Vietnam: A New History Hardcover - 2016 - 1st Edition

From the jacket flap

Vietnam's role in one of the Cold War's longest-running conflicts has meant that its past has been endlessly abused. Popular accounts have cherry-picked from the Vietnamese past to tell politicized, American-centered storieseither reducing the story of Vietnam and the Vietnamese to a noble tradition of anticolonial resistance embodied by the communist leader Ho Chi Minh, or alternatively seeking to rehabilitate American allies by making similarly essentialist claims about "the Vietnamese" and their history. Now, over forty years after the end of the American war in Vietnam, the events which created the modern state of Vietnam can be seen in truly historical perspective. Christopher Goscha's Vietnam: A New History tells the story of this fascinating and complex country on its own terms, emphasizing the contingency that characterizes Vietnam's history and the diversity of its people, polities, geography, and experiences as both colonized and colonizers. Goscha describes the complicated legacies of generations of emperors, rebels, priests, and colonizers, showing how various strains of imperialism that have shaped Vietnam and its culturenot only the crucial periods of Chinese, French, and Japanese rule, but also Vietnam's own colonial enterprises, as the Vietnamese gradually extended their influence southward from the Red River basin. He examines the many ways Vietnam has historically been divided, from the separate states ruled by Trinh and Nguyen military lords in the seventeenth century, to the three territorial subunits created by French colonizers in the nineteenth century, to the warring nations of Democratic Republic of Vietnam and Republic of Vietnam in the Cold War era. Vietnam first took its modern shape in 1802, but it has only existed along these boundaries for about 84 years, interrupted by French colonization in 1862 and then again by the wars of the 1940s-1970s. Goscha shows how Western colonialism was far from the only force bringing Vietnam into the

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Citations

• Choice, 03/01/2017, Page 0
• Kirkus Reviews, 07/15/2016, Page 0
• Library Journal, 09/01/2016, Page 122
• Publishers Weekly, 01/30/2017, Page 0