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Quagmire: Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books (Hardcover)

Autor David Andrew Biggs, David T. Biggs
en Limba Engleză Hardback – feb 2011 – vârsta de la 22 ani
In the twentieth century, the Mekong Delta has emerged as one of Vietnam's most important economic regions. Its swamps, marshes, creeks, and canals have played a major role in Vietnam's turbulent past, from the struggles of colonialism to the Cold War and to the present day. Quagmire considers these struggles, their antecedents, and their legacies from the perspective of environmental history.

Beginning with the French conquest in the 1860s, colonial reclamation schemes and pacification efforts centred on the development of a dense network of new canals to open several million hectares of land for agriculture. These rapid projects helped precipitate economic and environmental crises in the 1930s, and subsequent struggles after 1945 led to the balkanisation of the delta into a patchwork or regions controlled by the Viet Minh, paramilitary religious sects, and the struggling Franco-Vietnamese government. After 1954, new settlements were built with American funds and equipment in a crash program intended to solve continuing economic and environmental problems. Finally, the American military's failure with counterinsurgency in Vietnam is revealed as not simply a failure of policy makers but also a failure to understand the historical and political complexity of the spaces American troops attempted to occupy and control.

By exploring the delta as a quagmire in both natural and political terms, Biggs shows how engineered transformations of the Mekong Delta landscape-channelized rivers, a complex canal system, hydropower development, deforestation-have interacted with equally complex transformations in the geopolitics of the region. Quagmire delves beyond common stereotypes to present an intricate, rich history that shows how closely political and ecological issues are intertwined in the human interactions with the water environment in the Mekong Delta.

David Biggs is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Riverside.
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780295990675
ISBN-10: 0295990678
Pagini: 300
Ilustrații: 32 illus.
Dimensiuni: 162 x 232 x 26 mm
Greutate: 0.56 kg
Editura: University of Washington Press
Seria Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books (Hardcover)


Recenzii

"No one before Biggs has focused so intensely on the landscapes and waterscapes in which the Vietnam War was fought and their relationship to the complex colonial history of transformation that had been occurring for the century prior to the conflict."-William Cronon

"This brilliantly researched book explains the part that the environment has played in several colonial schemes in the Mekong Delta and in America's most tragic war there, and how the environmental history of the Mekong Delta has been part of the process of nation-building in Vietnam."-Mart Stewart, Western Washington University

"The delta, as natural and as it has been transformed throughout the past two hundred years or so, has played a decisive role in the successes (not many) and the failures (a lot of them) of colonial and post-colonial regimes, of the American war efforts, and of modernization and development. Biggs' focus on the muddied delta and its 'quagmire' characteristics that shaped every economic, agriculture, and political project is among the first of its kind on this subject. He did it quite well."-Thongchai Winichakul, University of Wisconsin-Madison"Quagmire offers a neat and fresh storyline, explaining that nation-builders failed to understand the serpentine watercourses and landscapes of the Mekong Delta Biggs, an environmentalist historian at the University of California in Riverside, is not a revisionist, nor does his approach conveniently fall into any other clique. Quagmire rather brings forward some of the latest thinking on Vietnamese history Biggs shines a light on the everyday struggles of farmers and migrants not seen since David Elliott's 1500-page chronicle, The Vietnamese War, and Jeffrey Race's classic doctoral dissertation, War Comes to Long An." - Asian Affairs


"No one before Biggs has focused so intensely on the landscapes and waterscapes in which the Vietnam War was fought and their relationship to the complex colonial history of transformation that had been occurring for the century prior to the conflict."-William Cronon "This brilliantly researched book explains the part that the environment has played in several colonial schemes in the Mekong Delta and in America's most tragic war there, and how the environmental history of the Mekong Delta has been part of the process of nation-building in Vietnam."-Mart Stewart, Western Washington University "The delta, as natural and as it has been transformed throughout the past two hundred years or so, has played a decisive role in the successes (not many) and the failures (a lot of them) of colonial and post-colonial regimes, of the American war efforts, and of modernization and development. Biggs' focus on the muddied delta and its 'quagmire' characteristics that shaped every economic, agriculture, and political project is among the first of its kind on this subject. He did it quite well."-Thongchai Winichakul, University of Wisconsin-Madison "Quagmire... offers a neat and fresh storyline, explaining that nation-builders failed to understand the serpentine watercourses and landscapes of the Mekong Delta... Biggs, an environmentalist historian at the University of California in Riverside, is not a revisionist, nor does his approach conveniently fall into any other clique. Quagmire rather brings forward some of the latest thinking on Vietnamese history... Biggs shines a light on the everyday struggles of farmers and migrants not seen since David Elliott's 1500-page chronicle, The Vietnamese War, and Jeffrey Race's classic doctoral dissertation, War Comes to Long An." - Asian Affairs

Notă biografică

David Biggs is associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside.

Descriere

By exploring the delta as a quagmire in both natural and political terms, Biggs shows how engineered transformations of the Mekong Delta landscape-channelized rivers, a complex canal system, hydropower development, deforestation-have interacted with equally complex transformations in the geopolitics of the region.