspects of war more endemic to the post-World-War II conflicts in Indochina, including a reference to "sophisticated Siamese psychological operations" (p. 212).

Paths to Conflagration is organized into nine chapters, each covering a different episode of the period, examined step-by-step, and turns from one incarnation of Vientiane to another--from victim to provocateur to buffer state. Each page is heavy with documentation, but the narrative is lighter. This book has three real strengths. First, it discusses history at the point of intersection between three different polities and does not apply the nation-state "cookie-cutter" approach--looking only at developments as they relate to a...

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