Benjamin Batson (1942–1996) was an American mathematician and historian who studied 20th centuryThai history. He spent almost his entire professional life inSoutheast Asia.^[1]

Batson was born in Tennessee in 1942. Batson earned abachelor's degree in mathematics in 1963 atHarvard College, where he was elected to membership ofPhi Beta Kappa and played on the Harvard chess team. He briefly returned Tennessee to work at theOak Ridge National Laboratory. He then moved to Thailand, teaching mathematics atChulalongkorn University from 1964-66. After completing amaster's degree underWalter Vella at theUniversity of Hawaiʻi in 1968, he returned to Thailand to teach mathematics atChiang Mai University in the north of the country. He received grants from theEast–West Center, NDFL Act (Title IV), the Ford Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. While there he developed an interest in Thai history.^[1]

In 1969 he entered the Southeast Asia Program graduate program atCornell University, where his thesis on the end of Thailand'sabsolute monarchy and transition to aconstitutional monarchy was supervised byDavid K. Wyatt. While at Cornell Batson attracted the attention ofWalter LaFeber, the eminent historian of American foreign policy, whom he served under as a teaching assistant. Sifting through neglected files at the National Archives in Bangkok, Batson uncovered a long lost collection of papers in which the concept of democracy in Thailand was debated between the seventh Bangkok king and his ministers and advisers. He translated a selection of these and published them asSiam's Political Future: Documents from the End of the Absolute Monarchy^[2] in 1974. He was a research fellow at theAustralian National University in the late 1970s, during which time he revised his dissertation for publication asThe End of the Absolute Monarchy in Siam by theOxford University Press in 1984.^[3] He wrote a work on the Thai literary figure and political activist,Kulap Saipradit. He also began studying Japanese-Thai relations withShimizu Hajime inspiredSoutheast Asia under Japanese Occupation andThe Tragedy of Wanit: A Japanese Account of Wartime Thai Politics^[4] in 1980 and 1990, respectively.^[1]

Batson's last published piece, published in theJournal of Southeast Asian Studies, in March 1996, discussedPhra Sarasas, a figure who positioned himself as power-broker between the Japanese and Thai governments during the leadup toWorld War II.^[1]

Batson died unexpectedly ofheart disease in Singapore on January 7, 1996, at the age of 53.^[1]

• 1942 births
• 1996 deaths
• 20th-century American historians
• 20th-century American male writers
• Academic staff of the National University of Singapore
• Cornell University alumni
• Harvard College alumni
• Historians of Southeast Asia
• American male non-fiction writers
• American expatriates in Thailand
• University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa alumni
• American expatriates in Singapore
• American expatriates in Australia

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• Short description matches Wikidata