Rice wars in colonial Vietnam : the Great Famine and the Viet Minh road to power / Geoffrey C. Gunn.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book offers the first detailed English-language examination of the Great Vietnamese Famine of 1945, which left at least a million dead, and links it persuasively to the largely unexpected Viet Minh seizure of power only months later. Drawing on extensive research in French archives, Geoffrey C. Gunn offers an important new interpretation of Japanese-Vichy French wartime economic exploitation of Vietnam's agricultural potential. He analyzes successes and failures of French colonial rice programs and policies from the early 1900s to 1945, drawing clear connections between colonialism and agrarian unrest in the 1930s and the rise of the Viet Minh in the 1940s. Gunn asks whether the famine signaled a loss of the French administration's "mandate of heaven," or whether the overall dire human condition was the determining factor in facilitating communist victory in August 1945.



In the broader sweep of Vietnamese history, including the rise of the communist party, the picture that emerges is not only one of local victimhood at the hands of outsiders--French and, in turn, Japanese-- but the enormous agency on the part of the Vietnamese themselves to achieve moral victory over injustice against all odds, no matter how controversial, tragic, and contested the outcome. As the author clearly demonstrates, colonial-era development strategies and contests also had their postwar sequels in the "American war," just as land, land reform, and subsistence-sustainable development issues persist into the present.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Famine and war are frequent bedfellows, with civilian deaths due to starvation and malnutrition sometimes outnumbering battlefield casualties. This scenario was clearly the case in colonial Indochina as WW II reached its climax. The great famine of 1944-45 is largely unknown or forgotten in the West, and this new book by Gunn (emer., Nagasaki Univ., Japan) appears to be the first title in English to discuss it at length. In examining the famine, Gunn discusses the role of natural disaster, rice requisitions by the occupying Japanese forces, and ineffective administration by Vichy French authorities. However, most of the book is a prelude to the famine itself, as Gunn examines Vietnamese agriculture, prewar resistance to French rule, and the rise of the Viet Minh and its efforts to gain a foothold in rural areas. This book is a welcome addition to scholarship on Vietnam, but its organization, complex content, and writing style may place it beyond the grasp of general readers or most undergraduate students. Summing Up: Recommended. Researchers, faculty, graduate students. D. R. Graber Wayne State College