Splendid book.
"Choice"
Bradley's effort to place American?Vietnamese relations in a broader context is welcome.
"New York Times Book Review"
Bradley scrupulously analyzes the scholarship of the postcolonial period of Vietnam's turbulent history and the cataclysmic events that followed.
"Library Journal"
Bradley's effort to place AmericanVietnamese relations in a broader context is welcome.
"New York Times Book Review"
Recommended reading for any serious student of culture, diplomacy, intellectual history, and the making of the postcolonial world.
"Journal of Military History"
"Recommended reading for any serious student of culture, diplomacy, intellectual history, and the making of the postcolonial world.
"Journal of Military History""
A pioneering effort.
"Reviews in American History"
Bradley's effort to place AmericanPVietnamese relations in a broader context is welcome.
"New York Times Book Review"
From the Inside Flap
In this study of the encounter between Vietnam and the United States from 1919 to 1950, Mark Bradley fundamentally reconceptualizes the origins of the Cold War in Vietnam and the place of postcolonial Vietnam in the history of the twentieth century. Bradley draws on newly available Vietnamese-language primary sources and interviews as well as archival materials from France, Great Britain, and the United States.
From the Back Cover
In this study of the encounter between Vietnam and the United States from 1919 to 1950, Mark Bradley fundamentally reconceptualizes the origins of the Cold War in Vietnam and the place of postcolonial Vietnam in the history of the twentieth century. Bradley draws on newly available Vietnamese-language primary sources and interviews as well as archival materials from France, Great Britain, and the United States.
About the Author
Mark Philip Bradley is associate professor of U.S. international history at the University of Chicago.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Liberty and the Making of Postcolonial Order
On 15 March 1887, the first French colonial exhibition in Hanoi was opened to Vietnamese and French residents of the city. At the center of the exhibition, the organizers erected a replica of sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi's Liberty Enlightening the World. Bartholdi's monumental original had been unveiled in New York Harbor five months before the Hanoi exhibition opened, a gift to the United States from France to honor the centenary of the American revolution. For the French officials organizing the colonial exhibition, who saw no contradiction between the ideals of liberty and their imperial vision, Hanoi's Statue of Liberty, an exact if smaller copy of the one France sent to the United States, was intended to dramatize the political, economic, and cultural promises of French rule and tutelage to its new colonial subjects.[1]
After the exhibition closed, Liberty was moved to a more permanent installation at the nearby Place Neyret, where it anchored a figurative spatial geography of French power and authority in Vietnam. Liberty rested on the southernmost tip of the expansive Avenue Puginier, named to honor the well-known Catholic missionary who had played a central role in the French conquest of northern Vietnam. From Liberty's visage the avenue traversed the Citadel, which housed the colonial military forces; passed the beaux arts mansions that provided offices for the civil colonial administration; and finally, at its northernmost point, flowed into the imposing Place Puginier, dominated by the grand residence of the gouverneur-général for French Indochina.[2]
Some fifty years later on 2 September 1945, a day that marked the symbolic passing of the French colonial order in Vietnam, Liberty remained in place at one end of the Avenue Puginier. At the other end, a crowd of almost 400,000 people filled the Place Puginier, now renamed Ba Dinh Square by the new Vietnamese provisional government to honor a failed but tenacious Vietnamese battle against French colonial forces in the 1880s. From a raised wooden podium in front of the gouverneur-général's palace, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam independent of French colonial rule. In his speech, which opened with quotations from the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Ho contrasted the revolutionary ideals of liberty with what he termed eighty years of French colonial oppression in Vietnam.
Joining the crowd of Vietnamese revolutionaries gathered in the square were a small group of American officers from the wartime OSS, one of whom had helped Ho Chi Minh ensure the words he borrowed from Thomas Jefferson about the meaning of liberty were accurately rendered. Ho closed his speech with a plea to the United States and Allied powers to recognize the right of the Vietnamese people to self-determination in the spirit of the wartime Tehran and San Francisco conferences where the principals animating the newly formed United Nations had emerged. "Vietnam," he concluded, "has the right to enjoy freedom and independence, and in fact has become a free and independent country."[3]
As Ho's words reverberated through the crowds in Ba Dinh Square, echoed down the Avenue Puginier, and met Liberty's gaze, the imposing symbolic edifice of French colonial power that lined the avenue lay in ruins. The beaux arts offices were emptied of their French civil servants. French military forces were under house arrest in the Citadel. Hanoi's Liberty now seemed to embody an alternative set of meanings: an ironic reminder of the yawning chasm between French rhetoric and colonial realities, an astute recognition of the power of the United States to shape international order at the close of World War II, and a reverent, if somewhat inchoate, vision of the promises of postcolonial independence.[4]
The transnational circularity of Liberty's image and the multiple meanings it came to represent in Vietnam illustrate the central concerns animating this study of the encounter between Vietnamese revolutionaries and the United States from 1919 to 1950. For much of these transformative three decades, the relationship between Vietnamese and American political elites was often more symbolic than real. If perhaps the only Vietnamese in Hanoi in September 1945 who had actually seen the original Liberty was Ho Chi Minh himself, who passed it in the French steamer that brought him to New York City in 1912, an imagined America occupied a central place in anticolonial political discourse as a symbol of the qualities that Vietnamese revolutionaries believed were critical for reshaping Vietnamese society. The Statue of Liberty could easily have joined an existing dialogue that gave sustained attention to figures such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford in indigenous accounts of American revolutionary virtue, commercial strength, and technological achievement. The heroic voluntarism many Vietnamese revolutionaries favorably equated with the United States during the colonial period, along with their embrace and indigenization of Marxism-Leninism and the ideals of socialist internationalism, formed a diverse and enduring repertoire of symbolic language and perceptual experience. As Vietnamese anticolonial elites worked to overthrow the French colonial order and establish an independent Vietnamese state, much of their effort rested on a postcolonial vision informed by this fluid discourse of revolutionary nationalism.
