A History of Cambodia

This clear and concise volume provides a timely overview of Cambodia, a small but increasingly visible Southeast Asian nation. Hailed by the Journal of Asian Studies as an "original contribution, superior to any other existing work," this acclaimed text has now been completely revised and updated to include material examining the early history of Cambodia, whose famous Angkorean ruins now attract more than one million tourists each year, the death of Pol Pot, and the revolution and final collapse of the Khmer Rouge. The fourth edition reflects recent research by major scholars as well as Chandler's long immersion in the subject, including new material covering the challenges facing Cambodia today. This comprehensive overview of Cambodia will illuminate, for undergraduate students as well as general readers, the history and contemporary politics of a country long misunderstood.

In sum, I am supplementing this book with one that deals exclusively with Cambodian history in the last 30 years, but for the "big picture," "A History of Cambodia" is The One. I couldn't be more impressed.


Good.   January 25, 2002
 6 out of 12 found this review helpful

This is a very succint but adequate history of Cambodia, which started some 2,000 years ago with the Funan empire (1st to 6th centuries AD) and reached its peak with the Khmer empire (9th to 13th centuries AD) and its famous Angkor monuments. From then on, it was a steep downward slide into oblivion.

One just has to wonder how such a brilliant civilization could have disappeared even from the minds and memory of its own people. A Frenchman, Henri Mouhot, rediscovered the Angkor complex in 1860.


Another masterpiece, now available in Khmer translation.   June 24, 2000
 11 out of 12 found this review helpful

Those who are fascinated with Cambodia, the Khmer language and the Cambodian people treasure the work of David Chandler. Clear and logical presentation are to be taken for granted. The author has for years set the standard toward which the next generation of Asia scholars strive. Even more rare than his impressive intellect is David Chandler's collegial approach to his subjects and his fellow researchers.

The 2005 publication in the Khmer language is a beautiful piece of work done in a very crisp and legible Khmer font. The set in both English and Khmer will make the best study aid ever available for students of Khmer and for native speakers studying English. Very encouraging to see the American Embassy in Phnom Penh and the Van Waveren Foundation assist with funding this project. [publishing@khmerstudies.org & www.khmerstudies.org]


A Respectable Showing--Too Bad It's The Only One   June 3, 2000
 24 out of 29 found this review helpful

The coverage in this book is genuinely refreshing: from dim origins of the various ethnic and linguistic groups of Indochina; through the fascinating but frustratingly scant data on pre-Angkorean times; to the glory of Angkor itself; and then into the welcome light of more ample documentation, be it Chinese, European, Siamese or Vietnamese; and finally, of course, colonization, modern war, and the staggering horror of the Khmer Rouge. I believe that history--all history--is the mother of insight, and Chandler's work serves to bolster this opinion. Even the pre-Angkorean chapters--which, as I noted, are cursed by a paucity of evidence--fired my mind: I am now fascinated by the "indianization" of Southeast Asia that occurred in the first millenium AD. It struck me that it was one of the few times where a civilization spread its culture in a big way without either much violence or emigration. [Are there parallels with the contemporary global spread of American culture? True, American ascendance has not been without a torrent of violence--as amply recounted in this book--but I would submit that force has, if anything, hindered rather than advanced the adoption of American cultural norms.] This book is also a welcome antidote to the myriad histories of Southeast Asia that treat all the events before European colonization as the merest of preambles. We learn, for instance, that well before Cambodia became a disposable pawn in bloody post-war neo-imperialist games, it was long an important prize in a previous bipolar arena of gruesome geopolitical struggle--that between Vietnam and Siam in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus the tragedy of modern Cambodia does not lie in Western, patronizing visions of the Cambodians as innocent children, but rather in the story of a wordly civilization that had endured and survived so many depradations from outsiders, only to all but self-destruct in our own time.