Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta

摘要

David Biggs has provided a distinguished first installment of what one hopes will eventually be, with the help of others, a historical, political, and demographic ecology of the watery places of mainland Southeast Asia. Such a corpus of work would do justice to the unique role played not only by the Mekong Delta and trans-Bassac, but also the Red River Delta and the Chao Phraya and Irrawaddy Deltas in the history of the region. The indelible social ecology of these regions, many of them little populated until the beginning of the twentieth century, represented challenges to state control that frustrated precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial regimes. The history of these landscapes is so distinctly different from the histories of heartland regions and upland regions that they deserve their own narrative.