IN AN age of national self-determination, when country after country is
gaining or regaining autonomy, Thailand is all but unique. Alone in
Southeast Asia, Thailand has maintained sovereign power within the historic
past; while the greater part of Asia and Africa, in recent centuries, have
been parts of European empires, Thailand has hardly been invaded, and
never conquered, by Western arms.

Partly because Thailand has never been under Western control, this
nation is, perhaps, less well known in the Western world than almost any
other. Yet the winds of change have affected Thailand no less because she
has maintained political autonomy; in some ways, indeed, Thailand's leaders
have been the more ready to adopt new ideas, new techniques, new ways
of looking at resources, because nationalism there has been less of an issue.
The present shape of the Thailand economy, the patterns of its recent growth,
and the paths it is likely to follow in the future hold interest, then, not merely
for their own sake, but as a possible indicator of how the whole of the non-
colonial but still underdeveloped world may in time react, when present
political feeling no longer obscures the longer-range problems of economic
growth.

Statistics are fragmentary, reliable estimates of resource potential and use
still lacking for most sectors of the Thai economy. And such information as
is available is scattered in obscure periodicals and learned journals.

Perhaps a major merit of the present volume is that it gathers together
many of these separate bits of information and presents them, for the first
time, between the covers of a single volume. This book is not a comprehen-
sive study of all aspects of life in Thailand; it is, however, a more comprehen-
sive stocktaking of Thai physical and economic geography than has yet
been presented in English.

The inspiration for this volume, and more than half the material of the book,
is by Dr. Robert L. Pendleton, Knight Commander, Order of the Crown of
Thailand, holder of the David Livingstone Centenary Medal of the HispanicSociety of America

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