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Post-Ayutthaya historiography

The history of the Ayutthaya Kingdom overall has been a neglected period of historiography in Thailand, as well as abroad, characterized by well-researched and popular histories of subperiods of Ayutthaya. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit 's " A History of Ayutthaya: Siam In the Early Modern World ", published in 2017, was the first English-academic book to have analyzed the full four hundred years of the Ayutthaya Kingdom's existence. The historiography of Southeast Asia originated from post-colonial capitals. As Thailand had never been fully colonized, it never had a European patron from which national histories could be written about themselves until the arrival of the Americans in the 1960s.

In the early Rattanakosin period, King Rama I compiled all surviving Ayutthaya law records and published the Three Seals Law in 1805. Early Rattanakosin period documents traced their "national" origins to the founding of Ayutthaya in 1351. In the early 20th-century however, Thai elites, influenced by Western ideas of European nationalism and the nation state, used that framework to create a nationalist history of Thailand, implementing it in ways deemphasized Ayutthaya's importance to Thai history by portraying the Sukhothai Kingdom as the first "Thai" kingdom or golden age of "Thai-ness" (Buddhism, Thai-style democracy, free trade, abolition of slavery), Rattanakosin as the "rebirth", and Ayutthaya as a period of decline between Sukhothai and Rattanakosin. This resulted in Ayutthaya being largely forgotten in the historiography of Thailand for half a century following the works of Prince Damrong in the early 20th century.

The nationalist-themed histories of Ayutthaya, pioneered by Prince Damrong, primarily featured the stories of kings fighting wars and the idea of territorial subjugation of neighboring states. These historical themes remains influential in Thailand and in Thai popular history up until the present, which has only been challenged by a newer generation of historians and academics in Thailand and abroad starting in the 1980s, emphasizing the long-neglected commercial and economic aspects which were important to Ayutthaya. New released sources and translations from a variety of historical records (China, the Netherlands, etc...) have made the researching of Ayutthaya history more accessible in the past two and three decades.

Since the 1970s, newer generations of academics have come up and challenged the old historiography, paying more attention and publishing works about the history of Ayutthaya, prominently beginning with Charnvit Kasetsiri 's " The Rise of Ayudhya ", published in 1977. Kasetsiri, in 1999, argues that, "Ayutthaya was the first major political, cultural, and commercial center of the Thai."