Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today

Using as a basis Jit Poumisak's The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today (1957), Reynolds both writes Thai history and critiques the historiography relevant to that history. He is markedly concerned with epistemology and historiography (who writes history and what form it should take, questions of revision and rewriting). Exploring the problems of imperialism, feudalism, and the nature of power, Reynolds argues that comparisons between European and Thai premodern social formations can be useful in characterizing Thai social formation (especially the present one) as historical, contingent, and temporally bounded. 1987. 2nd printing 1994. 186 pages. Illustrations.