Christopher E. Goscha's Historical dictionary of the Indochina War (1945–1954) is a landmark achievement. It expands the existing scholarly parameters of the conflict and provides a new model for what a historical dictionary can — and probably should — be. The entries — including people, concepts, events, places, agreements, and government entities — constitute the most thorough collection of information about the Indochina War assembled in any volume. Collectively they offer readers an authoritative and well-written narrative by one of the few scholars of Southeast Asian history who has the Western and Asian language skills to produce a work of this breadth.
Why would a prominent historian renowned for his ground-breaking studies in Southeast Asian history select this format for his next project? And why would he write and publish a historical dictionary in an age when wiki-like encyclopedias are now possible on the Internet? The volume's subtitle — An international and interdisciplinary approach — answers these questions and conveys why this volume is so extraordinary. Goscha's dictionary fills the gap in available sources about the war. Not only is it the first English-language historical dictionary of a conflict commonly known in Vietnam War studies as ‘the French war’, it offers a comprehensive approach that transcends the narrow foci of works produced in France and Vietnam. As Goscha points out in his introduction, most French volumes are almost exclusively focused on the military exploits of the French Union Forces (as was Jacques Dalloz's 2006 Dictionnaire de la Guerre d'Indochine) while the Vietnamese sources evince a strongly pro-Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) bias (evident in the repeated use of terms such as ‘ineluctable victory’) at the expense of non-communist historical actors. Goscha's dictionary contains entries about British, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and other important international figures absent in French and Vietnamese collections. Along with his entries on war, diplomacy, and politics are those that consider social structures, gender, economics, and, especially, cultural factors. He includes singers (Dinh Ngoc Lien), writers (Tran Dan), artists (Mai Van Hien), filmmakers (Khuong Me), philosophers (Tran Duc Thao), educators (Nguyen Van Chi), scientists (Nguyen-Phuoc Buu Hoi), religious leaders (Ho Thanh Bien), and other figures commonly marginalised or ignored in war dictionaries.
In fact, Goscha highlights the arena of ideas nearly as much as he does the battlefield. For example, his entry on the ever intriguing Paul Mus, the French intellectual and outspoken critic of the war, is longer than that for Vo Nguyen Giap, the DRV's supreme military commander who oversaw its great victory at Dien Bien Phu. Goscha also offers numerous entries on fascinating figures who do not appear prominently, if at all, in English-language histories. Historical actors such as Ernst Frey — the Jewish Austrian communist who escaped Hitler's Anschluss by joining the French Foreign Legion and, later, crossed over to the Viet Minh as a military commander — receive as much attention as the most familiar names.
And while I am impressed by the breadth of Goscha's topics, I admire his discipline in the contents of the entries. His dictionary focuses almost exclusively on the decade of the First Indochina War. While the entries contain information about events ante- and post-bellum, the heart of the content concerns the war years. Goscha links entries to earlier periods of French colonial administration only to provide context for events that occurred during the conflict; he includes the briefest of references to the figures’ significance in the subsequent decades of American involvement and unification. His entries provide enough pre- and post-war context without being digressive.
Most entries are about 150–300 words, or a single column of a split page. More important topics are longer. Dien Bien Phu, for example, consists of multiple subtopics spread over six pages. And military topics are specific to the experiences of individual armies. The topic of desertion, to cite one example, is covered separately for the DRV and the French Union Forces. The Vietnamese entries include their diacritics (although the Lao and Khmer ones appear only in their Romanised transliterations). All entries are cross-indexed in bold within the text and by related topics in capital letters at the foot of the entries. Reading through the volume, I found myself indulging in the joy of repeatedly pursuing related threads — leapfrogging through the 500-page volume — until I had acquired a fuller overview of my original topic of interest. The volume is enhanced by a detailed timeline and generous collections of photographs. Even more useful are the numerous historical maps that convey the diplomatic and military circumstances of various periods of the war.
As for why this volume is superior to a wiki-system encyclopaedia, the answer is Goscha himself. This single-authored volume's power is the direct result of Goscha's strengths as a scholar of twentieth-century Southeast Asia, specifically one who has not confined himself to a single nation, people, or decade. His writing retains the vitality of an individual voice while synthesising input from a wide array of scholarly sources — some of whom are cited in the entries — without ever sounding choppy or bland. Goscha presents competing academic assessments surrounding much debated topics, such as the significance of the Battle of Hoa Binh in 1951–52 or longstanding French allegations about official Chinese military intervention, with the authority of someone deeply knowledgeable about their intricacies.
And as for the potential benefits of crowd-sourcing material facilitated by an open-accessed electronic wiki-like database, Goscha has made provisions. He asks readers to contact him via his email address with any errors, suggestions, or omissions they identify. My assumption is that future editions will bear the fruit of these outside contributions.
In both the volume's acknowledgements and introduction, Goscha indicates that his unusual project was the product of a ‘mad’ idea that once born would not leave him alone. And while no residual sign of this ‘madness’ is apparent in the lucid text, the notion of a historical dictionary might nonetheless strike some as odd or even outdated. Fortunately, the line between eccentricity and sagacity can be thin. And in the case of Goscha's Historical dictionary of the Indochina War, the resulting product lands squarely on the side of magnificence.
