When British diplomats McLeod and Richardson set out on their missions to the Tai states in December 1836, their aim was trade and friendship. Captain William Couperus McLeod and Dr. David Richardson, both of the East India Company Madras Army, traveled from Moulmein on elephants, horses, and in the caravans of traders, to the present-day regions of the Shan States in Burma, northern Thailand, and Sipsong Panna in China. As the first Europeans to officially visit the region, they experienced some extraordinary social and cultural encounters. McLeod and Richardson had been in action in the first Anglo-Burmese War (1824-6) and had experience of other missions in Burma and Siam. They were fluent in Burmese and had a basic knowledge of Tai. They wrote superbly of their journeys and diplomatic exchanges. Their journals are published here in full, with detailed notes, for the first time. The richness of their narratives, their records of scientific, social, and cultural detail, their engaging insights, and some prejudices, make this engrossing reading for the enthusiast of travel and adventure literature. More than this, it is an essential new resource for scholars of many kinds-historians, anthropologists, geographers, and botanists, to name a few. Grabowsky and Turton provide an analytical commentary on the journals, and on the conditions and contexts of their writing and subsequent use. The authors set the information in the journals in the context of indigenous Tai language sources. They also present completely new research on the British settlement in the Tenasserim Provinces of peninsular Burma, along with the biographies of McLeod and Richardson, who appear, for the first time, as three-dimensional individuals. This volume is a state-of-the-art example of how to make archival material like these journals, which are among the finest of the period, accessible to a broad audience. Volker Grabowsky is professor of South East Asian history at the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitut Munster. Andrew Turton is reader in anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

This exhilarating book interweaves the stories of two early twentieth-century botanists to explore the collaborative relationships each formed with Yunnan villagers in gathering botanical specimens from the borderlands between China, Tibet, and Burma. Erik Mueggler introduces Scottish botanist George Forrest, who employed Naxi adventurers in his fieldwork from 1906 until his death in 1932. We also meet American Joseph Francis Charles Rock, who, in 1924, undertook a dangerous expedition to Gansu and Tibet with the sons and nephews of Forrest’s workers. Mueggler describes how the Naxi workers and their Western employers rendered the earth into specimens, notes, maps, diaries, letters, books, photographs, and ritual manuscripts. Drawing on an ancient metaphor of the earth as a book, Mueggler provides a sustained meditation on what can be copied, translated, and revised and what can be folded back into the earth.

This volume traces the threads that tie together an understanding of Thailand as a dynamic and rapidly changing society, through an examination of the work of one major scholar of the country, Andrew Turton. Turton's anthropological studies of Thailand cover a wide spectrum from politics and economy to ritual and culture, and have been crucial in shaping evolving understandings of Thai society. In this collection, ten leading specialists on Thailand from a variety of disciplines critically consider aspects of Turton's work in relation to the changing nature of different aspects of Thai society. The book tracks the links between past and present scholarship, examines the contextuality of scholarship in its times, and sheds light on the current situation in Thailand.

The fact is, some books simply need to exist. Burma: The Cookbook is one of these. Burma is culturally rich and complex in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in its extraordinary food culture. It's at the crossroads between the food of the great Indian subcontinent (to its west) and the food of Southeast Asia (to its east), with a dash of Chinese influence (from the north), making it an amazing place in-between. With simple recipes for food that manages to be elegant and earthy at the same time, plus stories of a place and a people that inspired Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, and George Orwell, this may be Duguid's most enchanting cookbook yet. The book features photographs throughout--of the finished dishes, of people, of a hauntingly beautiful land--as well as travel tips, a history of Burma, extensive glossaries, and a bibliography.

Woman between Two Kingdoms explores the story of Dara Rasami, one of 153 wives of King Chulalongkorn of Siam during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in a kingdom near Siam called Lan Na, Dara served as both hostage and diplomat for her family and nation. Thought of as a harem by the West, Siam's Inner Palace actually formed a nexus between the domestic and the political. Dara's role as an ethnic Other among the royal concubines assisted the Siamese in both consolidating the kingdom's territory and building a local version of Europe's hierarchy of civilizations. Dara Rasami's story provides a fresh perspective on both the sociopolitical roles played by Siamese palace women, and Siam's response to the intense imperialist pressures it faced in the late nineteenth century. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

The collection of Burmese art housed at the Denison Museum in Granville, Ohio, USA, includes more than 1,500 objects dating from the late first millennium AD through the twentieth century. While particularly strong on textiles originating with minority groups in Burma, it also showcases Buddha images, lacquer objects, works on paper, manuscripts, wood carvings, and pieces made from bronze, silver, and ivory. Eclectic Collecting is both a catalogue of the collection and a scholarly examination of Burmese art.

Laos's emergence as a modern nation-state in the 20th century owed much to a complex interplay of internal and external forces. Arguing that the historiography of Laos needs to be understood in this wider context, this study considers how the Lao have written their own nationalist and revolutionary history "on the inside," while others-the French, Vietnamese, and Thais-have attempted to write the history of Laos "from the outside" for their own political ends. As nationalist historiography, like the formation of the nation-state, does not emerge within a nationalist vacuum but rather is created and contested from inside and out, this incisive volume's approach has applications and implications far beyond Laos.