This is one of the very few scholarly Western-language studies of the Vietnamese reaction to the French colonial conquest of Vietnam during the nineteenth century. Utilizing Vietnamese primary sources to examine the reaction of scholars and the Vietnamese court to the French conquests, Mark McLeod goes beyond studies that only analyze the conflict from primarily French sources. As he states in the introduction, the dynamic force behind Vietnamese historical development was usually seen to be the activity of colonial enterprises. The Vietnamese people themselves enter these histories only...

Vietnam is increasingly opening up to the West, and society is in flux between tradition and modernity, and capitalism and socialism. Americans have distanced themselves from the Vietnam War now, and Culture and Customs of Vietnam fills a need to learn about the country, which has also evolved. Readers will find that this is the only general book on Vietnamese culture in English written by specialists. McLeod and Nguyen, historians specializing in Vietnam engagingly show the various forces of Vietnamese culture in narrative chapters on the land, people, and language; history and...