Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta

Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books

by David Andrew Biggs, William Cronon (Foreword)

Winner of the 2012 George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History

In the twentieth century, the Mekong Delta has emerged as one of Vietnam's most important economic regions. Its swamps, marshes, creeks, and canals have played a major role in Vietnam's turbulent past, from the struggles of colonialism to the Cold War and the present day. Quagmire considers these struggles, their antecedents, and their legacies through the lens of environmental history.

Beginning with the French conquest in the 1860s, colonial reclamation schemes and pacification efforts centered on the development of a dense network of new canals to open land for agriculture. These projects helped precipitate economic and environmental crises in the 1930s, and subsequent struggles after 1945 led to the balkanization of the delta into a patchwork of regions controlled by the Viet Minh, paramilitary religious sects, and the struggling Franco-Vietnamese government. After 1954, new settlements were built with American funds and equipment in a crash program intended to solve continuing economic and environmental problems. Finally, the American military collapse in Vietnam is revealed as not simply a failure of policy makers but also a failure to understand the historical, political, and environmental complexity of the spaces American troops attempted to occupy and control.

By exploring the delta as a quagmire in both natural and political terms, Biggs shows how engineered transformations of the Mekong Delta landscape - channelized rivers, a complex canal system, hydropower development, deforestation - have interacted with equally complex transformations in the geopolitics of the region. Quagmire delves beyond common stereotypes to present an intricate, rich history that shows how closely political and ecological issues are intertwined in the human interactions with the water environment in the Mekong Delta.

Watch the book

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Asia

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 2011

Reviews

[Hiepsihattao · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is from my point of view, a Vietnamese likes history but knows little about Mekong Delta.
An interesting book about the history of this area from precolony, French colony to Vietnam war. The author shows us evidence to prove the important role of environment to the failure to rule this area of the French and later, the Americans. Many projects were initiated to make the rivers or canals to be something as they expected for civilization, but in the end, it turned out that, with Mekong Delta, we should rather adjust along with the environment, like the residents have been doing for many years.
What I'm impressed in this book is a lot of references the author used to protect his viewpoint. Among these are Son Nam's books, who is respected as "writer of Nam Bo". The author had some years in Vietnam to study, moreover, he got married with a Vietnamese woman, so that he has a deep understand with this area and its culture.
However, the book would be more attracting if he wrote intensively about the time from 1975 up to now, about how this area has developed to the most important area in agriculture of Vietnam, and about the difficulties they will face, such as the building of many damps in the Mekong upper source, as he mentioned a litle bit in the summary

[J N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Một cuốn sách tiếp cận lịch sử khu vực miền Tây lạ lãm và cũng quen thuộc với tôi. Nhìn chung Có nhiều phương pháp để có thể tiếp cận lịch sử, có thể theo dòng thời gian, có thể theo các điểm thời gian. Trong cuốn sách này, David Biggs tiếp cận lịch sử dựa trên sự thay đổi của môi trường tự nhiên, từ thời người Việt đánh Champa tạo nên không gian sinh hoạt cộng đồng của nhóm ba dân tộc Việt, Hoa, Khmer. Sự thay đổi của môi trường theo David Biggs không xuất phát đơn thuần từ chính nó mà được đẩy nhanh bởi bàn tay của con người. Cùng với tiến trình hình thành và phát triển của các thể chế chính trị khu vực miền Nam, môi trường tự nhiên đóng góp ít nhiều việc duy trì của thể chế. Không thấu hiểu môi trường để có hướng cải tạo cụ thể, không hiểu rõ con người bên trong lòng môi trường chính là "đầm lầy mà tác giả ám chỉ.
Phương pháp tiếp cận mới lạ của cuốn này khiến tôi phải đọc lại phần lịch sử vấn đề và phương pháp nghiên cứu hai lần mới hiểu được sơ nét cách tiếp cận của tác giả. Một lịch sử đầy thú vị của miền đồng bằng sông Mekong được lột tả thú vị!
4/5

[Jindřich Zapletal · Rating 5 out of 5]

In retrospect, the book about US that mattered most for me was Cronon's Nature's Metropolis. It provided a shelter from nationalist jabber, it taught me a great deal about the US, and it even changed my view of the way humanity works.

Cronon is an editor of the series in which the current book appeared, and I am sure he was happy about it. To me, it does to south Vietnam history exactly what Nature's Metropolis does to US history. The prevailing straightforward historiographies are pushed aside. The central stage is reserved for the foolish or heroic or apocalyptic struggle of the people with the land that they inhabit, with attention paid to its scientific, industrial, and legal determinants. I learned much more about Vietnam from this book than any political/military history textbook, and I gathered a pile of queries for my search engine that will take me a while to go through.

Highly recommended.

[mantareads · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in virtually one sitting! It taught me a lot about Vietnamese history from a refreshingly environmental perspective. The writing was lucid, and the choice of the title was poetic and evocative. "Quagmire" not just as a metaphor for disaster, but as a productive, generative concept too.

[Phillip · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.0 / 5.0

Academic Viewpoint. Minimal linkage to historical context. Well written dense but readable. Not really thought provoking.

[Mariavv · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed parts of this book, and I am glad that I read it, but it was not an easy read. That is probably at least partly because I don't think I am the target audience - I am interested in environmental politics and nation-building and when I googled those terms together this book came up. I do not know much about Vietnamese politics or history, which the author assumes the reader has at least some general knowledge of. That confused me at times, for example, for part of the book president of South Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem plays quite a large role, until suddenly the president is called Nguyen Van Thieu. I looked it up, and Diem was assassinated, which, unless I missed it, is not mentioned in the book at all. Similarly, the Tet Offensive is mentioned often as a pivotal point in the history of the Vietnam War in the Mekong Delta, but only in sentences like 'after the Tet Offensive...', 'since the Tet Offensive...' etc, there is no explanation of what the Tet Offensive itself was. I didn't even know whether it was an offensive by the Viet Minh or the American army, so I got confused. Of course the book is not presented as a history book, but since the chapters are structured in chronological order and sometimes it is contains quite a lot of history, I constantly felt like I must have missed pages here and there.

Overall, though, it's an interesting book which describes how nature got in the way of nation-building attempts in the Mekong Delta by first the French, then the Vietnamese, then the Americans and now the Vietnamese again, mostly because the people doing the nationbuilding tend to ignore natural conditions completely and then are surprised to see their nice new canals silt up, their roads flood and building foundations sink into the mud. It is also a good book for anyone interested in peasants' movements. I definitely learned a lot.