With exceptions, English-language publications on Southeast Asia reveal little knowledge of scholarship in the French and Japanese languages. So, it is good to see books in these languages published in translation. These two books display fine scholarship as well as contrasts with academic fashion in the English language. Imperial Borderlands is an archive-based study, and Maritime Trade is an archaeological study. They share an exemplary regard for evidence, methodology, and analytical rigor.

There has been a tendency to subsume nearly all activities associated with European colonialism into an imperialist agenda and to include modern mapping technologies as an example of this. But Marie de Rugy writes in Imperial Borderlands that “the ambiguities of colonial domination appear with particular acuity in the mapping of empire's borderlands” (p. 2) and that “maps actually have had very little power, even in a colonial context, if one goes beyond the discourses to look at how they are actually produced and used” (p. 4). She compares British and French (and, tangentially, Chinese and Siamese) mapping of borders in mainland Southeast Asia in terms of institutional support and actual fieldwork; she displays a mastery of detail, a sensitivity to nuance, an analytical skill, and a fresh conceptual grasp that is admirable. Furthermore, she treats comparison not simply as a method but as a subject in its own right. The colonial mapping practices in Southeast Asia are placed in the perspective not only of British and French mapping practices in other colonial venues, such as Africa, but also in Britain and France.

De Rugy finds that in Burma, mapping was an extension of the mapmaking institution already functioning in India, while in Indochina, the French developed mapping practices on the spot. The British used greater numbers of Indigenous staff than the French and had closer links with the Siamese Royal Survey Department. The French produced maps to be used for administration, while the British administration was more text based than map based. Unlike many colonial boundaries in Africa, in Southeast Asia, the British and French consulted people who lived in the borderlands and drew lines that were “not entirely artificial and purely external” (p. 286). De Rugy also points out that while borderlands were mapped, there were “vast neglected expanses, which largely escaped central control . . . sparsely populated territories, which the colonisers considered to be unprofitable . . . hardly mapped at all” (p. 287).

The book is beautifully illustrated with photos of maps, although they are presented by way of displaying examples without explanation. Historians may be surprised by the assertion that the Garnier episode of 1873 caused the fall of Jules Ferry's government in 1885 (p. 257), an idea that perhaps arose from mistranslation. What de Rugy means by “the ambiguities of colonial domination” comes from her understanding of colonial borders being drawn not as demarking a homogenized colonial regime but as an institutional practice by which colonial governments familiarized themselves with the terrain where their authority abutted that of another power. She believes that the borderlands attracted “disproportionate attention” when colonial powers endeavored to understand their territorial limits, but once the borders were drawn, the interest of central authorities in the borderlands waned (p. 2). She concludes that scholars have tended to overemphasize the importance of colonial maps, which is also a way of “attributing more importance to the Europeans than they actually had,” and that “hierarchies established under colonial rule . . . drew on earlier hierarchies between minority and majority ethnicities, which persisted after colonization, and are even visible today” (p. 287). This book is an admirable reminder to look at colonization with the ambiguities and variations of ascendancy that distance and terrain imposed.

In recent years, there have been studies of international trade in Vietnamese history based primarily on textual materials with some mention of archaeological evidence. It is generally known that Vân Đồn and Phố Hiến were significant centers of international trade at certain times in the past, but in A History of Maritime Trade in Northern Vietnam, Yuriko Kikuchi provides an archaeologically based description of trade items and chronologies that brings these two sites alive.

This book is rich in illustrations and tables summarizing archaeological finds. Archaeology being the domain of things that have not suffered dissolution because of climatic or soil conditions, we are almost entirely in the realm of ceramics and, to a lesser extent, coin hoards, which at times limits comprehension of the topic. In Kikuchi's words, “In this book, the nature of the export and consumption of ceramics in the northern part of Vietnam is at the core of the discussion” (p. 24). The principal yield of archaeological digs at old ports is ceramic shards, but more than ceramics were being traded at these places. Kikuchi notes the discrepancies between textual and archaeological evidence for the Ly dynasty port of Vân Đồn (eleventh and twelfth centuries). Looking purely at ceramics, there is no evidence of port activities at Vân Đồn during the Ly dynasty; nevertheless, Vietnamese annals note the arrival at Vân Đồn of ships in 1149 and in 1184 from various parts of Southeast to trade in luxury goods such as pearls, sandalwood logs, “rare items,” and “a red bird that talked”—such items have left no archaeological residue (pp. 137–39, 163).

One of the great contributions of this book is its account of the various sites associated with Vân Đồn and the ceramic remains found at those sites. This is the first study known to me that clearly describes the assembly of ports covered by the term Vân Đồn. These sites are on at least six separate islands southeast of Bái Tử Long Bay, east of Hạ Long Bay (pp. 46–91). Understanding Vân Đồn not as “a port” but as a group of ports on islands making up an archipelago between the coastal waters and the open sea requires us to think about how the conduct and administration of trade was organized in such a place. This book provides archaeologically based data to think about the role of the Vân Đồn ports in relation to ceramic production centers, the chronology of trading activities, as well as the reason for and the process of eventual decline.

The other part of the book is about Phố Hiến, which is not a seaport but rather a trading center located in the river system between Hà Nội and the sea. In the seventeenth century, foreign merchants, both Chinese and Europeans, resided and conducted business at Phố Hiến. That evidence for trade is found only on islands off the coast or in the riverine system between the coast and Hanoi is explained by the fact that until the French began to dredge the river at Hải Phông in the nineteenth century, northern Vietnam had no plausible seaport. In the seventeenth century, seagoing ships shifted cargoes to river craft that then went upriver to Phô Hiên and beyond to Hà Nội. The rulers limited foreign access to Hà Nội, so foreigners accumulated at Phố Hiến, which became a commercial center. This book provides a good survey of archaeological evidence at Phố Hiến with an account of the activities of European trading companies there and the reasons why Europeans abandoned their trade in northern Vietnam by the end of the seventeenth century.

For historians, Kikuchi's recitation of nationalist historiographical clichés such as “the period of Chinese domination,” “the thousand years of Chinese rule,” or “the fourth Chinese domination period” (pp. 37, 131, 132, 133, 140) may be a distraction, but it is a minor one next to the professional display of archaeological evidence and the disciplined methodology used to analyze that evidence. In this regard, it is similar to de Rugy's use of archival materials and justifies reviewing these two books together.

At a time when it is fashionable for academic publishing in English about Southeast Asia to make “interventions” or to serve ideologically driven agendas, reading these books translated from French and Japanese reminds us that evidence still matters and that developing an analysis based firmly upon data is an alternative to selecting what can be fit into predictable theoretical grooves. De Rugy invites us to consider what actually happened when colonial mappers went out to explore and define the edges of their territory—how did they do their work, what results did they achieve, and what difference did it make to the centers of colonial administration. She finds that mapping was a necessary administrative procedure given the system of international demarcation in that time, but it was limited to a narrow band of territory that was rarely important thereafter and that ignored vast stretches of territory between “the border” and “the center.” She also reminds us that people lived in the mountainous places being mapped, and they often participated in the mapping process, but the fact of having their lands mapped, for the most part, did not give them any new advantage or disadvantage vis-à-vis the more populous and politically dominant lowlanders, whether they be British, Burmese, Chinese, French, Siamese, or Vietnamese. This study may begin to loosen a common assumption that colonial regimes occupied a homogenous space of operation.

Kikuchi's book encourages us to pause and reconsider the tendency in Southeast Asian studies to focus on trade and commerce as the motor of modernity and the extent to which this idea has been based on textual sources. By adding archaeological materials to the discussion, she invites us to consider the ebbs and flows of international commerce during the last millennium and the extent to which it was affected by decisions made by rulers in China, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, decisions that had no direct relationship with international trade. At various times, rulers in China, Japan, and Vietnam encouraged and discouraged international trade based on internal political considerations rather than commercial interest. These vicissitudes of port activity are reflected in the remaining ceramic debris. Accordingly, the evidence points to changes attributable to local calculations more than to a global commercial process, the positing of which has been text based. This book also reminds us that a port serves its hinterland as much as floating foreign interests, and that networks of transport and control from production sites to ports is as important as networks of maritime trade.

Both books draw our attention away from schemes seeking to explain the past by absorbing, digesting, and homogenizing evidence to propose big ideas, such as an age of commerce or the age of European imperialism. Instead, they suggest that the micro-dynamics of human activity is at least as important as the macro-systemics of big ideas.