Gunn, Geoffrey C. (Author)
Rowman & Littlefield
Physical Details: xix + 323 pp.; bibl.; index
Language: English
This book offers the first detailed English-language examination of the Great Vietnamese Famine of 1945, which left at least a million dead, and links it persuasively to the largely unexpected Viet Minh seizure of power only months later. Drawing on extensive research in French archives, Geoffrey C. Gunn offers an important new interpretation of Japanese--Vichy French wartime economic exploitation of Vietnam's agricultural potential. He analyzes successes and failures of French colonial rice programs and policies from the early 1900s to 1945, drawing clear connections between colonialism and agrarian unrest in the 1930s and the rise of the Viet Minh in the 1940s. Gunn asks whether the famine signaled a loss of the French administration's “mandate of heaven,” or whether the overall dire human condition was the determining factor in facilitating communist victory in August 1945. In the broader sweep of Vietnamese history, including the rise of the communist party, the picture that emerges is not only one of local victimhood at the hands of outsiders---French and, in turn, Japanese--- but the enormous agency on the part of the Vietnamese themselves to achieve moral victory over injustice against all odds, no matter how controversial, tragic, and contested the outcome. As the author clearly demonstrates, colonial-era development strategies and contests also had their postwar sequels in the “American war,” just as land, land reform, and subsistence-sustainable development issues persist into the present.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Wood, Donald C.;
(2012)
Ogata-Mura: Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village
(/isis/citation/CBB001421795/)
Article
Robert M. Baum;
(2016)
Prophetic Critiques of Colonial Agricultural Schemes: The Case of Alinesitoué Diatta in Vichy Senegal
(/isis/citation/CBB513589053/)
Book
Zhang, Jiayan;
(2014)
Coping with Calamity: Environmental Change and Peasant Response in Central China, 1736--1949
(/isis/citation/CBB001422302/)
Article
Francks, Penelope;
(2013)
Simple Pleasures: Food Consumption in Japan and the Global Comparison of Living Standards
(/isis/citation/CBB001421533/)
Article
Dorit Brixius;
(2018)
A Hard Nut to Crack: Nutmeg Cultivation and the Application of Natural History Between the Maluku Islands and Isle De France (1750s–1780s)
(/isis/citation/CBB685972928/)
Book
Bala, Poonam;
(2009)
Biomedicine as a Contested Site: Some Revelations in Imperial Contexts
(/isis/citation/CBB000950294/)
Article
Monnais, Laurence;
(2012)
Colonised and Neurasthenic: From the Appropriation of a Word to the Reality of a Malaise de Civilisation in Urban French Vietnam
(/isis/citation/CBB001200715/)
Book
Ebrahimnejad, Hormoz;
(2009)
The Development of Modern Medicine in Non-Western Countries: Historical Perspectives
(/isis/citation/CBB000933048/)
Book
Hayden (Hayden R.) Smith;
(2020)
Carolina's golden fields: inland rice cultivation in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670-1860
(/isis/citation/CBB273348836/)
Thesis
Aso, Michitake;
(2011)
Forests without Birds Science, Environment, and Health in French Colonial Vietnam
(/isis/citation/CBB001560839/)
Article
Smith, Elta;
(2009)
Imaginaries of Development: The Rockefeller Foundation and Rice Research
(/isis/citation/CBB000932845/)
Article
Ross, Corey;
(2014)
The Plantation Paradigm: Colonial Agronomy, African Farmers, and the Global Cocoa Boom, 1870s--1940s
(/isis/citation/CBB001421537/)
Book
Todd Tucker;
(2007)
The Great Starvation Experiment: Ancel Keys and the Men Who Starved for Science
(/isis/citation/CBB809511253/)
Book
Sheila Zurbrigg;
(2018)
Epidemic Malaria and Hunger in Colonial Punjab: Weakened by Want
(/isis/citation/CBB453593524/)
Thesis
Smith, Elta C.;
(2008)
Governing Rice: The Politics of Experimentation in Global Agriculture
(/isis/citation/CBB001561390/)
Book
Kathinka Sinha Kerkhoff;
(2014)
Colonising Plants in Bihar (1760-1950): Tobacco Betwixt Indigo and Sugarcane
(/isis/citation/CBB736218379/)
Book
Sharma, Jayeeta;
(2011)
Empire's Garden: Assam and the Making of India
(/isis/citation/CBB001421813/)
Book
Swindell, Ken;
Jeng, Alieu;
(2006)
Migrants, Credit and Climate: The Gambian Groundnut Trade, 1834--1934
(/isis/citation/CBB001422392/)
Book
Lucas Richert;
Jim Mills;
(2021)
Cannabis: Global Histories
(/isis/citation/CBB469806689/)
Book
Michael G. Vann;
Liz Clarke;
(2018)
The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam
(/isis/citation/CBB876051143/)
Be the first to comment!