A Maritime Vietnam
Douban
From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century
Tana Li
overview
Despite its 3,000 kilometre coastline, few people see Vietnam as a maritime country. Here Li Tana presents a powerful new argument about Vietnamese history: that key political changes resulted from the impact, economic and otherwise, of the sea. This is a finely layered account covering the two millennia before colonisation that radically restructures how we understand the role of the maritime and trans-regional in Vietnam's early history. Drawing on exhaustive research of Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese sources, Li reveals that it is only when viewed against the background of the sea that Vietnam's past can be properly understood. In contrast to traditional perceptions of an inward-looking society dominated by Chinese cultural influence, Vietnam was shaped by dynamic littoral economic and cultural contact.
contents
Introduction
1 Maritime Formations
2 Aromatics, Buddhism, and the Making of a South Seas Emporium
3 ‘THE Harbour and THE Path of All Countries’
4 Maritime Resurgence and the Rise of Dai Viet
5 Winds of Trade from the Middle East
6 Muslim Trade and the Conquest of the Coast
7 Silks and Society
8 Seventeenth-Century Dang Trong
9 The Rise and Fall of the Eighteenth-Century Water Frontier
10 Ships and the Problem of Political Integration
Conclusion