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Monarchical Manipulation in Cambodia: France, Japan and the Sihanouk Crusade for Independence
Geoffrey C. Gunn
NIAS: 2018
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Geoffrey C. Gunn is a distinguished Australian academic who has spent most of his working life in Asia. Since the 1980s he has written about the history and politics of many Asian countries, including Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Timor-Leste and Vietnam. For many years Gunn’s work on what was once called French Indochina (a perennial interest of his) concentrated largely on Laos and Vietnam. Monarchical Manipulation in Cambodia: France, Japan, and the Sihanouk Crusade for Independence is the first of his books to deal exclusively with Cambodian history. Like much of Gunn’s earlier work, it benefits from his archival immersions and displays his extraordinary skill at finding invaluable needles in haystacks of documentation. In this regard a special virtue of Gunn’s latest work is the painstaking, imaginative way he has mined the national archives in Phnom Penh, which only became fully accessible to scholars in the late 1990s.

Monarchical Manipulation focusses on the French Protectorate of Cambodia (1863-1954) and more superficially on the first sixteen years of Cambodia’s independence. Aside from a brief epilogue, it closes with the bloodless coup in March 1970 that removed Prince Norodom Sihanouk (1922-2012) from power. Its discussion of the Sihanouk era pays more attention to left-wing resistance to the regime, traversing territory covered by Yale historian Ben Kiernan a quarter century ago, than it does to the Sihanouk era itself. What’s missing is a discussion of the political dynamics of the so-called golden age of Sihanouk or an assessment of Sihanouk’s activities and importance. By failing to discuss the Sihanouk years in detail, Gunn misses the opportunity to examine a stretch of time that was marked, or scarred, by consistent and systematic monarchical manipulation, a phrase that aptly characterises Sihanouk’s career and his personalised rule.

• Tags: Cambodia, David Chandler, Geoffrey C. Gunn, Indochine, Issue 13, Sihanouk