The Thai Village Economy in the Past is one of the classics of modern Thai history. Few books have provoked so much interest or controversy. Though the theme of the book is deceptively simple--that the Thai rural economy was a subsistence economy and remained so much longer than is commonly thought--the message of the book has proved far from simple. Chatthip has written the history of the village from the viewpoint of the village, making it one of the key texts of the "community culture" movement and rural revival. Much of the book's appeal stems from its straightforward style and startling ideas. The village existed before capitalism and before the state. It has its own culture which owes little to urban influence. It took the Buddhism that came from outside and subordinated it to local beliefs. Constantly in print since its first publication in 1984, it is now available in English for the first time. Chatthip Nartsupha is professor of economic history at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok.

A History of Thailand offers a lively and accessible account of Thailand's political, economic, social, and cultural history.

This book presents an economic history of Bangkok, the Central Region, the North, the South, and Northeastern Regions from the signing of the Bowring Treaty in 1855 to the present. Most research has focused on Bangkok as the centre of change affecting other regions and has neglected other regions that had an influence on Bangkok. This book however looks at the changes not only in Bangkok, but also in the other regions, and emphasizes the ways in which Bangkok had an impact on the other regions, and how changes in the other regions affected Bangkok. It also looks, in turn, at each of the principal regions, and concentrate on the long-term economic and social changes and the various forces which promoted the changes.

When a populist movement elected Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister of Thailand in 2001, many of the country’s urban elite dismissed the outcome as just another symptom of rural corruption, a traditional patronage system dominated by local strongmen pressuring their neighbors through political bullying and vote-buying. In Thailand’s Political Peasants, however, Andrew Walker argues that the emergence of an entirely new socioeconomic dynamic has dramatically changed the relations of Thai peasants with the state, making them a political force to be reckoned with. Whereas their ancestors focused on subsistence, this generation of middle-income peasants seeks productive relationships with sources of state power, produces cash crops, and derives additional income through non-agricultural work. In the increasingly decentralized, disaggregated country, rural villagers and farmers have themselves become entrepreneurs and agents of the state at the local level, while the state has changed from an extractor of taxes to a supplier of subsidies and a patron of development projects. Thailand’s Political Peasants provides an original, provocative analysis that encourages an ethnographic rethinking of rural politics in rapidly developing countries. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Ban Tiam, a rural village in northern Thailand, Walker shows how analyses of peasant politics that focus primarily on rebellion, resistance, and evasion are becoming less useful for understanding emergent forms of political society.

Lessons learned in the process of designing and implementing one of the longest-running panel data surveys in development economics.

"Food and Population in a Northeast Thai Village is a remarkably thorough baseline study of the interrelationship between demographic change, land and agricultural production in what must be one of the most intensively studied village communities in Asia, Ban Don Daeng, which lies a few kilometres from the North-East Thai regional urban centre of Khon Kaen." —Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (30:01, March 1999)