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S0REN Iv ARSSON, Creating Laos: The Making of a Lao Space between Indochina and Siam, 1860-1945. (NIAS Monographs 112). Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008. 238 pages, euro 53.00. ISBN 978-87-7694-022-5
The nation-state of Laos is widely regarded as a contingent product of colonial history, a small remnant of the disintegrated Lao kingdom of Lan Sang. The Mekong river, lifeline of the Lao people, now constitutes the better part of the border between Laos and Thailand. While the vast majority of the ethnic Lao live in Thailand today, the Lao in Laos constitute hardly more than half of the six million inhabitants of this ethnically diverse country.
The intriguing book Creating Laos, written by the Danish historian Dr. Soren Ivarsson, tackles the question of how "Laos" came into being as a national space under French colonial rule. Threatened with being absorbed into the Thai realm and treated by the French as a colonial backwater and minor part of Vietnamese-dominated Indochina, the way to Lao nationhood was a complex and uncertain process. Lao national identity emerged only slowly in the crossfire of pan-Thai nationalism and French colonialist strategies. Dr. Ivarsson provides an excellent study of this process, based on an analysis of Lao, Thai and Western primary sources.
Following Anderson's influential idea of the nation as an imagined community, Ivarsson traces the role of media and institutions in the constitution of a genuine Lao cultural nationalism. Moreover, he analyzes the influence of Thai and Vietnamese nationalist discourses and of French attempts to sever traditional cultural links between Lao and Thai. The first chapter of his work is dedicated to the colonial encounter in the 19th century, when the French extended their administrative control to the Lao territories in the Mekong basin, thereby challenging Siamese dominance in the region. Inspired by Thongchai Winichakul's study of the Thai "geo-body", Ivarsson examines the transformation from pre-colonial concepts of multiple suzerainty in the Lao territories to Western notions of exclusive territorial rights and sovereignty. While the French claimed to fulfill...