I think it is fair to say that Keith Taylor's new history of the Vietnamese peoples, A History of the Vietnamese, is long awaited in at least two senses. Those who were aware that Professor Taylor was working on this project were eager to see how a senior scholar would present the broad sweep of the Vietnamese past. But even those who were not anticipating this particular work must have been waiting for the first serious and detailed English-language survey of Vietnam's long history. While there exist, for example, hundreds of such surveys in English on the history of China, until now there had been no serious effort by a respected scholar to set forth a similar work for Vietnam. In short, such a work is long, long overdue, and the field is deeply in Taylor's debt for having tackled such a daunting project.

Inevitably, Taylor's book is partly a response to the well-established historiographical traditions of the twentieth century, both those laid out by Vietnamese nationalist and communist historians, and those produced by Western scholars writing during the years of the American war in Vietnam. Indeed, in this book Taylor is clearly challenging some of the tropes of this scholarship as well as the teleological elements found in some of it. But A History of the Vietnamese is not merely about upsetting conventional teleologies or such problematic binaries as that juxtaposing “Vietnam” with “China.” It is also a work of revisionism that seeks to reframe important elements of the past. There is little doubt of the impact that this book will have on the field both now and well into the future. Any scholars engaging with topics on the history of Vietnam will have to address Taylor's interpretations as laid out in this book.

Having stipulated its importance, I want to offer a more challenging perspective on this work, raising questions about its structure, narrative choices, and coverage. I do so not to question Taylor's larger historiographical intervention, but rather to highlight some of the revisionist elements of his narrative, and to examine some of what I see as the work's structural shortcomings. First, given the shortage of serious and detailed narrative histories, it is perhaps not surprising that Taylor would choose an approach that provides a detailed chronology with an emphasis on political and military figures who were important for propelling the course of events. Indeed, given the nature of the sources—namely official histories produced by a succession of courts—this is an obvious choice, for it is such figures who are the center of these narratives. An account of this type is an indispensable tool for historians and students who need such a reference, and I have no doubt that this book will serve this purpose. Indeed, Taylor argues that his strategy was driven in part by the absence of an existing basic narrative of this type in English, which is very true (p. 7). And yet, I cannot but feel a measure of frustration at this strategy, for Taylor's account (particularly for the premodern period) often becomes bogged down in a blizzard of names (often similar). One example suffices: “In 1240, Thuan Thien bore the king a son, Tran Hoang, who became the crown prince. In order to knit the two sides of the family together, a daughter that Thuan Thien bore Tran Lieu, Princess Thien Cam, became the queen of Tran Hoang, her half-brother. She subsequently became the mother of the next king, Tran Kham. Tran Kham's queen was his cousin, a daughter of Tran Quoc Tuan, who became the mother of the next king, Tran Thuyen . . .” (p. 112). One wonders what the non-expert reader (the ostensible target audience of this book) must make of such passages.

To some extent such narrations are a function of Taylor's understandable decision to provide a “basic sequence of events,” in which he hews closely to the key historical texts and avoids unwarranted speculation. An obvious consequence of this, however, is to obscure the lives of the vast majority of the Vietnamese population who are but pale shadows and hints in these sources. The reader is frequently left with the story of the tiny fraction of the elite, into which ordinary men and women seem rarely to intrude. Again, this is a consequence of the texts, but one wishes that Taylor would more directly acknowledge this limitation, and perhaps remind the reader more regularly that there was life going on amongst ordinary people beyond the confines of Thang Long, Hue, or Saigon. Taylor anticipates such criticism in his introduction, where he offers a proactive defense against readers' perceptions that this is a “kings and battles” narrative (p. 7). And it is true, as he points out, that the book includes discussions that go well beyond simple royal genealogies and dynastic transitions, touching on religion, literature, education, and economic changes, among other topics. And yet, even the inclusion of such elements does little to integrate stories of the common people and how they fit into the grand scheme of Vietnamese history.

Secondly, I am frustrated by the conscious choice not to use footnotes, and similarly by Taylor's decision not to “excavate the historiography from which my ideas have emerged” (p. 7). The decision to omit footnotes is understandable in a work geared for the general public. However, the absence of footnotes makes tracing the author's historiography rather difficult, and the almost complete absence of self-conscious historiographical reflection means that the average reader will not appreciate the revisionist elements of this volume. The lightly annotated but comprehensive bibliography goes some way to filling this void, but leaves a lot unanswered. Perhaps the lack of footnotes is not as problematic for the earlier period where limited numbers of sources exist upon which to build a narrative, but for the post-Le dynasty era when the number of sources as well as the secondary scholarship grows considerably, and matters of interpretation begin to become more contentious, one is left to guess which accounts Taylor is challenging or supporting. Given the work's refreshing approach to the historical landscape, I believe that more direct engagement with the existing historiographical traditions would have been extremely helpful. I could not help thinking, as I read this, of John K. Fairbank's final project, China: A New History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1992), a broad survey of Chinese history in which Fairbank directly engaged with the accumulated secondary scholarship. While at times Fairbank's work reads like a bibliographic essay, it is of enormous value for scholars and students alike for presenting the varying interpretative models of the Chinese past, and for highlighting the ways in which such interpretations have changed. I fear that a narrative that does not directly engage with such interpretations is not always self-conscious enough about the foundations upon which it is built.

This issue seems to me to emerge in Taylor's narration of the division between the northern and southern parts of the Vietnamese lands over the course of the sixteenth century and beyond. While stepping back and trying to discern larger patterns is something that Taylor discourages us from doing, arguing in his introduction (pp. 2–3) that such a search is chimerical, I cannot help but wonder whether he, himself, has not imposed such patterns upon his work. In particular, I am struck by a sense that Taylor offers a history that anticipates the rise of the southern portions of the Vietnamese realm by frequently offering pointedly critical commentary on the Vietnamese state when it was centered in the Red River basin, and noticeably more favorable assessments of the new regimes that emerged in the center. Thus, anticipating the twentieth century, in which he offers a more favorable assessment of the South Vietnamese state than of its communist counterpart, Taylor is (unconsciously?) drawing these lines back into the past. The north, in this narration, seems, as the centuries pass, to be increasingly a land of extreme policies, deranged rulers, and corrupt officials. The south, or at least the lands of the Nguyen beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century, is a landscape peopled by astute and morally upright rulers and adventurous explorers who settle new lands while breathing new life into Vietnamese society and customs. This is, perhaps unconsciously, a pattern of the type that Taylor claims to have eschewed. One can debate its merits, but at least the reader should be on the lookout for such patterns that will inevitably shape a historical narrative that (equally inevitably) makes selective use of the source material.

A pair of examples, from north and south, serve to illustrate elements of this pattern and Taylor's revisionist approach. In Taylor's narrative of the second half of the eighteenth century, we encounter a noted northern scholar official, Le Quy Don. To hear Taylor tell it, Le Quy Don is noteworthy for his corruption and his sycophantic support for the Trinh rulers in the second half of the eighteenth century: “Le Quy Don was a relatively erudite man, which may explain the confidence placed in him by Trinh Doanh. He was also a clever self-promoter and did not neglect opportunities to advance the careers of men in his debt or to derail the careers of men he did not like” (p. 362). If the sources are correct, one can certainly limn Le Quy Don's life in this fashion. And yet, Taylor's presentation ignores other facts that one can extract from the sources, namely that Le Quy Don was one of the most important intellectuals of his generation, a man who left us a series of extremely significant historical, geographical, literary, and philosophical texts. In short, the decision to focus on Le Quy Don's personal failings to the exclusion of his major literary contributions is a choice made by Taylor, one that puts his narrative substantially at odds with most previous representations of Le Quy Don. One can debate the approach, but this is a case in which the failure to highlight this marked departure from the earlier historiography does a disservice to the reader.

Then, to read Taylor's account of the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, one chiefly gets an impression of a strong, visionary man (albeit one with flaws that Taylor does acknowledge) who guided his regime through a rocky birth and a complex relationship with the United States. This is in keeping with recent revisionist work on Diem by Edward Miller, Jessica Chapman, and others. Consequently, when Taylor speaks of the 1955 referendum that Diem arranged and that brought him to power, he does so in very benign terms: “The public campaign and voting procedure for this referendum was used to spread popular awareness of the new government and its break with the French past” (p. 562). This is true; but it is also true that Diem rigged the voting in blatant fashion to ensure not merely a win, but a virtually unanimous mandate for himself. This is not an unimportant detail, and casts a rather different light on Diem's personality and political strategies, possibly affecting how the reader might view him. Again, it is the historian's choice about how to present their narrative, but this is another instance in which a departure from earlier interpretations might be worth signaling to the reader.

A final problematic element of the book's narrative is its account of the American war in Vietnam. This is one of the most bloodless and sanitized accounts of the war that I have read. The uninformed reader would likely come away from this book with the impression that the “Vietnam War” was a series of diplomatic, political, and military maneuvers carried out against a backdrop of South Vietnamese electoral politics and north Vietnamese totalitarianism. Obscured in Taylor's account are the massive, relentless, and often indiscriminate American bombings in both north and south that caused millions of civilian casualties; produced even larger numbers of refugees, especially in South Vietnam; and caused staggering amounts of ecological damage. This omission seems once again to be a byproduct of the book's almost unwavering focus on elites, political leaders, and military figures. The anonymous peasant here, as earlier, is largely absent. While it is difficult to write about the lives of the unnamed and unknown “common people,” and the idealistic or propagandistic writings of modern Vietnamese historians who glorified peasants and workers have not contributed much in this regard, it would be helpful for an account of “the Vietnamese” to include greater coverage of the majority who bore this label. It was they who bore the brunt of the reckless policies of those who claimed to be their leaders or allies, they who endured the brutality of the (unmentioned) My Lai massacre and other acts of indiscriminate killing in “free fire zones,” and they who continue to suffer from the effects of (unmentioned) Agent Orange.

Let me close with a few comments on more mundane elements of the book's appendices. First, while it is nice finally to encounter the maps that had been sadly missing throughout the text, once the reader discovers them they all look pretty much the same. There are a few place name changes, but the average non-specialist might be more than a little confused about how to interpret the subtle differences between them. The map captions often lack dates, challenging the reader to correlate dynasties with time periods. The issue of dynasties also comes up in charts laying out dynastic genealogies. While such annexes to the text might seem to be factually straightforward lists, they also reflect certain historiographical choices. For example, Taylor's lists of dynasties include neither the Ho nor the Tay Son dynasties. While neither lasted very long, their omission seems a deliberate choice, one that obscures the political realities of the early fifteenth century and the last decades of the eighteenth. Also, labeling Nguyen Anh as “the Nguyen Vuong” (king) from 1780 onward seems an unjustified convenience. Nguyen Anh was the leader of a tenuous military coalition at the time, and was in exile in Siam for a portion of the post-1780s period, making his claims to rule quite sketchy.

In sum, this book should, without question, be on the shelf of anyone with a serious interest in the history of the Vietnamese peoples. But it should be used with the caution that applies to all historical narratives, namely that it reflects a particular vantage point articulated at a certain moment in time. Thus, it is one way of telling this history, not the only way, as I have no doubt Professor Taylor would agree. For this reason, I think this book must be supplemented by works that give more attention to the lives of the non-elite, and ones that give a more robust account of the warfare of the twentieth century. Readers who approach this work with a critical eye, rather than mere awe at its seemingly exhaustive detail, will thus be better served.