The Crisis of the Nineteenth Century

The first sixty years of the nineteenth century form the darkest portion of Cambodia’s recorded history prior to the Armageddon of the 1970s. Invaded and occupied repeatedly by Thai and Vietnamese forces, the kingdom also endured dynastic crises and demographic dislocations. For a time in the 1840s, it ceased to exist as a recognizable state. Just as Jayavarman VII’s totalizing ideology can be compared in some ways to the ideology of Democratic Kampuchea, the first half of the nineteenth century bears some resemblance to the 1970s in terms of foreign intervention, chaos, and the sufferings of the Cambodian people.