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Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954. By pierre brocheux and daniel hémery. Translated by ly lan dill-klein, with eric jennings, nora taylor, and noémi tousignant. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 508 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).
Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954 is the English translation of Indochine: La colonization ambiguë 1858-1954, which came out in 1994 and had gone through a second expanded edition in 2001. The current English version under review could be considered a third edition of the book since it has also been further updated with the inclusion of a large number of recent publications in the field. As suggested by its title, one of the ostensible purposes of the book is to foreground the "ambiguous" character of the colonial situation in Indochina. This objective has to a large extent been achieved as the authors of the book, Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery, have done a superb job of teasing out the highly complex and often convoluted strands of the century-long history of colonization of the Indochinese peninsula, and weaving the various discordant voices and contesting perspectives of a politically and ideologically diverse spectrum of players from both sides of the colonial divide into the fabric of their narrative. The result is a multilayered interpretative synthesis of a voluminous literature of primary and secondary materials that is interspersed with the authors' own unique insights.
The book is structured around a chronological and thematic order. The study starts with a reconstruction of the key stages of the French conquest of the peninsula from the mid ninteenth century all the way to its final pacification in the late 1890s and ends with an analysis of the demise of the French domination in the Far East on the heels of World War II. The intervening six chapters focus each on...