Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Award
In the twentieth century, the Mekong Delta has emerged as one of VietnamÕs most important economic regions. Its swamps, marshes, creeks, and canals have played a major role in VietnamÕs 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.
"This work is an original and innovative approach to the contemporary history of Viet Nam." -Environmental History
"Biggs is clearly a major talent, who has written a path-breaking book that enables us to see, experience, and interpret the delta anew." -Journal of Contemporary Asia
David Biggs is associate professor of history at the University of California, Riverside.
Review
"Biggs unfolds an environmental history equally rewarding for regional specialists and lifelong residents as well as those for whom the Mekong Delta evokes only memories of war. . . The book makes a significant contribution to development studies and political geography around the role of nature in nation-building projects." -Brian Marks, The Geographical Review, Vol. 102:3
Review
"I learned that it is not a linear development how people use the environment or how the environment affects people; rather it is a dynamic equilibrium between humans and environment, and it is that interaction which shapes nation-building." -Ang Cheng Guan, Journal of American-East Asian Relations
Review
"Quagmire is also an example of the challenges faced when trying to translate ambitions in historical narrative. How to tell a story of such complexity and nuance? . . . I expect [the answer] will come pretty close to the way Biggs has written his story." -Maurits Ertsen, Technology and Culture
Review
". . . Biggs has authored an exciting work that clearly breaks new ground. I have little doubt that the book will be well received by multiple audiences." -Shawn McHale, Asian Studies Review, Vol. 37(2)
Review
"Blending disciplinary perspectives from history, anthropology, and geography, Biggs approaches the Mekong Delta as a landscape--as things on the land, as people, institutions, discourses, artifacts, metaphors, and eco-logics--with a particularly unstable morphology." -Michael Kantor, H-HISTGEOG
Synopsis
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 trailer: http: //www.youtube.com/user/UWashingtonPress#p/u/2/gp1-UItZqsk