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

CHARNEY, MICHAEL WALTER

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 state-centered narrative (thus framed by political borders). Instead of the history of Laos, we find here the history of a very turbulent period in which political borders did not mean very much in delineating the boundaries of action. Second, this book makes use of a very wide range of sources, especially from the Thai archives, spanning a large number of languages (including Lao, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, French, English, and German--both primary sources and secondary literature) a nd a multitude of perspectives. Third, this book focuses attention on developments sometimes left out of analyses of mainland Southeast Asian history, such as the all-important impact of migration, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is no mistake that migration is referred to over and over again in chronicles of the period, from westem Burma to Vietnam, and that migration is used as metaphor for political change and state reformation for far earlier periods in these chronicles. Here too, migration played a very important role, as the authors stress both migration into the Lao kingdom, and forcible expulsion by the Thais, as a basis for the well-being and even survival of the Vientiane-based state.

Still, despite the many contributions of this book, there are a few general drawbacks. The text, while on the whole clear and well written, suffers from a narrative style that rushes through incidents and characters at a rapid pace. More time could have been spent summarizing major developments and indicating the relevance of factual detail. There is also a failure to identify players in Lao history when one first runs across them, and the reader is constantly faced with new actors introduced without enough elaboration to make it easier to follow the fast-paced and detailed discussion.

One of the most important problems, however, is the heavily pro-Lao and anti-Thai bias of the authors' use of documents, as already suggested by David Wyatt in his foreword to the book. Related to this, there is the tendency of the authors to read Lao identity as it exists in the post-independence period back into the late eighteenth century. Can we really talk about questions of Lao unity, as the authors uncritically do, as if "being Lao" was already a very real "identity" at the beginning of the nineteenth century? In other words, how far back in time can we read modern Lao nationalism?

From another perspective, some of the problems mentioned above can also be seen as unintended strengths of the book. We have before us a very readable perspective on early modern regional history that does not express the central Thai point-of-view, but rather that of the peripheral Lao. In the context of prevailing historiography, this is an important contribution, and helps enrich our overall picture of developments during the period and in the place under examination. It also helps to put the state-centered historical narrative of Victor Lieberman into a broader perspective. That is, by looking at this period through the eyes of one of the many small- and mid-sized kingdoms that lost out to the expanding Burmese, Thai, and Vietnamese core states (and the Lao kingdoms were in the unique position of being pressured and diced up by not just one, but all three), we can better understand and sometimes even question processes viewed as core-prompted in the Liebermanian model. Looking at migration, for example, the authors suggest how dislocation caused by the expansive Thai state led to migration into Laos that strengthened (and did not weaken) both Lao unity and the economic prosperity of the Lao kingdom (p. 44).

Books such as the one under review, which suddenly draw attention to a range of developments and perspectives that have as yet made no appearance in the prevailing historiography, appear only once in a few years. There will probably be better books down the road on this period and place, in terms of balance and broader connections, but this book's contributions lie elsewhere, in both innovation and impact, and will not likely or easily be surpassed. This book is highly recommended for both scholars and students of Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, and especially Lao history. This book is also an example to historians of Cambodia about what could be done with the historical sources for the hazy late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.