David G. Marr – författare

Despite the historical importance of the Vietnam War, we know very little about what the Vietnamese people thought and felt prior to the conflict. Americans have tended to treat Vietnam as an extension of their own hopes and fears, successes and failures, rather than addressing the Vietnamese record. In this volume, David Marr offers the first serious intellectual history of Vietnam, focusing on the period just prior to full-scale revolutionary upheaval and protracted military conflict.He argues that changes in political and social consciousness between 1920 and 1945 were a necessary precondition to the mass mobilization and people's war strategies employed subsequently against the French and the Americans. Thus he rejects the prevailing notion that Vietnamese success was primarily due to communist techniques of organization. However, "Vietnamese Tradition on Trial" goes beyond simply accounting for anyone's victory or defeat to an informed description of intellectual currents in general.Replying for his information on a previously ignored corpus of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and leaflets, the author isolates eight issues of central concern to twentieth-century Vietnamese.The new intelligentsia - indubitably the product of a peculiar French colonial milieu, yet never divorced from the Vietnamese past and always looking to a brilliant Vietnamese future - spearheaded every debate beginning in 1925. After 1945, Vietnamese intellectuals either placed themselves under ruthless battlefield discipline or withdrew to private meditation. David Marr suggests that the new problems facing Vietnamese today make both of these approaches anachronistic. Whether the Vietnam Communist Party will allow citizens to subject received wisdom to critical debate, to formulate new explanations of reality, to test those explanations in practice, is the essential question lingering at the end of this study.

1945: the most significant year in the modern history of Vietnam. One thousand years of dynastic politics and monarchist ideology came to an end. Eight decades of French rule lay shattered. Five years of Japanese military occupation ceased. Allied leaders determined that Chinese troops in the north of Indochina and British troops in the South would receive the Japanese surrender. Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, with himself as president. Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews, and an examination of published memoirs and documents, David G. Marr has written a richly detailed and descriptive analysis of this crucial moment in Vietnamese history. He shows how Vietnam became a vortex of intense international and domestic competition for power, and how actions in Washington and Paris, as well as Saigon, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh's mountain headquarters, interacted and clashed, often with surprising results. Marr's book probes the ways in which war and revolution sustain each other, tracing a process that will interest political scientists and sociologists as well as historians and Southeast Asia specialists.

Amidst the revolutionary euphoria of August 1945, most Vietnamese believed that colonialism and war were being left behind in favor of independence and modernization. The late-September British-French coup de force in Saigon cast a pall over such assumptions. Ho Chi Minh tried to negotiate a mutually advantageous relationship with France, but meanwhile told his lieutenants to plan for a war in which the nascent state might have to survive without allies. In this landmark study, David Marr evokes the uncertainty and contingency as well as coherence and momentum of fast-paced events. Mining recently accessible sources in Aix-en-Provence and Hanoi, Marr explains what became the largest, most intense mobilization of human resources ever seen in Vietnam.

Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 traces the roots of modern Vietnam’s revolutionary politics back to the decades when French colonial control was consolidated and Vietnamese resistance first assumed organized forms. Against the backdrop of France’s long-term project of exploitation, the book focuses not on collaborators but on those who resisted—sometimes clandestinely, often at great personal risk. By examining proclamations, poems, essays, autobiographies, and oral accounts, alongside French archival sources, the study reconstructs the diverse anticolonial voices that shaped Vietnam’s political consciousness well before the rise of the Indochinese Communist Party or the Viet Minh.A central argument is that one cannot understand the successes of twentieth-century revolutionary movements in Vietnam—or why non-communist nationalists faltered—without beginning in 1885. The book emphasizes the importance of Vietnamese-language sources, many only published after 1954, and compares materials produced in both North and South Vietnam, highlighting the interpretive tensions between Marxist scholarship and more traditionalist perspectives. While much of the narrative is necessarily descriptive, bringing forward figures, ideas, and movements largely unknown outside Vietnam, the study insists on the need to delineate process and structure in Vietnamese history and to integrate cultural and intellectual dimensions into the analysis of resistance. By situating early anticolonialism within the longue durée of Vietnamese political struggle, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 reframes the origins of modern revolution and challenges readers to see how myths, memory, and ideology shaped a movement whose reverberations defined Vietnam’s twentieth century.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 traces the roots of modern Vietnam’s revolutionary politics back to the decades when French colonial control was consolidated and Vietnamese resistance first assumed organized forms. Against the backdrop of France’s long-term project of exploitation, the book focuses not on collaborators but on those who resisted—sometimes clandestinely, often at great personal risk. By examining proclamations, poems, essays, autobiographies, and oral accounts, alongside French archival sources, the study reconstructs the diverse anticolonial voices that shaped Vietnam’s political consciousness well before the rise of the Indochinese Communist Party or the Viet Minh.A central argument is that one cannot understand the successes of twentieth-century revolutionary movements in Vietnam—or why non-communist nationalists faltered—without beginning in 1885. The book emphasizes the importance of Vietnamese-language sources, many only published after 1954, and compares materials produced in both North and South Vietnam, highlighting the interpretive tensions between Marxist scholarship and more traditionalist perspectives. While much of the narrative is necessarily descriptive, bringing forward figures, ideas, and movements largely unknown outside Vietnam, the study insists on the need to delineate process and structure in Vietnamese history and to integrate cultural and intellectual dimensions into the analysis of resistance. By situating early anticolonialism within the longue durée of Vietnamese political struggle, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 reframes the origins of modern revolution and challenges readers to see how myths, memory, and ideology shaped a movement whose reverberations defined Vietnam’s twentieth century.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.