At the same time a biography and a history of how Cambodia became colonized by the French in the nineteenth century, "Cambodia's Bad Frenchmen "offers a captivating account of a little-known period of colonial history. Drawing on new materials from French, Vietnamese and Cambodian archives, it reconstructs a time during which France struggled to give meaning and substance to its Protectorate over Cambodia. The book focuses on those sitting on the boundaries between the worlds of the colonizers and the colonized: indigenous interpreters, go-betweens, concubines and their metis children, and...