Cambodia and the West, 1500-2000

Book excerpt: This volume brings together an interdisciplinary team of established and emerging scholars from the disciplines of history, political science and communication studies, to provide a historical reappraisal of Cambodia’s relationships with the West. Contributors to the volume examine moments of historical import in Cambodia's history, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. These include Cambodia’s first contacts with European mercantilism; the establishment of formal French colonialism and commercialism; British peace enforcement and diplomacy after the Second World War; independence, modernisation and the onset of the Cold War and the United Nations peace process; and the Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal of more recent times. The result is a unique and significant new analysis of some of Cambodia’s most controversial interactions with the West, demonstrating how far the West has shaped the development of Cambodia in the contemporary epoch.