Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit. A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World.

Abstract

Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit have already proved themselves one of the most creative and complementary marital partnerships in the business of interpreting Asia. While they eschew partitioning responsibility, suffice it to say that together they offer both an elegant Cambridge style of historical analysis and great empathy for the Thai sources and context. Following their innovative and successful A History of Thailand (2005), Baker and Pasuk have recently turned their attention to elegant English editions of some crucial Ayutthaya texts. The scholarly effort of rendering into poetic English two colorful epic poems, Tale of Khun Chang Khun Phaen: Siam’s Great Folk Epic of Love and War (2010), and Yuan Phai, Defeat of Lanna: A Fifteenth-Century Thai Epic Poem (2016), was accompanied by a study and translation of The Palace Law of Ayutthaya and the Thammasat: Law and Kingship in Siam (2016). These works provide a cultural depth lacking in earlier surveys, and are drawn on liberally throughout Baker and Pasuk’s A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World. The Palace Law, for example, provides a vivid picture of the military style of court culture that the authors see as characteristic of the sixteenth century in Siam (105–111).