As the violent conflict in southern Thailand has escalated since the beginning of the 2000s, there has been a markedly increased interest in the history of the region among scholars based in Southeast Asia and beyond. Reflecting this broader development, Ghosts of the past in southern Thailand is an edited volume containing a ‘small selection’ of the papers presented at a conference about the influence of nationalist histories of Patani, held at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University in December 2009 (p. x). Among the thirteen contributors are several of the world's leading Anglophone and Southeast Asian experts on the region's history.

In an apparent attempt to organise the diverse contributions thematically, the main chapters of the book, apart from the editor's introduction, have been divided into four parts, of which the second, entitled ‘Patani's place in Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern Islamic networks’, and the fourth, entitled ‘The struggle for control of Patani and its history’ are the most coherent. It is above all the last part which corresponds to the main title of the book, Ghosts of the past in southern Thailand — at least if the phrase is to be understood as indicating a concern with the way history is used and understood in the region today.

Two of the chapters in the first part of the book, ‘Pluralism and identity in Patani's history’, contain English translations of key historical texts relating to Patani's early history, including an important Dutch description of Patani in the beginning of the seventeenth century, translated by Anthony Reid, and a survey of various Chinese sources from the sixth to the nineteenth century, collected and commented on by Geoff Wade. Although it may be useful to have English translations of these sources, it is not clear why they have been included in the edited volume. The Dutch account is only one among many important European accounts of Patani in the first half of the seventeenth century — some of which are far less well-known to historians of the region — and many, if not most, of the Chinese texts have already been translated and published in English (G. Wade, ‘From Chaiya to Pahang’, in D. Perret et al., eds, Études sur l'histoire du sultanat de Patani, 2004; Ishii Yoneo, ed., The junk trade from Southeast Asia, 1998).

The most important contribution in the book is, in my opinion, Francis R. Bradley's chapter ‘Siam's conquest of Patani and the end of Mandala relations, 1786–1838’, which is found in the third part of the book under the heading ‘Alternative histories of Patani's decline and fall’. Based on contemporary and, for the most part seemingly reliable, European accounts of the Siamese subjugation of Patani, Bradley paints a vivid picture of the atrocities committed by the conquering Siamese against the population of Patani in their attempt to achieve a lasting domination of the region. The tactics included massacres, enslavement, and environmental warfare; taken together they amounted to what in contemporary terminology is generally referred to as systematic ethnic cleansing (my words). In his contribution, Bradley not only adds important — and, in the light of the present conflict, highly controversial — pieces of evidence about the historical relationship between Patani and Siam; he also effectively questions the established scholarly view of precolonial warfare in Southeast Asia as a relatively non-lethal affair with few casualties (p. 149).

As often is the case with conference volumes, the quality of the contributions vary and several chapters, particularly in the last part of the book, are largely descriptive and would have been greatly improved if the authors had attempted to analyse their cases from theoretical and comparative points of view. This criticism is also, to an extent, valid for the book as a whole. The introduction, particularly the first half, provides a useful (but lamentably short) historiographical sketch, but there is no attempt to bring the diverse contributions together in a concluding discussion or to analyse the importance of history in the present conflict more generally or in a regional or global comparative perspective.

There are some inaccuracies and errors that preferably should have been edited out, such as the now generally refuted suggestion that Raja Kuning might have ruled Patani for more than fifty years until the early 1690 (p. 73). Differences of opinion between the authors are evident in some passages — such as in Bradley's questioning of Reid's assessment of precolonial warfare or his criticism of Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian's treatment of the Siamese subjugation of Patani in 1785–86 and 1831–32 (p. 159, n. 26). These could have been debated and highlighted more thoroughly if the contributors in their arguments had engaged more with one another.

In spite of these critical remarks, Ghosts of the past in southern Thailand contains several important contributions to the understanding of both the history of Patani in itself and the contemporary struggle over the interpretation of the region's past. Apart from Bradley's chapter, some of those that deserve special mention include Barbara Watson Andaya's chapter about the role of symbols and sounds, such as gates, elephants, cannons and drums, for the creation of a Patani identity; Azyumardi Azra's chapter on Patani's role in global and regional Islamic networks; Iik Arifin Mansurnoor's chapter about the ‘Jawi’ (mainly Malay) historiography of Patani; and Duncan McCargo's study of how history is used in militant leaflets spread by different groups in the present conflict. The book should be of great interest to students and scholars of the history of Patani and Southeast Asia more broadly as well as to anyone concerned with understanding the present conflict in southern Thailand.