For readers who are not familiar with Oxford University Press's “Graphic History Series,” The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam is what one would call a mixed-media text. This collaborative project by historian Michael G. Vann and illustrator Liz Clarke tells the story of how French colonizers, in their attempt to turn Hanoi into a “modern” city, created themselves the problem of rodent overpopulation.

The book includes a work of literature (a graphic novel) and supplementary materials that students, teachers, and scholars from various fields can rely on to learn more about how nineteenth-century modernity, industrialization, imperialism, globalization, and racial prejudices (especially Sinophobia) all contributed to humanity's Third Plague Pandemic. The colonial administration's obsession with a potential outbreak of the bubonic plague in the “Paris of the East” perfectly illustrates such historical context.

Within the context of current scholarly debates, Vann and Clarke's book addresses issues related to pedagogy (what means of expression can be used to teach about a particular topic), historicism (which historical periods and geographical spaces should be taken into account), and methodology. The last point is particularly relevant because for the past twenty-five years, scholars of East Asian studies have seen their field largely affected by the end of the Cold War. In the case of Vietnamese studies, for instance, there is a before and after Đổi mới (economic renovation). Scholar Sylvie Blum-Reid had already set a milestone for the trend. Her book East-West Encounters analyzes various French-heritage films about the colonial period that were made just before the changes brought about by twenty-first-century globalization, at the time when the régime of Hanoi had barely begun to allow Western directors to film onsite.Footnote ¹ Thanks to the reopening of diplomatic relations between the United States and its former enemy in the mid-1990s, scholar Ben Tran was able to access the Vietnamese archives to research the popular literature (written in a newly Romanized script) from the French period, which became the primary source material for his Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam.Footnote ² The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt closes the circle. In his prologue, Vann (as a character in the graphic novel) explains that his project originated in the French national archives (pp. 5–8). However, the afterword eventually shows the author finishing his research directly in Hanoi's public library (p. 119).

The graphic novel itself is divided into seven chapters (in addition to the prologue and the afterword). Though this is my own preference, I would recommend saving this best part of Vann and Clarke's book for the end. I would suggest reading first the supplementary materials that include respectively a collection of the primary sources used for the plot development of the graphic novel; an essay on the historical context of the events narrated in the work; an article on the making of the book itself; and finally a list of discussion, reading comprehension, and essay questions that can be used in the classroom.

Vann's explanation of the second age of imperialism and its historical context is essential in understanding why the French's failed attempt to eradicate the rat “colonization” in the “Paris of the East” was not an isolated case. In addition, both the graphic novel and the supplementary materials explain that imposing a French model of urban development in an environment that was originally mostly rural, along with connecting an emerging colony to a racist and imperialist system of economic globalization (dependent on the trade of manufactured goods and on the mobility of cheap labor) created the problem of the rodent overpopulation in Hanoi (ironically, caused by the installation of a “modern” sewer system in the city's European quarter). Vann mentions that, at the time, similar problems were occurring in the Chinatowns of San Francisco and newly colonized Hawaii. According to Vann, because of their predominant racist views, Europeans and North Americans were convinced that colonial subjects voluntarily lived in precarious and unsanitary conditions. As a result, nineteenth-century imperial and colonial powers began to associate the Third Plague Pandemic with Asians. Although malaria, dysentery, and later cholera resulted in more deaths in French Indochina than Yersina pestis, racial prejudices caused the colonial administration to focus instead on the (failed) eradication of the rat population in Hanoi.

A very large readership will find this book of interest, such as students, teachers, and scholars of world history, (East) Asian studies, French civilization (especially the period of the Third Republic), (post) colonial studies, globalization studies, and even literature. Outside academia, history buffs and collectors of graphic novels likely will also enjoy this work. Of course, the audience will have to become familiar with the graphic novel genre not just as a narrative form, but also as a medium to disseminate academic scholarship.