Both of these books begin in 1860, the year that King Norodom inherited the Cambodian throne from his father, Ang Duong. Three years later, Norodom and the French would sign an agreement making Cambodia part of the French colonial empire. That both books should choose 1860 rather than 1863 as the date for their history's origin is telling, for each volume attempts, in different disciplines, to perform a history that undermines the standard categories and classifications that have dominated Cambodia ever since, for Khmer and non-Khmer alike.
Penny Edwards's book, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945, begins with the story of one of Pol Pot's pseudonyms, “The Original Khmer.” This was the term given to the class of upland minority groups by a previous generation of Khmer nationalists, so Pol Pot was reappropriating a fantasy of indigeneity and claiming a symbolic racial legitimacy for his program. Edwards quickly...
