scholarly journals State formation on China’s southern frontier: Vietnam as a shadow empire and hegemon

HumaNetten ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Tuong Vu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Dyadic Interactions ◽  
Large Area ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Communist State ◽  
Vietnamese History ◽  
Mainland Southeast Asia

State formation in Vietnam followed an imperial pattern, namely, a process of conquests and annexations typical of an empire. At its peak in the early nineteenth century, the frontier of the Vietnamese empire encompassed much of today’s Cambodia and Laos. This imperial pattern was the basis on which the French built their Indochinese colony and the Vietnamese communist state built its modern hegemony. By re-examining Vietnamese history as that of an empire and hegemon, this paper challenges the nationalist historiography’s assumption about Vietnam’s need for survival from China as the driving force of Vietnamese history. In contrast, I argue that the threat to Vietnamese survival has come less from China than from other states on China’s southern frontier. Vietnam has in fact benefited from a positive synergy with China in much of its premodern and modern history. By situating Vietnamese state formation in the context of mainland Southeast Asia, I hope to correct the tendency in many studies that focus exclusively on Sino-Vietnamese dyadic interactions and that posit the two as opposites. Treating Vietnam as an empire or hegemon over a large area of mainland Southeast Asia also is essential to understand why Vietnamese sometimes did not automatically accept Chinese superiority despite the obvious “asymmetry” between them.

scholarly journals Before and after the wheel: Precolonial and colonial states and transportation in West Africa and mainland Southeast Asia

HumaNetten ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Charney
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Dyadic Interactions ◽  
Large Area ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Communist State ◽  
Vietnamese History ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Mainland Southeast Asia

State formation in Vietnam followed an imperial pattern, namely, a process of conquests and annexations typical of an empire. At its peak in the early nineteenth century, the frontier of the Vietnamese empire encompassed much of today’s Cambodia and Laos. This imperial pattern was the basis on which the French built their Indochinese colony and the Vietnamese communist state built its modern hegemony. By re-examining Vietnamese history as that of an empire and hegemon, this paper challenges the nationalist historiography’s assumption about Vietnam’s need for survival from China as the driving force of Vietnamese history. In contrast, I argue that the threat to Vietnamese survival has come less from China than from other states on China’s southern frontier. Vietnam has in fact benefited from a positive synergy with China in much of its premodern and modern history. By situating Vietnamese state formation in the context of mainland Southeast Asia, I hope to correct the tendency in many studies that focus exclusively on Sino-Vietnamese dyadic interactions and that posit the two as opposites. Treating Vietnam as an empire or hegemon over a large area of mainland Southeast Asia also is essential to understand why Vietnamese sometimes did not automatically accept Chinese superiority despite the obvious “asymmetry” between them.

An Anti-Vietnamese Rebellion in Early Nineteenth Century Cambodia: Pre-colonial Imperialism and a Pre-Nationalist Response

1975 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Chandler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Way

The “holy man's” (nak sel) rebellion against the Vietnamese that broke out in 1820 along the Cambodian-Vietnamese border is the best-documented one of its kind in pre-colonial Cambodia, and makes a useful addition to the literature of such revolts in Buddhist Southeast Asia. Its importance in Cambodian terms lies in its anti-Vietnamese character, the participation in its ranks of Buddhist monks, the collusion of Cambodian authorities, and the way in which these themes foreshadow Cambodian political thinking, before and after the arrival of the French.

Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Period; Twenty-Five Years On

1995 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard Y. Andaya ◽  
Barbara Watson Andaya
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
General Acceptance ◽  
Convenient Tool ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Asian History

The identity of “Southeast Asia” has been debated since the 1950s, when the region began to develop as an area of academic viability around which courses could be constructed, programmes built, and research published. Much less controversy has accompanied the growing use of “early modern”, a term which seems set to displace “precolonial” in periodizing Southeast Asian history. The phrase, of course, comes from scholarship on Europe, where it was popularized as a result of efforts to find shared “periods” that would facilitate the writing of a general history. It would be surprising if questions as to the applicability of “early modern” in Southeast Asia do not spark off some debate, especially in light of subaltern writings that reject the notion of modernity as a universal. For such historians the very invocation of the word implicitly sets a “modern Europe” against a “yet to be modernized non-Europe”. But whatever decision is made regarding terminology, scholarship on Southeast Asia is increasingly viewing a period that stretches from about the fifteenth to the early nineteenth century as rather different from those traditionally described as “classical” and “colonial/modern”. The term “early modern” itself is at present a convenient tool for historical reference, and only time will tell whether it will find general acceptance.

The Paradox of Nineteenth-century Population Growth in Southeast Asia: Evidence from Java and the Philippines

1987 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman G. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Rapid Growth ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Natural Increase ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Line Passing ◽  
Demographic Theory ◽  
Almost All

The paradox can be expressed simply: the population of nineteenth-century Southeast Asia apparently grew much more rapidly than precedent or demographic theory would have led us to expect. In the two areas for which we have the most and best data — Dutch Java and the Spanish Philippines — almost all the statistical evidence points to rates of natural increase reaching 1 per cent a year by the early nineteenth century and rising well above that level for most of the rest of the century. Though the evidence is much less clear for other countries in the region, it is generally compatible with a hypothesis of comparably rapid growth. In Siam, for example, the trend line passing through most nineteenth-century estimates reaches 1.3 per cent by the 1860s, 3 per cent by the 1890s.

Beyond control: Orientalist tensions and the history of the “upas tree” myth

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-189
Author(s):  
Tim Hannigan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Surrounding Atmosphere ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

The “upas tree” is one of the most enduring European myths about Southeast Asia. Accounts of a tree so toxic that it renders the surrounding atmosphere deadly can first be identified in fourteenth-century journey narratives covering what is now Indonesia. But while most other such apocrypha vanished from later European accounts of the region, the upas myth remained prominent and in fact became progressively more elaborate and fantastical, culminating in a notorious hoax: the 1783 account of J. N. Foersch. This article examines the history of the development of the upas myth, and considers the divergent responses to Foersch’s hoax amongst scientists and colonial administrators on the one hand, and poets, playwrights, and artists on the other. In this it reveals a significant tension within the emerging “Orientalist” discourse about Southeast Asia in the early nineteenth century.

Free Trade and State Formation: The Political Economy of Fisheries Policy in Britain and the United Kingdom circa 1780–1850

2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Gambles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Policy ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
State Formation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
British State ◽  
The Relationship

It is striking that historians of the early nineteenth century have been relatively reluctant to consider relationships between economic policy and the consolidation of the British state. In today's context, the economic and political challenges posed by both European integration and resurgent nationalism have generated hotly contested controversies on the political economy of state formation. From the perspective of the United Kingdom, the prospect of political and administrative devolution has forced us to address the implications of political decentralization for regional economic development (and vice versa) and to consider in turn the impact of these dynamics on the political integrity of a multinational state. For Britain, the period between circa 1780 and 1850 was characterized by unprecedented economic growth, imperial crisis and acquisition, and political consolidation. In a metropolitan sense the most dramatic feature of this process was, of course, the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. Insofar as historians of early nineteenth-century Britain have examined the relationship between “state formation” and economic policy, however, they have tended to focus on the ideas, politics, and pressures surrounding the retreat of the state from economic intervention. Thus in more general accounts it became axiomatic that the nineteenth-century state shrank progressively from social and economic intervention, liberating commerce, and resting the fiscal system on secure but modest direct taxation.More recently, the relationship between the concept of “laissez-faire” and British state formation has been dramatically revised and refined by Philip Harling and Peter Mandler.

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