Newly published source Source Paths to conflagration fifty years of diplomacy and warfare in Laos Thailand and Vietnam 1778 1828 Authors Mayur Ngaos vat Mayuri Ngaosivat and Pheuiphanh Ngaosyvathn Publisher Ithaca N Y Southeast Asia Program Publications Cornell University 1998 Series Studies on Southeast Asia no 24 Edition Format Book English ID Numbers Open Library OL433527 M ISBN 10 0877277230 LC Control Number 98141866 OCLC WorldCat 38909607 Library Thing 4223523 Review 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 Further 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 and 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 western 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