Bradley Camp Davis's Imperial Bandits is a history of the complex dynamics between the Chinese and Vietnamese imperial states, the border populations and their local political leaders and, later in the story, the French colonial powers. It is a story of their shifting relationships, alliances, accommodations, and occasionally violent conflicts. Central to Davis's discussion is the Sino-Vietnamese border region and the ways in which it figures in the story of the relationship between the Vietnamese, Chinese, and French in the second half of the nineteenth century.

At some level, what Davis is describing here will be quite familiar to scholars of Chinese “border” history—tales of the endless negotiation of power relationships between imperial centers and the often autonomous peripheries. Davis uses the term “imperial bandits” to label the complicated figures that occupy these lands and to capture their uneasy linkages to the centers of official power. In this story, as was so often the case in both Chinese and Vietnamese history, “bandits” operated very close to the edges of legitimacy. It was a fundamental reality that “suppression” of bandits was often a fool's errand, for outlaw leaders and their bands inevitably had significant advantages in terms of local connections, topographical knowledge, and the capacity to negotiate with patrons who could offer protection. Under such circumstances, as is frequently the case here, states chose either to cooperate with or to co-opt bandits by transforming them into their agents, at times granting them titles and uniforms.

While the basic dynamic, then, is familiar, what Davis contributes in this book is a careful and well-grounded story of its manifestation at a critical moment in the histories of both Vietnam and China. In doing so, he subverts the dated historiography on the Vietnamese side in particular surrounding the various “Flags” (Black and Yellow), bandit organizations whose exploits became the subject of colonial fears, popular mythologies, and nationalist imaginings. Davis tells this story by drawing substantially on Vietnamese and Chinese imperial records, which he gradually supplements with French colonial narratives, biographies, and official records, as these become relevant. He also utilizes a smaller selection of Vietnamese oral traditions surrounding these bandit groups and their depredations. Through these accounts, we meet a fascinating cast of characters—Vietnamese, French, and Chinese—whom Davis follows through a variety of critical episodes.

The book lays out its story chronologically, first introducing the general environment and its bandit inhabitants, then tracing events as the French appear, struggle to consolidate their control, eventually battle the Chinese and Vietnamese in the Sino-French war of 1885, and finally seek to assert their new colonial authority during the later 1880s and toward the dawn of the twentieth century. The final chapter, “Borderline, Resistance, and Technology,” is particularly useful for situating the early 1880s “Aid the King” (Can Vuong) movement within the larger context of the various bandit army conflicts already taking place within the Vietnamese realms. Davis's examination of this important manifestation of anti-colonial resistance helpfully removes it from the conventional narrative of a simple manifestation of anti-French nationalism and places it into the much broader historical landscape of the later nineteenth century. The chapter also examines the impact of two newer technologies: a concrete border and the telegraph. The telegraph, while at times speeding information, here seems to have been more of a novelty than a game-changing communication medium. Even the use of secret telegrams to incite an insurrection (p. 151) represented more a curiosity than an act that significantly impacted the course of events. Meanwhile, the French aspirations to demarcate a distinct boundary, in conjunction with their Chinese counterparts, also appears to have changed the overall dynamic little. Davis speaks of “lines in the ground,” but his discussion of this newly realized boundary line suggests one more hypothetical than actual. Bandit groups appear to have used this ostensible boundary to their personal advantage in the last years of the nineteenth century, but they had done so in earlier eras as well, even before these lines were created. Davis acknowledges as much when he argues that the situation remained as fluid after as before the lines were created. The primary impact of the efforts to concretize the border, which Davis nicely describes here, is the ways in which this project shaped French imaginings of their colonial control and the delimiting of their political authority. Indeed, the most salient point in the discussion of borders is that the newly conceptualized (if often not actualized) boundary lulled the colonial regime into a false sense of having entered a new era of control, even as, Davis rightly notes, little had changed before 1900.

For all its considerable strengths, Imperial Bandits does have a few weaknesses. First, while there is a distinct strength in Davis's microscopic examination of various protagonists, at times the reader becomes a bit mired in these storylines and can lose sight of the study's larger points about collective rather than individual dynamics. Second, although Davis's introduction extensively discusses the importance and value of oral accounts for writing a history that focuses on bandits and people living in more remote populations, the volume itself appears to contain relatively little use of such sources. Most of his evidence (at least judging from the footnotes) is of a more conventional, archival variety, with reference to oral materials being rather sparse and sporadic (pp. 45–46, 71). This does not diminish the value of the volume but is surprising given the introduction's emphasis on the importance of oral materials. Finally, it is disappointing that a book about a very specific geographical region and one with considerable discussion of the drawing of border lines contains only two maps (pp. 82–83), neither of which is included as a geographical aid. They serve merely as illustrations.

These, however, are minor shortcomings. This is a compelling book with much to tell us about Vietnamese history in the final decades of the nineteenth century. It is particularly important as a counterpoint to existing narratives of this period, which focus less on its complicated political ambiguities and more on the emergence of a simplified binary pitting Vietnamese anti-colonial forces against the French. Davis here makes a strong case for the need to keep ourselves always a bit off-kilter when we look at histories, to avoid falling into essentializing and teleological traps. In short, Davis's Imperial Bandits is a valuable contribution to our understanding of later nineteenth-century Vietnamese history. It is also a very useful case study of the complex world of borderland politics, one that focuses on the Vietnamese side when most such studies of this border world have come from China historians. Scholars of Vietnamese, Chinese, and French colonial history will all find much to appreciate in a volume that expands and nuances our knowledge of a critical historical moment.