INTRODUCTION

 

This book will examine roughly two thousand years of Cambodian his- tory. Chapters 2 through 5 carry the story up to the end of the eigh- teenth century; the remaining chapters deal with the period between 1794 and 2007.

One reason for writing the book has been to close a gap in the histo- riography of Southeast Asia. No lengthy history of Cambodia has ap- peared since the publication of Adhémard Leclère’s Histoire du Cambodge in 1914.1 Subsequent surveys, in French and English, have limited themselves to the study of particular eras or have relied pri- marily on secondary sources.2 Over the last sixty years or so, moreover, many of Leclère’s hypotheses and much of his periodization—to say nothing of his style of approach—have been revised by other scholars, weakened by new documents, or altered by archaeological findings. The colonial era ended in 1953 and needs examination in terms of preceding history; moreover, the so-called middle period discussed in Chapters 5 through 7 has often been ignored even though it clearly forms a bridge between Angkor and the present.

The time has come, in other words, to reexamine primary sources, to synthesize other people’s scholarly work, and to place my own research, concerned mainly with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, into the framework of a general history, with a nonspecialist audience, as well as undergraduates, in mind.

As it stands the book examines several themes. One of these has to do with the effects on Cambodian politics and society of the country’s location​​ between Thailand and Vietnam. This theme, which is discussed in detail in Chapters 6 and 7, has been crucial since the second half of the eigh- teenth century and has recently faded in importance. For over two hun- dred years, beginning in the 1780s, the presence of two powerful, antagonistic neighbors forced the contentious Cambodian elite either to prefer one or the other or to attempt to neutralize them by appealing to an outside power. Cambodian kings tried both alternatives in the nine- teenth century. Later on, Norodom Sihanouk, Lon Nol, and Pol Pot all attempted the second; the regime of the State of Cambodia (SOC), for- merly the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, which lasted from 1979 until 1991, committed itself to the patronage of Vietnam. A UN protec- torate (1991–93) neutralized the contending foreign patrons of Cambo- dia by removing it from Cold War rivalries. In the late 1990s Cambodia and Vietnam joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the Kingdom of Cambodia, established under that name in 1993, has so far avoided seeking a dominant foreign patron, although in recent years China has emerged as an increasingly important ally and benefactor of the regime.

Another theme, really a present-day one, has to do with the relation- ship of contemporary Cambodians to their past. The history of Angkor, after all, was deciphered, restored, and bequeathed to them by their French colonial masters. Why had so many Cambodians forgotten it, or remembered it primarily as myth? What did it mean to have the memo- ries and the grandeur brought back to life, in times of dependence? What happened to the “times between” Angkor and the modern era? And in what ways are the post-Angkorean years, the colonial era, and what has happened since 1954 connected to these earlier periods? How are the revolutionary events of the 1970s to be remembered, taught, and internalized? There has even been pressure from the government to play down the teaching of Cambodian history as too controversial.

A third theme arises from the pervasiveness of patronage and hierar- chies in Cambodian thinking, politics, and social relations. For most of Cambodian history, it seems, people in power were thought (by them- selves and nearly everyone else) to be more meritorious than others. Older people were also ideologically privileged. Despite some alter- ations these arrangements remained unchanged between Cambodia’s so-called Indianized phase in the early years if the present era and the onset of Theravada Buddhism in the fourteenth century, when some egalitari- anism, but not much, seeped into Cambodian social relations.3 The widespread acceptance of an often demeaning status quo meant that in Marxist terms Cambodians went through centuries of mystification. If this is so, and one’s identity was so frequently related to subordination, what did political independence mean?

A final theme, related to the third, springs from the inertia that seems to be characteristic of many rural societies like Cambodia. Until very re- cently, alternatives to subsistence agriculture and incremental social im- provements of any kind were rarely available to most Cambodians and were in any case rarely sought, as the outcome could be starvation or punishment at the hands of those in power. In the meantime, crops had to be harvested and families raised, as they had been harvested and raised before. The way things had always been done in the village, the family, and the palace was seen as the way things should be done. Clearly, this attitude suited elite interests and kept the rest of society in line, but the process may well have been less cynical than we might wish to think. After all, how else was stability to be maintained? Throughout Cambodian history, in any case, governance (or rajakar, literally “royal work”) was the privilege enjoyed by people freed in some way from the obligation of growing their own food. The governed grew food for those above them in exchange for their protection.

This conservative cast of mind has led some writers to suggest that, at least until the 1970s, Cambodia and its people were unchanging and asleep. The notion of changelessness suited the French colonial adminis- tration, as it implied docility. For later observers there has been some- thing “un-Cambodian” about revolutionary efforts, however misguided and inept, to break into a new kind of life and something un-Cambodian about the country becoming a player on the global scene.

The notion of changelessness, of course, is an oversimplification of events, but it has persisted for a long time among students of Cambo- dian history and among Cambodians with a conservative point of view. The notion will be undermined in this book, for each of the chapters that follow records a major transformation in Cambodian life. The first perceptible one came with the mobilization of population and resources to form a somewhat Indianized polity at the start of the Christian era, discussed in Chapter 2. Another followed the concentration of power at Angkor in the ninth and tenth centuries, which is described in Chapter

3. A state emerged at Angkor that some scholars have seen as a classic example of Karl Wittfogel’s notion of oriental despotism or of Marx’s concept of an Asiatic mode of production and which has bequeathed an extraordinary legacy of religious monuments and sculpture.4 Still an- other transformation, discussed in Chapter 4, overtook the Khmer when their capital was damaged by Cham invaders in 1177 and was rebuilt into a Buddhist city by the Khmer monarch Jayavarman VII, who was a Mahayana Buddhist. In the century following his death in 1220, still an- other transformation occurred: the conversion of most Cambodians from a loose-fitting form of Shaivistic Hinduism, with perhaps some Mahayana overtones, to Theravada Buddhism, the religion of the new kingdoms that were coming into being in what is now central Thailand. These changes are discussed in Chapter 5. The abandonment of Angkor in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the southward drift of Cam- bodia’s demographic center of gravity in this period probably had even more profound effects.

Because the sources are so thin and unreliable, the middle period of Cambodian history, extending from the abandonment of Angkor to the imposition of French control, is difficult to study, but it is clear that it was very different from its Angkorean forebear. For one thing, the spread of Theravada Buddhism (and its corollary, Thai cultural influ- ence) diminished the importance of priestly families close to the king who had crowded around the throne looking for preferment. In Angko- rean times, these families had controlled much of the land and man- power around Angkor through their connections with royally sponsored religious foundations. As these foundations were replaced by wats (Theravada Buddhist temples), the forms of social mobilization that had been in effect at Angkor broke down, and so did the massive and com- plicated irrigation system that had allowed Angkorean populations to harvest two or sometimes three crops of rice per year. The elite grew less numerous as a result of these changes and out-migration, while its inter- ests became more commercial. 

Unfortunately for us, these transformations occurred in a very poorly documented era. Through documents, we can examine Cambodian soci- ety before and after the transformations, but not while they were taking place. We have no clear idea, for example, why so many people changed religions when they did or how the process played out. Although there were clearly some economic incentives involved, it is hard to say why (and when) a landholding Angkorean elite transformed itself into, or was replaced by, an elite more interested in trade.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cambodia became a vic- tim of its location. Its capital region (Phnom Penh/Udong/Lovek) lay at the eastern edge of the Theravada cultural zone that included Burma and Siam, and it was very close to the expanding southern frontier of Sini- cized Vietnam. The region, in other words, lay along a cultural fault line. This fact affected the thinking and behavior of Cambodia’s leaders, drawn into games of realpolitik that they could never expect to win. By the end of the eighteenth century, Cambodia had been devastated by civil wars and invasions from both sides; it was even without a monarch for several years. The early 1800s, discussed in Chapters 6 and 7, formed perhaps the darkest portion of the post-Angkorean era. By the mid-nineteenth century, Cambodia was almost a failed state. After a brief taste of independence under King Duang (r. 1848–60), the kingdom suc- cumbed to French protection. Its rulers probably preferred this state of af- fairs to continuing Thai hegemony, but French rule soon came to resemble the “civilizing mission” imposed upon Cambodia earlier by the Viet- namese when the monarch’s autonomy had also been sharply reduced.

The economic, social, and cultural changes of the colonial period in Cambodia resembled those that occurred elsewhere in Southeast Asia, but they were less intense than those that affected Java, Burma, and the Philippines under systematic colonial rule. As in these other colonies, however, the changes that swept through Cambodia helped to put to- gether the framework for the Cambodian nation-state that emerged very briefly in 1945 and again in 1953.5

The three most obvious transformations in the colonial era discussed in Chapters 8 and 9, were in foreign trade, communications, and de- mography. Rice and corn, grown for the first time in large quantities for export, and rubber, grown for the first time altogether, now linked Cam- bodia with the world outside Southeast Asia. Its economy, never espe- cially strong, became partially dependent on this outside world. Nothing altered with political independence; most of Cambodia’s for- eign exchange throughout the 1950s and 1960s came from earnings on the export of rice, rubber, and corn.

Perhaps the most visible difference between colonial and precolonial Cambodia, however, had to do with communications. By the 1920s, one could travel across Cambodia by car in a couple of days—a journey that had taken months just fifty years before. Cambodians began moving around the country by road and rail and found markets for their prod- ucts opening up. The social changes that accompanied this new freedom of movement were obviously important, but they are hard to document precisely.

Finally, for every Cambodian who had greeted the French (if the im- age is appropriate) in 1863, there were four to say good-bye. Cambo- dia’s population, estimated at slightly less than a million when the protectorate was declared, had risen to more than four million by the early 1950s. By keeping the kingdom at peace and by introducing some improvements in hygiene, the French presided over a demographic revo- lution that, when it intensified in the 1960s, soon put serious pressures on Cambodian resources. Since the 1980s these pressures have become even more severe, and Cambodia now has thirteen million people.6

It is difficult to say how decisive the Japanese occupation of Cambo- dia in World War II was, particularly as the French remained in nominal control until March 1945. With hindsight, however, it is clear that the summer of 1945, when Japan granted Cambodia its independence, had a profound effect on many Cambodian young people. In the late 1940s after the French returned, a new political ideology based on resistance rather than cooperation and on independence rather than subordination also took hold among many rural Cambodians, as well as in sectors of the Buddhist clergy and the educated elite. Some of these people opted for a revolutionary alternative to the status quo, occasionally with disas- trous effects. These developments in the 1940s and early 1950s, dis- cussed in Chapter 10, continued as an undertone to Cambodian political ideology ever since. Cambodia gained its independence in 1953, but its economy re- mained much as it had been under the French. Under the relatively be- nign dictatorship of the former king,  now titled Prince Norodom Sihanouk, which lasted from 1955 to 1970, education expanded, the economy flourished, and the country enjoyed a period now regarded by most Cambodians over fifty as a kind of golden age. By the mid-1960s, however, as the Vietnam War intensified and as Sihanouk’s ability to control Cambodia’s politics diminished, new forces came into play, in- cluding a revolutionary movement dominated from the shadows by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) led by a former schoolteacher, Saloth Sar, who later took the name Pol Pot.

In March 1970 Cambodia’s National Assembly voted to remove the prince from power. Soon afterward the new, pro-American government declared that Cambodia had become a republic. This move, which ended over a thousand years of Cambodian kingship, which was re- stored in 1993, occurred in the context of a Vietnamese Communist in- vasion, U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and a burgeoning civil war inside Cambodia between the government and forces allegedly loyal to Sihanouk. The latter were soon controlled by the CPK, and a brutal civil war lasted until April 1975, when the Communists, known popu- larly in the West as the Khmer Rouge, were victorious.

Over the next three years, many of Cambodia’s institutions were de- stroyed or overturned, and the urban population, forcibly exiled from towns and cities, was put to work alongside everybody else (except for soldiers and CPK cadres) as agricultural laborers. The new regime abol- ished money, markets, formal schooling, Buddhist practices, and private property. In a headlong rush toward a socialist Utopia, nearly two mil- lion Cambodians, or one in four, died of overwork, malnutrition, and misdiagnosed diseases or were executed.

The regime of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) effectively destroyed it- self when its leaders decided in 1977, with Chinese encouragement, to wage war on the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. By that time, economic disaster in the countryside and uncertainty about the loyalty of high- ranking CPK members had led Pol Pot and his colleagues to set purges of the CPK in motion, during which at least fifteen thousand people were executed at the regime’s secret prison after interrogation and after providing detailed, but often spurious, confessions.7 Tens of thousands of others, especially in the eastern part of the country, were later killed for allegedly supporting the Vietnamese incursions of 1977 and 1978. These men and women were said to have Cambodian bodies and Vietnamese minds. Such actions hastened the collapse of DK and paved the way for a Vietnamese invasion. After 1979, Cambodia, known as the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) and later as the State of Cambodia (SOC), struggled to its feet under Vietnamese protection. For several years, the regime submitted to Vietnamese guidance and control, particularly in the realms of defense, internal security, and foreign relations.

Throughout the 1980s, repeated votes in the United Nations condemned Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia and allowed DK representatives to occupy Cambodia’s UN seat. Lacking diplomatic recognition (aside from allies of Vietnam), the PRK was unable to obtain development assistance, so the country’s economic recovery was slow. Resistance forces, claiming loyalty to Sihanouk, the CPK, and an amorphous middle-class grouping, found sanctuary in Thailand and received political support from the United Nations that was spearheaded by the United States and China. Throughout the 1980s, Pol Pot’s forces, esti- mated at between twenty thousand and forty thousand armed men and women, also benefited from extensive Chinese military aid.

The process of rediscovering and reshaping Cambodia’s identity, which is not the same as reconstructing its prerevolutionary appearance, continued through the 1990s and beyond, as did yet another transformation whereby Cambodia today has become part of the wider community of Southeast Asian nations and moved into the global marketplace. Given the importance of these successive transformations and be- cause coherent economic data about Cambodia are so scarce, this book says very little about Cambodia’s resources or its economy, except in passing. Aside from recent and sizable discoveries of oil offshore, as dis- cussed in the final chapter, these have been remarkably consistent over the two millennia to be examined in the book. Developments in the

manufacturing sector have also been significant since the early 1990s.

In early times, as discussed in Chapter 2, the cultivation of grain, probably wet rice for the most part, supported the people of the Mekong Delta in the region known to the Chinese as Funan. Chinese accounts tell us that farmers stored water in small, man-made ponds (trapeang in Khmer) which they used for bathing and perhaps for irrigation, much as they were to do until the upheavals of the 1970s, when Cambodia’s rural economy expanded rapidly and to a large extent broke down. The extensive hydraulic works at Angkor, discussed in Chapter 3, amplified this earlier technology. The relationships among the seasons, water, rice, and subsistence agriculture have remained crucial throughout Cambodian history. Supplements to the diet, however, may have changed somewhat. The amount of wild game has undoubtedly de- creased, and in recent times imported and processed items have become available. The mainstay supplements, however—fish, roots, locally grown spices—appear to have changed very little from one century to the next. The economy of Angkor, now receiving detailed scholarly attention, is somewhat peculiar because, unlike most neighboring states, the empire never used money of any kind.

Until very recently, Cambodia’s rural technology generally stayed the same. Pots, sickles, oxcarts, unglazed pottery, and cotton cloth, to name only five, appear to have changed little between the twelfth century, when they appeared on bas-reliefs at Angkor, and the present day.

A third consistency in the Cambodian economy lies in the field of ex- ports. Until the colonial era when plantation crops that were grown for export (primarily rubber, corn, pepper, and rice) transformed Cambodia’s national economy, the goods Cambodia exported were, for the most part, ones that grew wild in the woods. These included rhinoceros horns, hides, ivory, cardamom, lacquer, and perfumed wood. Because these exports paid for the luxuries imported by the Cambodian elite, it is important to note the symbiosis that existed between woodland populations responsible for gathering these products and the people who had settled in the agricultural plains. This relationship is examined in a nineteenth-century context in Chapter 6.

Another theme of the Cambodian economy is the country’s annual victimization by monsoons. Like many other countries of Southeast Asia, Cambodia has two distinct seasons rather than four. The rainy sea- son, dominated by the southeasterly monsoon, lasts from May to November. The rest of the year is dry. Over the years, rice farmers and administrators have calibrated their activities to the ebb and flow of these conditions. In the wet season much of Cambodia is under water. As a result, in precolonial times at least, military campaigns almost never began in wet weather; at the same time, because there was little for farmers to do in the fields once the rains had started, these months came to be favored by young men who wanted to spend short periods on the move or in monasteries as Buddhist monks.

Unlike the other countries of mainland Southeast Asia, Cambodia has no mountain ranges running north to south that might provide barriers to military penetration. Low ranges of hills mark off its northern frontier and parts of Cambodia’s frontier with Vietnam. These have never posed serious problems for invaders, either from Champa in Angkorean times or more recently from Vietnam. Cambodia’s vulnerability to attack, especially after the decline of Angkor, is a recurrent feature of its history and a theme of its more recent foreign relations. Conversely, in its periods of greatness, Cambodia expanded easily into the plains of eastern and central Thailand and extended its authority into the Mekong Delta, not yet occupied to any great extent by ethnic Vietnamese.

On the one hand, because Cambodia had no deep-water port of its own until the 1950s, most overseas commerce reached the Cambodian capital by coming upriver from the China Sea. On the other hand, foreign influences like foreign armies tended to come overland. The conversion of the kingdom to Theravada Buddhism discussed in Chapter 4 is an example of this process of infiltration and osmosis.

The transformations and continuities I have listed came under attack in 1975, when Cambodia’s historical experience was challenged and dis- credited by Democratic Kampuchea, which worked hard to dissolve continuities, real and imagined, between revolutionary Cambodia and anything that had happened in earlier times.8 We also have little idea how severe the damage was to rural Cambodian society during 1973 when U.S. B-52 bombers from Guam and Thailand dropped nearly twice as many tons of bombs on rural Cambodia as the United States had dropped on Japan in World War II.

The damage to the countryside and the Communists’ repudiation of the past had important effects on people’s memories and behavior. In the twenty-first century, Cambodia is a country that has been scarred by its recent past and identifies itself closely with more distant periods. It is the only country in the world that boasts a ruin on its national flag.

The complexity of Cambodia’s past should encourage historians to refrain from making rash predictions. It may still be too soon, and it is certainly very difficult, to speak with assurance about the prospects for Cambodian society in its partially globalized, postrevolutionary phase. But the times that DK spokespersons were accustomed to call two thou- sand years of history still remain relevant to recent events and to Cambodians today. For these reasons, they deserve the sustained attention that the following pages hope to provide.