ABSTRACT
This is a book about borders in the Greater Mekong Sub-region – to use contemporary terminology. One of the striking features of this book is that it incorporates work by both historians and social scientists, including political scientists and scholars in development studies and anthropology. In this introduction, I want to explain the rationale for this. I have also come at this book with an abiding interest in the state. This has undoubtedly infl uenced the way in which I have edited the individual chapters, even if ostensibly this is a book about borders. A real challenge of this project has been the extent to which one can talk meaningfully about the state in a book which spans some six hundred years of history and a broad geographical and cultural terrain, and thus arguably incorporates a wide variety of state forms.2 This is also something I want to address here, setting out what it is the book is hoping to achieve by placing discussions of the state from very different historical time periods alongside each other. Not all the contributors to this book are thinking about borders in the same way, which is healthy. Nevertheless, the different approaches contained within this book require some explanation and this too will form part of this opening chapter. Finally, while the book aims to speak beyond the realms of area studies, the fact of its geographical focus requires some comment. Some thoughts, therefore, on how the book conceives of the Greater Mekong Sub-region in a way which further unites the book’s individual chapters comprises the penultimate section of this introductory chapter, prior to an outline of the book’s structure.
