It gives me great pleasure to write this foreword to Charnvit Kasetsiri’s volume on the struggle to build the nation called Thailand. Given his long-held view that the country should have retained its name as Siam, he has brought an exceptional perspective to how Thailand approached the idea of modern nationhood—both before and after the age of imperialism. The name change that followed the military coup of 1932 and the end of the historic monarchy had created greater insecurity in a region that was about to be transformed. The uncertainty was compounded by Japanese ambition and the outbreak of the European War that became worldwide. This was followed after the war by a total change in the regional environment when the imperialist powers retreated and new nations gained their independence.

Siam had the difficult experience of remaining sovereign and independent during the nineteenth century when its neighbours were being invaded. The wisdom of its rulers and the skills of its diplomats were the envy of all those who were colonized. Having survived multiple threats with exceptional success, those who were set to build a new kind of nation in 1945 would have assumed that Thailand was free from that particular burden. Indeed, many post-war studies made the process of Thai nationhood appear to be a seamless development that required no special attention. They therefore concentrated on economic, diplomatic and security affairs that enabled the country to play important roles in the region’s fresh start as new polities.

It needed someone with Charnvit’s historical sensitivity to go behind the country’s confident front to discover other dimensions to the special kind of nationhood that the various peoples of Thailand sought to establish. His focus on the long reigns of the royal house as determinants in the country’s political architecture is original and illuminating. It does not only emphasize a unique phenomenon but also throws light on how the kings could find the space to strengthen their position under some extremely unstable conditions.

As a historian, he is not satisfied simply to have found an instructive angle from which to explore the mysteries in a modern experimental monarchy. His keen sense of time has filled his narrative with insights that only few people could have identified. To me, that is a mark of one with a fine sense of what the past can mean.