The early colonial history of French Indochina arguably started with the slow push by French Catholic missionaries sent to the Far East from the mid-seventeenth century onward. After Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes famously broke the path in the 1620s, one missionary society, the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP), occupied the front line in this long-term penetration. This book tells the story of this penetration and the reactions by the Vietnamese rulers as it unfolded in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Jacob Ramsay presents us here with a well-researched volume making convincing use of Vietnamese and French missionary archives alike to discuss a period that has not yet been thoroughly investigated in relation to the impact of the French missionary push in Vietnam before the military conquest formally started in 1858. Ramsay centers his considerations around the thoughts and actions of the Vietnamese emperors of the Nguyen Dynasty in reaction to the political impact of that growing Catholic presence within their empire. The result is a focused analysis of the three decades preceding the beginning of the French colonization of Indochina and a compelling chronicle and analysis of this uncomfortable encounter.

In the introduction, the author explains why he chose to focus on the central and southern Vietnam vicariates, in other words on Cochinchina, and gives useful details on his sources. Chapter 1 provides the background on the relationship between the Nguyen rulers and the MEP, in particular Emperors Gia Long and Minh Mang. Chapter 2 exposes the wariness felt by the imperial court faced with the growing influence of the MEP mission among the Vietnamese population, seeing a direct challenge to Hue's imperial administration. Chapter 3 examines in detail the subsequent anti-Catholic repression of the late 1830s when the court intensified its efforts to wipe out the local Catholic Church. Chapters 4, 5, and 6, the more analytical part of the book, bring into the picture the greater interconnectivity of European and Vietnamese societies via the increased presence of European colonial powers in Southeast Asia. As I have recently emphasized myself (Jean Michaud, “French Missionary Expansion in Colonial Upper-Tonkin,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 35:2: 287–310, 2004; Jean Michaud, “Incidental” Ethnographers: French Catholic Missions on the Tonkin-Yunnan Frontier, 1880–1930 [Leiden: Brill, 2007]), Ramsay also shows that the MEP pursued a political agenda in harmony with the colonial project and made great strategic use of in-house Catholic publications available in France to gain the metropolitan public opinion for its expansionist cause in Indochina, notably through the spreading of stories detailing the fate of martyrs. A five-page epilogue wraps up the manuscript, followed by endnotes and the reference list. The undersized index is disappointing for a volume abounding with such a wealth of locations, characters, and events.

The book is a version of the author's recently completed Ph.D. dissertation in history at the Australian National University, titled “Missionaries, Priests and Mandarins: Catholicism and the Nguyen in Vietnam's South, 1820–1868.” At 172 pages without the endnotes, the author's demonstration is concise. It draws on the archives of the MEP (chiefly on Cochinchina) and the Nguyen Dynastic chronicles. Reference to relevant Western publications also abound, showing a good command of French colonial literature, though I believe contemporary documents such as Pierre-Jacques Lemonnier de La Bissachère (Etat actuel du Tun-Kin, de la Cochinchine et des royaumes de Cambodge, Laos, Lac Tho [Paris: Galignani, 2 vols., 1818]) and analytical ones such as Henri Chappoulie (Rome et les missions d'Indochine au XVIIe siècle [Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1943]) could have been included profitably.

Jacob Ramsay's carefully crafted book constitutes a most welcome addition to a growing body of scholarly studies of the influence the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris has had on the history of Vietnam. But above all, it also is an excellent portrait of the relationships among the Vietnamese rulers and state, the Vietnamese Catholics, and the Vietnamese population at large at the start of the colonial era.