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NGUYEN COCHINCHINA: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. By Li Tana. Ithaca (New York): Cornell University, SoutheastAsia Program Publications, 1998. 194. (Tables). US$16.00, paper ISBN 0-8772-7722-2.
This important monograph studies the emergence and expansion of a southern Vietnamese kingdom under the Nguyen lords in the 1600s and 1700s. The author sees the south, as ruled from what later became the city of Hue, as a region where "new political forces" could establish themselves and successfully create "a new state system and a new culture" (p. 12). Southern expansion became the real motive force in Vietnamese history, as it was elsewhere in mainland Southeast Asia. But the Nguyens overextended themselves, and became the victims of their own success (p. 153). Li has given us a pathbreaking analysis of a crucial moment in the history of precolonial Southeast Asian state formation. She makes superb use of Vietnamese and other sources, 1 and portrays the south's human and natural geography with skill and eloquence. The author is especially good at reconstructing the complex seventeenth-century Asian trading world in which the Vietnamese south ("Cochinchina,"...