This collection of eleven essays by senior Asianist Craig J. Reynolds features debates about meaning in Southeast Asian and Thai history. History is vital to collective memory, dynastic succession, and an individual's identification with place. Contemporary events can prick sensitivities about what a proper account of the ancient, premodern, or modern past should be. Craig Reynolds explores themes that have hitherto been treated superficially in Thai historical writing, including Siam's semi-colonialism in the late nineteenth century. The concepts of militarism and masculinity, the relationship of manual knowledge to ethnoscience, and the dialectics of globalization. Other more familiar topics under Reynolds' microscope, treated with new material and approaches, include cultural nationalism and religious history.

This is a seminal work, addressed to young scholars coming into the fields of Southeast Asian and Thai history, as well as to current scholars and teachers working in the various disciplines of political science, anthropology, history, sociology, and philosophy.