Vietnamese Anticolonialism 1885-1925

Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 traces the roots of modern Vietnam’s revolutionary politics back to the decades when French colonial control was consolidated and Vietnamese resistance first assumed organized forms. Against the backdrop of France’s long-term project of exploitation, the book focuses not on collaborators but on those who resisted—sometimes clandestinely, often at great personal risk. By examining proclamations, poems, essays, autobiographies, and oral accounts, alongside French archival sources, the study reconstructs the diverse anticolonial voices that shaped Vietnam’s political consciousness well before the rise of the Indochinese Communist Party or the Viet Minh.

A central argument is that one cannot understand the successes of twentieth-century revolutionary movements in Vietnam—or why non-communist nationalists faltered—without beginning in 1885. The book emphasizes the importance of Vietnamese-language sources, many only published after 1954, and compares materials produced in both North and South Vietnam, highlighting the interpretive tensions between Marxist scholarship and more traditionalist perspectives. While much of the narrative is necessarily descriptive, bringing forward figures, ideas, and movements largely unknown outside Vietnam, the study insists on the need to delineate process and structure in Vietnamese history and to integrate cultural and intellectual dimensions into the analysis of resistance. By situating early anticolonialism within the longue durée of Vietnamese political struggle, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 reframes the origins of modern revolution and challenges readers to see how myths, memory, and ideology shaped a movement whose reverberations defined Vietnam’s twentieth century.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.