Creating Laos: The Making of a Lao Space Between Indochina and Siam, 1860-1946

by Søren Ivarsson

The existence of Laos today is taken for granted. But the crystallization of a Lao national idea and ultimate independence for the country was a long and uncertain process. This book examines the process through which Laos came into existence under French colonial rule through to the end of World War II. Rather than assuming that the Laos we see today was an historical given, the book looks at how Laos' position at the intersection of two conflicting spatial layouts of 'Thailand' and 'Indochina' made its national form a particularly contested process.This, however, is not an analysis of nation-building from the perspective of administrative and political structures. Rather, the book charts the emergence of a notion of a specifically Lao cultural identity that served to buttress Laos as a separate 'Lao space', both in relation to Siam/Thailand and within French Indochina. Based on an impressive variety of primary sources, many of them never before used in studies of Lao nationalism, this book makes a significant contribution to Lao historical studies and to the study of nation-building in Southeast Asia.

Genres: History

250 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2008

Reviews

[Jason Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an illuminating book about how the conceptions of "Laos" as a nation (in the nation-state sense) and as a Historic entity developed before it was officially considered "independent". It's not a book that I would recommend to those who are just learning about the country and its history. It's in deep conversation with the works of post-colonial scholars of Southeast Asia such as Benedict Anderson, Thongchai Winichakul, and Christopher Goscha, as well more contemporary Lao historians such as Grant Evans and Martin Stuart-Fox. Luckily, I've read each of those scholars and am familiar with their ideas and arguments, so this book was extremely fascinating for me. But I don't really know how it would read for someone who is not that versed in the language and arguments supporting post-colonial nation-building and the complications that can come from dealing with often conflicting state narratives/mythologies, etc.

The argument that the book makes is that the Lao conception of itself as a historic unified entity was developed in conjunction with various competing French designs for Indochina, but it wasn't wholly dependent on it. The French period had encouraged research on a Lao identity in order for it to justify its new territorial space as part of the greater French empire (as opposed to being Siamese). It was to be seen as having its own separate history along with the rest of the French colonies and protectorates such as Cambodia, Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina. And with this research came a reformulated view of a Lan Xang empire that preceded the domination of Siamese influence that all of Laos could look back to, and on which they could then build a new mythology that is wholly "Lao." Many things complicate this history, such as the near-invisibility of the highlander peoples in these mythologies, as well as the fact that the sphere of influence of the empire at its peak stretched onto areas in today's Thailand as well. Arguing for historical territorial continuity from Lan Xang to today's Laos is a bit of a stretch. Other related complications are that the majority of the people who speak the Lao language today live in the Khorat Plateau in Thailand, and that those whose first language is Lao is actually in the minority in today's Laos amongst the dozens of other "tribal" languages in the country.

All of these are of course relatively moot points— the story of post-colonial countries is often that a lot of it makes little rational sense and has had more to do with the logics of their colonizations by foreign Europeans than it has to do with anything else. It's never wholly just the Europeans in charge, there's a lot of local elite agency in these processes as well, but they all turn out similarly— variously confusing states of nationalism. And that's Ivarsson's main point. Laos is just like any other post-colonial nation. It's not an anomaly. It's part of a consistently realized pattern of nation-building in the post-colonial world, and so knowledge on how Laos came to be can be easily integrated into the broader field of post-colonial studies. All due to the bridges built by Ivarsson here in this text. Or at least that's the idea.

But it's important to remember that this history of early nationalist thought in Laos precedes the horrific Indochina Wars and the subsequent installation of the Communist government in the country. And so a lot of what this book is about is merely building the first steps to understanding Lao nationalism today. It is far from the last book that needs to be written about Lao nationalism. It's far from the only book one needs to understand Laos. But it's a great start nonetheless. I wish it spent more time unpacking the Japanese era of anti-colonial nationalism and how the French-style nationalism they had been developing so quickly got reformulated into an anti-colonial one. It feels abruptly discussed at the end of the book, but perhaps it's because it requires a whole other text to get deeper into. Overall a very fascinating book about how a new Laos was born between the cultural strongholds of Vietnam and Thailand amidst colonizations and world war.

[Fernando Pestana da Costa · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the first half of 2017 I spent a little more than six a half months in Laos and when I had just about two months to go I found this book in Monument bookshop in Vientiane. It is a very interesting and very enlightening book about the origins of present day Laos nation-state (as opposed to the kind of ahistorical myths of a direct connection between today country and a supposedly fourteen century Laos golden age). Enformed by the work of Benedict Anderson on the link between Western colonialism and colonial nationalism, this book studies how the arrival of the French in Southeast Asia in the second half of the 19th Century created a new dynamics and let to the appearance of "rigid" boundaries where in premodern times there were more fluid and personal kind of allegiances. This let to the creation of two regional poles (the French Indochina and Siam - renamed Thailand in 1939) which competed for the lands that latter become Laos. The story presented in this book is a cultural one: it is about the role of nationalist ideologies of race and nation, of History, Religion, Language (and the all too important political aspects of fixing the written script and grammar of the Lao language), Literature, Music, and also infrastructure building and immigration policies. It deals with the French and Thai initiatives, and, of course, mainly from the 1920s and 1930s, also with Laos' intellectual elite (most of them civil servants in the colonial administration). The dynamics of all these aspects and actors resulted in the preconditions for the political nationalist movement that led to the creation of independent Laos in 1953, and, as described by Ivarsson, makes an exiting reading to anyone interested in the country, or in colonization/decolonization processes in general.

[Eskil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kjempegod introduksjon til moderne Laos for de som vet litt men ikke særlig mye om landet/regionen. Ikke anbefalt for folk som ikke engang vet hvor landet er på kartet, men jeg er ikke sikker på om de ville vært interessert til å begynne med.

Ivarsson strukturerer boka godt, og kildebruken hans er detaljert og styrker teksten. Fullt mulig det var doktorgradsavhandlinga hans, for jeg ser ikke noen grunn til at noen med ordentlig jobbsikkerhet skulle gjøre seg så flid >:3c