This selection of lectures by Professor Hla Pe, who has published widely in the fields of Burmese language and literature, and cultural studies, provides an insight into Burmese literature, culture, beliefs and way of life through the author’s own personal life and career. The lectures are divided into six parts: On Literature, On Historiography, On Scholarship, On Language, On Life, and On Buddhism.

Burma has often been portrayed as a timeless place, a country of egalitarian Buddhist villages, ruled successively by autocratic kings, British colonialists and, most recently, a military dictatorship. The Making of Modern Burma argues instead that many aspects of Burmese society today, from the borders of the state to the social structure of the countryside to the very notion of a Burmese identity, are largely the creations of the nineteenth century - a period of great change - away from the Ava-based polity of early modern times, and towards the 'British Burma' of the 1900s. The book provides a sophisticated and much-needed account of the period, and as such will be an important resource for policy makers and students as a basis for understanding contemporary politics and the challenges of the modern state. It will also be read by historians interested in the British colonial expansion of the nineteenth century.

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.

The encounter of indigenous history-making tradition with Western historical practice has been long neglected in Southeast Asian scholarship. Theara Thun offers one of the first critical and systematic studies of the interface between these two distinctive modes of historical presentation and their impacts on society. By examining historical discourses on Cambodia through the precolonial, colonial, and post-independence years, he presents a compelling account of indigenous scholars, with varying perspectives, who advocated competing versions of history. Thun argues that new discourses about national history emerged by drawing on, reconfiguring, combining, or, in many cases, rejecting older discourses of precolonial historical scholarship. Epistemology of the Past examines how certain types and forms of historical knowledge are created, understood, and used within a given context and how that knowledge has evolved over time. The book brings together and critically explores a large collection of original manuscripts and printed texts—notably, Khmer chronicle manuscripts and colonial-era works of French scholar-officials. Thun’s analysis discloses multilayers of intellectual traditions and diverse views of Cambodian and, more broadly, Southeast Asian scholars engaging with European colonial scholarship. In addition to contributing to the multidisciplinary field of Cambodian and Southeast Asian studies, Epistemology of the Past will be essential reading for those interested in intellectual history, transculturation, historiography, intertextual studies, narrative studies, literature, colonialism, and nationalism.

Wendy Law-Yone was just fifteen when Burma's military staged a coup and overthrew the civilian government in 1962. The daughter of Ed Law-Yone, the daredevil founder and chief editor of The Nation, Burma's leading postwar English-language newspaper, she experienced firsthand the perils and promises of a newly independent Burma. On the eve of Wendy's studies abroad, Ed Law-Yone was arrested and The Nation shut down. Wendy herself was briefly imprisoned. After his release, Ed fled to Thailand with his family, where he formed a government-in-exile and tried, unsuccessfully, to foment a revolution. Exiled to America with his wife and children, Ed never gave up hope that Burma would one day adopt a new democratic government. Though he died disappointed, he left in his daughter's care an illuminating trove of papers documenting the experiences of an eccentric, ambitious, humorous, and determined patriot, vividly recounting the realities of colonial rule, Japanese occupation, postwar reconstruction, and military dictatorship. This memoir tells the twin histories of Law-Yone's kin and his country, a nation whose vicissitudes continue to intrigue the world.