Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present by Ben Kiernan (PDF)

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For many Westerners, the name Vietnam evokes images of a bloody televised American war that generated a firestorm of protest and brought conflict into their living rooms. In his sweeping account, Ben Kiernan broadens this vision by narrating the rich history of the peoples who have inhabited the land now known as Viet Nam over the past three thousand years. Despite the tragedies of the American-Vietnamese conflict, Viet Nam has always been much more than a war. Its long history had been characterized by the frequent rise and fall of different political formations, from ancient chiefdoms to imperial provinces, from independent kingdoms to divided regions, civil wars, French colonies, and modern republics. In addition to dramatic political transformations, the region has been shaped by its environment, changing climate, and the critical importance of water, with rivers, deltas, and a long coastline facilitating agricultural patterns, trade, and communications. Kiernan weaves together the many narrative strands of Viet Nam’s multi-ethnic populations, including the Chams, Khmers, and Vietnamese, and its multi-religious heritage, from local spirit cults to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Catholicism. He emphasizes the peoples’ interactions over the millennia with foreigners, particularly their neighbors in China and Southeast Asia, in engagements ranging from military conflict to linguistic and cultural influences. He sets the tumultuous modern period–marked by French and Japanese occupation, anticolonial nationalism, the American-Vietnamese war, and communist victory–against the continuities evident in the deeper history of the people’s relationships with the lands where they have lived. In contemporary times, he explores this one-party state’s transformation into a global trading nation, the country’s tense diplomatic relationship with China and developing partnership with the United States in maintaining Southeast Asia’s regional security,and its uncertain prospects for democracy.Written by a leading scholar of Southeast Asia, Viet Nam presents an authoritative history of an ancient land.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Kiernan’s dispassionate recording of the behaviour of the regional powers–Champa, Cambodia, China, India–should help to make Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times a durable work.”–Sophie Quinn-Judge, Times Literary Supplement”Ben Kiernan shifts his gaze eastward in this ambitious study, Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present…. By assessing the long durée, Kiernan reveals the multifaceted nature of Vietnam’s history and suggests that there was a relatively transient nature to the ebb and flow of the various dynasties that competed with one another within Vietnam’s territory…suggesting, quite rightly, that there were alternative historical paths that might have been taken….A clearly written and broad introductory overview to the history of Vietnam that is appropriate for an upper-level undergraduate class.” — Geoffrey C. Stewart, American Historical Review”In Viet Nam, Ben Kiernan synthesises three millennia of history in a beautiful book that aids the reader with numerous maps and over a dozen photographs documenting the daily life of the Vietnamese people. It is a work full of insights for students of Southeast Asia generally and, more specifically, for comparative historians and political scientists interested in nationalism, anti-colonialism, US foreign policy, and the reform and modernisation of socialism. By taking the long view, the author successfully liberates the history of Viet Nam from the reductionist view of a US military misadventure, revealing long-term trends in political organisation, culture and environmental changes.” — Vicken Cheterian, University of Geneva and Webster University Geneva, Europe-Asia Studies”Comprehensive yet readable … It will serve the needs of both experts in Vietnamese history and general readers interested in Vietnam…. Viet Nam’s ability to integrate ecology into political, cultural and economic history is truly impressive.” — Michael G. Vann, Asian Studies Review”Kiernan departs from nationalist narratives to investigate the changing cultural, political, and ecological relations of the multiethnic communities that inhabited the diverse regions of Vietnam. His deep historical study exposes the folly of reducing Vietnam to a war, a metaphor of US imperialism, or the experiences of one ethnicity. Adopting a long-term approach that combines microhistory and macrohistory to decipher the multicausal forces driving historical processes, the author examines a time span of 3,000 years, beginning with the first Bronze Age chiefdoms and ending with the changing fortunes of the contemporary nation-state….The analysis is innovative for incorporating the roles of climate, water, and geography in explanations of historical continuity or change and for making ample use of archaeological and textual source materials. Valuable for both newcomers and experts in Vietnamese history. Highly recommended.”–CHOICE”This ambitious survey is pathbreaking not only in its chronological scope (from prehistory to the present) and the breadth of its sources but also in its thematic reach….Although the war against the United States is an important part of Vietnam’s story, it takes its place in the broad sweep of history as just one episode in a long series of struggles that people have waged over this piece of land.”–Andrew J. Nathan, Foreign Affairs”[In] this major new history of the country…Kiernan makes the actualities of Vietnamese life and landscape a central focus…Where Kiernan excels is in his engagement with the complex cultural and environmental factors that make the country so distinctive. In particular, he highlights the country’s ‘aquatic culture’ from prehistoric times right up to this day…[He] makes sure that Vietnamese women themselves are heard in his narrative and are not simply defined by men…Kiernan’s readiness to detect and define the significant details lurking in the sweeping historical panorama, make Viet Nam a major contribution to contemporary Southeast Asian scholarship…[A] sympathetic study of a tenacious and capable people.”–Robin Gerster, Australian Book Review”This is a remarkably evocative, multifaceted, sophisticated, and original study not only of those groups who haltingly coalesced as Vietnamese, but also of the many peoples with whom they interacted, and indeed of an entire region during two millennia. This book, I suspect, will become a classic in Asian as well as Southeast Asian historiography.”–Victor Lieberman, University of Michigan”An audacious book, Kiernan’s Viet Nam presents the country’s long history to new, global audiences, eloquently showing how the deep past continues to shape and inform the present.”–David Biggs, author of Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta “This outstanding book shows that ‘Viet Nam has always been much more than a war.’ By making his themes the perennial continuities and changes in the vital ecologies and polyethnic cultures of the country, Ben Kiernan tells a story of shifting layers that is lucid and rich. His work is a kaleidoscope of Vietnamese history.”–Greg Lockhart, author of Nation in Arms: the Origins of the People’s Army of Vietnam”Kiernan offers a comprehensive overview of Vietnamese history from prehistoric times to the 21st century…A distinctive quality of this work is its inclusion of environmental and linguistic history. The author effectively explains how geography and changing weather patterns (droughts, etc.) impacted historical development and demonstrates how changes in language over time provides information about Vietnam’s past…Essential for all students of Vietnamese history. Extensive descriptions of Vietnam’s relations with its neighbors also make this valuable reading for those interested in Chinese or Southeast Asian history.”–Library Journal About the Author Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Professor of International and Area Studies at Yale University, where he founded the Cambodian Genocide Program and the Genocide Studies Program. He is the author of numerous books including The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 and Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐the best documented and researched book i ever read. Ben Kiernan doesn’t just go easy on historical details and authenticity, he went in depth and did a very great job of describing the real history of Vietnam.

⭐Vietnam is far far more than a war. As a region that’s been settled for thousands of years, and a trade nexus for the South China Sea, it has a long and complex history. No single volume could possibly cover the whole history of Vietnam, but Kiernan makes an able effort, trying to draw some cohesive themes out of a mass of history.Geography is destiny, and again and again water appears as a major theme. Rice based settled cultures flourished in the Red River delta in the north, the Mekong delta in the south, and the innumerable smaller rivers up and down the coast. Archaeological evidence records a culture that made great bronze drums and had complex chiefdoms. Vietnam enters the historical record roughly 2300 years ago as a province of China. The Vietnamese were ruled as internal vassals for roughly 1100 years, with intermittent rebellions, before finally breaking away under Ngô Quyen in 934. The next thousand years were a mess of feudal history, marked by the rise and fall of dynasties, civil wars, and a few great kings. The major trends of this era were the conquest of the southern Champa kingdom by firearms equipped Vietnamese armies, increasing trade across the region and with Europeans, and military victories over the Chinese, combined with an import of Confucian culture, and a system of scholarly exams based on knowledge of the Chinese classics.1887 marked the third turn in Vietnamese history, with the authoritative victory of the French over the Vietnamese, and the colonization of the last independent Vietnamese kingdoms. French rule was marked by exploitation, but also the introduction of the romanized Quoc Ngu alphabet, and the rise of a local vernacular culture rather than one based on Chinese classics. Journalists and revolutionaries agitated against the French, and syncreatic millenialist sects arose (the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao). The course of the first and second Indochina Wars are covered briefly, as well as Vietnam post-1975, with the slow redevelopment of the country postwar, and economic liberalization without political liberalization.Someone who knows more about the pre-1954 history of Vietnam might find something to criticize, and if you have strong opinions about the present government, you’ll likely be disappointed. My biggest problem with this book is that it is very dry. I like this kind of stuff, and it still took me 10 days. Glad to have read it, even if I still can’t remember the order of the dynasties.

⭐A mind-numbing recitation of people, places, and events. Vietnamese history is replete with extraordinary events yet Kiernan fails to write a narrative that engages the reader or to explain key concepts (what is neo-Confucianism?). His style is overly academic with little regard for good writing. Definitely not recommended for the casual reader interested in learning something about Vietnamese history other than the American-Vietnam War.

⭐This book is very interesting to read. It is the third comprehensive treatise of Vietnamese history by American/Canadian professors that I bought in the last few years . Although I cannot say I have read any of them in its entirety, I love them all. I am using them not only as reliable reference material to review, update and expand my knowledge about my own country of origin, but also as assessments, from expert outsiders, of our culture and our identity in relation to the world, to understand better what we were and where we came from, to reassess the nationalistic bias and prejudices inherent to the post-colonial education we had received in Viet Nam and our own politicized media in the last 60-70 years. Kiernan’s so far is my favorite among the three books, particularly because of its extensive discussions about language, culture, minorities, which are wake up calls for Vietnam’s Kinh majority like me who grew up unaware of the plurality of the different peoples who shared this S shaped country over the last several millennia. Thank you, Professor Ben Kiernan, for your dedication .PS: On page 170, first paragraph, a friend detected an error. Mongol General Toghan was not killed in battle as stated in the book, but survived and fled back to China.(in Vietnamese Wikipedia about Toghan:Trấn Nam vương Thoát Hoan (chữ Hán: 脱欢, ký âm Mông Cổ: ᠲᠣᠭᠠᠨ, Тогоон, Toγan; ? – 1301) là một hoàng tử và là tướng nhà Nguyên trong lịch sử Trung Quốc. Ông được biết đến trong lịch sử Việt Nam qua 2 lần mang quân sang đánh nước Đại Việt cuối thế kỷ 13 thời nhà Trần nhưng đều bị thất bại). Sogetu (Toa Đô, 唆都), another Mongol general was actually killed in battle.

⭐Ben Kiernan covers thousands of years in this significant history of Vietnam. The book is especially valuable for the constants that Keirnan uses to give focus to his book: the importance of water, the ever-present threat of China, and the multi-ethnic nature of the Vietnamese people and their religions.

⭐The book starts with prehistory and continues through 2016. It is not for someone completely new to the history and geography of the region, but it is excellent for a reader with at least some acquaintance to the region’s and Vietnam’s history. It does a good job of setting out themes (e.g., water and mountains) that are carried through the book without seeming forced. The book is also quite good and balanced on post WWII political and economic history.I am sitting in my hotel room in Hoi An Vietnam, and I am glad to have read the book before and during my trip.

⭐Very enjoyable read. The author presents cultural evolution, linguistic evolution, climate fluctuations, agricultural developments, and the move from tribal to monarchy to colonialism to now.I am American. In the 1960s-1970s, I was quietly against the war because my friends were getting drafted and killed. I was clueless about what was happening to the Vietnamese people. This book gives a framework for looking back on events.

⭐There are very few single-volume histories of Vietnam from earliest times to the present day, as most focus on the French and American wars, or are written in French or Vietnamese, so this fills a gap for English-language readers who want to understand the whole history of this wonderful country.

⭐Comprehensive, but heavy reading if you don’t already have some knowledge.

⭐Lots of reviews praising the scope of this book but a closer reading for anyone even remotely interested in the early period of Vietnam, that is from its inception to to around 1200 AD, should look elsewhere. This is because of how important the relationship between China and Vietnam was at the time, and frankly later on as well. It is clear that Kiernan, the author, has no idea at all how to handle this period beyond parroting the most trope filled texts of modern nationalist historians. The names and transliteration of Chinese is all over the place from random connecting hyphens to diacritic marks for pinyin to straight up nonsensical transliteration that doesn’t match up with either wades giles or pinyin. For example on page 159, he quotes one “imperial censor” Thsai Fong-hi. What is this? All three syllables do not occur in any known transliteration system for Chinese. My first guess was that he copied it from a very old text on Chinese history, but a google search turned up no result except his own book. As far as I can tell, he made up this name. He uses both transliteration systems of wades giles and pinyin as well. Extremely disappointing.

⭐Ben Kiernan’s book is very readable, enjoyable and worthwhile. It is the most thorough study of Viet Nam, from pre-history through the present, that I have ever read. Anyone interested in the Viet Nam War, contemporary Viet Nam, or indeed world history and politics would do well to read this book.

⭐La historia de Vietnam explicada desde lo básico. Fundamental para entender el desarrollo de la cultura y tradición de Vietnam.

⭐

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