The Wex Habit in 1950s Burma
In the 1950s, Burma had just recently become independent. Its citizens were engaged in the monumental task of building a post-colonial nation. This took daily effort, but fortunately the Burmese…
The Evils of Quốc Ngữ #4
There is a text known as the Việt sử lược or the Đại Việt sử lược which was reportedly compiled in the fourteenth century. During the Ming occupation, it was…
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…