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Preface With the deepening rapprochement between history and the social sciences, the past is no longer what it used to be. The past has ceased to be viewed as merely another country: the past lives on as an arena of debate and a flourishing field of interpretations. In the particular case of societies that were under the sway of imperial colonial powers, local scholars often write history with the clear intent of meeting the emotional demands of the nation. It must be a usable past, as Renato Constantino has said. Usually having received a Western-style education, the historian of and from a former colony confronts a host of challenges. History is written to edify the modern nation and speak to a culture whose traditional forms and aims of retelling the past differ from those of the West, while at the same time abiding by certain canons of Western historiography. These aims may be difficult to reconcile, although Soedjatmako’s argument about the polyinterpretability of history may be comforting. In writing this book, however, I found that history’s polyinterpretability can be located not only in a range of authors who represent different perspectives but even within myself as crafter of the historical narrative. In the course of my research but especially during the period of actual writing, I found that moments of uncertainty, speculation, and imagination were interspersed with moments of objectivity, empirical certainty, and factual rectitude. Moments of theory and logic welded with moments of sentiment and invention. Moments of ironical detachment joined moments when I felt the great need to thresh out misconceptions. Moments when I sprang to the defense of my natal land mingled with moments when I consciously fought the inordinate celebration of the indigenous . Moments when I wanted to glare back at the colonial gaze intersected with moments when I sought to overcome the traps of colonialist discourse. Moments when I was convinced that, despite the hazards of translation, local and national histories must be understood on their own terms rather than through Western lenses combined with those when I was also convinced such histories would be the poorer if they remained parochial and insular. Moments when I believed the past to be recoverable competed with those when I felt history is all fiction. These various moments converge in the text which, in its entirety, is of course meaningful to me. Despite its many failings, which are wholly my own, and notwithstanding errors I did not detect, which should not be held against the people whose names appear in the following paragraphs, I hope that, if not in toto, various sections and aspects of the text will be found meaningful by others as well. Luang Wichit Watthakan suggested that the historian is more than God because, with the might of a pen or a computer keyboard, he or she can change the past. Despite my inadvertent mistakes and lapses, my avowed goal could not be farther from the Thai intellectual’s suggestion of playing God. Rather, as someone struggling for existential consistency as a Christian, I find one biblical incident during the claiming of the Promised Land ( Josh. 5:13–14) highly instructive. After crossing the Jordan and just before leading a bloody conquest, Joshua sees “a man standing in front of him with a sword drawn in his hand.” During this vision , he inquires of the man, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”, to which the response is “Neither.” In the case of this book’s narrative, the standpoint I take is encapsulated in that response. Not that such matters as identities and allegiances are unimportant, for they definitely are. But, despite the incomprehensibilities of the past, it is my personal belief that the purposes of the Lord of history, whose thoughts are higher than my thoughts, are being accomplished in rather unfathomable ways. This belief I find to be liberating because within its bounded limits, I gratefully take the liberty of exploring and reinterpreting the past. The making of this work, which was originally presented as a doctoral thesis at Cornell University, has its own little history with a number of unexpected twists and turns. My first three weeks of archival diggings, which happened to be in London, had to be cut short by the death of my beloved father in Naga, in the Philippines. After a period of mourning, I returned to Europe and was surprised to receive the generosity of Rene Salvania, who selflessly shared...

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