Pen and Sail: Literature and History in Early Bangkok

Pen and Sail combines intellectual history and economic history. Nidhi argues that the emergence of a market economy in the early Bangkok era (1782–1855) was the driving force behind a major change in mentality and worldview seen in poetry, early prose works, biographies of the Buddha, scripts for chanting the Jataka tales, language primers, manuals of behavior, and revisions of the royal chronicles.