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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Historians are ventriloquists, giving voice to plural pasts. We’re also soliloquists. Throughout this project, my inspirational and irresistible husband, Peter Bartu, and our radiant children, Benjamin, Maxine, and Lorenza, have all pulled me incessantly out of the past with their zest for the present, bringing light and fresh insights to what might otherwise have remained a quiet conversation between me and the men and women who walk the pages of this book. How, why, and with what effect people and ideas travel across time and space is a central focus of this book. In its various incarnations, the book’s manuscript travelled to and through France, Australia, Cambodia, Burma, and America. Our journey began with a wrong turn in a library. Fresh from a year as a media analyst with the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, I was browsing the Southeast Asia stacks in Cornell University’s Kroch collection in 1993, gathering materials for a planned PhD on Sino-Cambodian relations, when the gilded spines of some old French tomes caught my eye. Behind their quaint jackets, I found statements about the Khmer character and the temples of Angkor similar to the nationalist diatribes broadcast by the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian People’s Party, the royalist party Funcinpec, and the Buddhist Liberal Democrat Party whose propaganda it had been my job, as a United Nations officer, to analyze and summarize. That frisson of déjà-vu stretched into more than a decade of research, whose final outcome is this book. I could have found no better tutor at this juncture than Benedict Anderson, whose legendary course on Plural Societies framed my first analytical encounters with European colonialism, and who provided thought-provoking feedback on my initial scribblings. No less important were Vaddey and Blake Ratner, whose creative talents, powers of perception, and great humor warmed and have long outlasted my Ithaca winter. In 1994 I travelled to Australia to join my fiancé, Peter Bartu, who had become an inseparable part of my life and adventures since we first met over frogs legs and beer in Phnom Penh. We were married two years later. Peter’s intuitive grasp of the human condition, his sense of the Cambodian landscape, his gift for deciphering political machinations, his eclectic music and literature collection, his penchant for new adventures, and his unwavering enthusiasm for my work have all been vital ingredients of this book. My most significant other willing accomplice has been David Chandler, who supervised my doctoral dissertation at Monash University. David’s energy, his passion for history, and his generosity with ideas and materials added greatly to my thesis. Ian Mabbett’s erudite feedback on my dissertation, and insightful critiques by my examiners Thongchai Winichakul and Tony Reid all helped sculpt this book. In France in 1996, Michael Vann and David Deltesta guided me through colonial archives, and Christopher Goscha, Nasir Abdoul-Carime, and Serge Thion all gave generously of their time. Much of this book is in dialogue with the work of the brilliant art historian Ingrid Muan. This conversation was cut brutally short when Ingrid died, far too young, in Phnom Penh, in January 2005. Ingrid and I met in Phnom Penh in late 1999, and while I was juggling research and babies in later years, she generously shared her notes from the National Archives of Cambodia. Her scholarship informs much of what follows. My parents, John and Felicity, whose love of travel and books first stoked my curiosity for new places and strange tales, encouraged and indulged my interest in Cambodge with mailings of rare books, news clippings, long hours at photocopy shops, and visits to my research sites. Demelza Stubbing’s enterprise first got me to Cambodia in 1991, and her incisive intellect and political savvy have helped me to make sense of much of what I have found since. Demetra Tzanaki opened up new ways of thinking about culture and nationalism. Several sponsors backed my global roamings. A postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research 2000–2002, a Discovery Project Fellowship from the Australia Research Council 2003–2005, and a Harold White Fellowship at the National Library of Australia sustained the bulk of this book’s long gestation. A Fulbright Travel and Maintenance Award financed my year at Cornell. My PhD was funded by a Commonwealth Scholarship, a Robert Menzies Travel Award, a Monash Graduate Scholarship, and, when all that ran out in the months before completion, the Felicity Edwards Drifting Daughter’s...

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