The Geo-Body of Vietnam
In 1983, Benedict Anderson argued in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism that nations are “imagined,” and that one of the ways they are…
Wikipedia and Vietnamese Historical Scholarship
Ok, I know Wikipedia is not “scholarship,” but I’m going to use it to talk about scholarship anyway, because I just read an entry on the Vietnamese version of Wikipedia…
Nguyễn Phương on the Origins of the Vietnamese Nation
Nguyễn Phương was a Catholic priest and historian who worked at the University of Hue in the 1960s. In 1965 he published a book entitled Việt Nam thời khai sinh…
On Not Theorizing the Nation in Vietnam
The nation (dân tộc) is a critical concept in Vietnamese scholarship. It is a concept which is ubiquitous in Vietnamese writings, and yet it is extremely under-theorized. In the 1950s,…
Debating Industrial Civilization in 1930s Burma
One topic which I would love to read a book about is Southeast Asian intellectual history. Such a book, however, has never been written. In fact, it hasn’t even really…
The Rhythm of Ships and Suffering Chinese in Colonial Sarawak
I was reading the Sarawak Gazette from the 1890s, when Sarawak was under the control of the Brooke family, and I was looking at how the news from Kuching, the…
The Early History of the Eastern Part of the Southeast Asian Mainland
I recently received a copy of a new book entitled Ancient Vietnam: History, Art and Archaeology by Anne-Valérie Schweyer, a French scholar whose specialty is Cham epigraphy. It was published…
In the Darkness of a Colonial Singaporean Prison Cell
In the nineteenth century, colonial officials in Singapore were proud of their prison system, and particularly proud of their “convict prison.” This was a place for criminals who had been…
The Differing Customs of the Qing People
I was reading the Khâm Định Việt Sử Thông Giám Cương Mục and found some interesting entries in the year 1663. In the seventh lunar month of that year the…
Tự Đức’s Dismissal of Sĩ Nhiếp
One of the stereotypes which the Nguyễn Dynasty has suffered from is that it was “overly Sinitic/Confucian,” and that this made them impractical to the extent that they could not…