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.

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.

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Preface

Introduction

Part I: Chiefdoms
Ch. 1 Water, Rice, and Bronze: Prehistoric Viet Nam

Part II: Provinces
Ch. 2 Calming the Waves: Imperial Conquest and Indigenization, 221 BCE-540 CE
Ch. 3 Mountains and Rivers of the South: Annam and its Neighbors, 6th-10th Centuries

Part III: Kingdoms
Ch. 4 "Rice from the Sky": Assembling the Spirits of Dai Viet, 940-1340
Ch. 5 Smooth-Flowing Waters of Government: The Triumph of Confucianism, 1340-1570

Part IV: Regions
Ch. 6 Contending Shogunates: Inner and Outer Regions, 1570-1770
Ch. 7 Alternative Unifications: Rebellion and Restoration, 1771-1859

Part V: Colonies
Ch. 8 "World Trends" and French Conquest, 1860-1920
Ch. 9 Writing and Revolution from Colonialism to Independence, 1920-1954

Part VI: Republics
Ch. 10 The American-Vietnamese War, 1954-1975
Ch. 11 The Making of Contemporary Viet Nam, 1975-2015

Epilogue

Notes
Index