It is not often these days to find scholars of Southeast Asia with exceptional breadth and depth, prescience, and commitment who stick to their creed until the end. A longtime teacher and researcher based at Yale University, Jim Scott was from a different mould. His rise to fame was in the mid-1970s when he came up with the influential volume The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. But the book that changed my outlook on him was The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. This study explained the highlands in mainland Southeast Asia covering Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and four provinces of southern China.
