Newly published source    Source   Paths to conflagration  fifty years of diplomacy and warfare in Laos Thailand and Vietnam  Authors  Mayur Ngaosvat Mayuri Ngaosivatand Pheuiphanh Ngaosyvathn Publisher Ithaca NY  Southeast Asia Program Publications Cornell University  Series Studies on Southeast Asia no  EditionFormat Book  English ID Numbers Open Library OLM  ISBN    LC Control Number   OCLCWorldCat   Library Thing   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 eary 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 Anous 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 ThaiVietnamese competitive hostility Fighting between Thailand and Vientiane appears on an extremely personal level in the text  the authors stressing at one point Rama IIIs 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  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 postWorldWar II conflicts in Indochina including a reference to sophisticated Siamese psychological operations p   Paths to Conflagration is organized into nine chapters each covering a different episode of the period examined stepbystep 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 nationstate cookiecutter approach  looking only at developments as they relate to a statecentered 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 allimportant 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 wellbeing and even survival of the Vientianebased state