David G. Marr. Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution (1945-1946). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013, xix+721p.

Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution (1945-1946) David G. Marr Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013, xix+721p.David Marr's scholarship, which has spanned almost half a century, has had a great influence upon the direction of Vietnamese studies. We are all in his debt for showing what can be done by careful archival research and for making his findings accessible to people interested in Vietnam. His books have become the foundation of scholarship on modern Vietnamese history in the English language and have had a great influence upon work published in all other languages as well, including Vietnamese. Whatever the criticisms that might be made of his work, including mine in this review, they take nothing away from his monumental achievement in bringing historical knowledge about the modern Vietnamese into readable books.Marr's first monograph, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 (1971) was written in wartime with an agenda of asserting a theme of heroic, albeit unsuccessful, Vietnamese resistance to French colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to explain why US policy was doomed, thus providing a scholarly blessing to the anti-war viewpoint of that time; it was suffused with an approbation of a certain kind of nationalism as a legitimizing historical force, which was a dominant academic perspective in the 1960s and 1970s. As Marr states in his Preface (p. xv), his "fundamental assumption ... is that one cannot understand resistance efforts in Vietnam in more recent times without going back at least to 1885." The concept of "resistance" is important in all of Marr's books, which to him means resistance to the non-revolutionary mainstream of Vietnamese nationalism.Marr's second book, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 (1981), revealed the lively intellectual life of educated Vietnamese during the late French colonial period. It provided inspiration for a generation of young scholars of modern Vietnamese history that came of age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it has proven to be the most influential of Marr's books.In his last two books, Marr has focused on what he sees as the centerpiece of modern Vietnamese history, the August Revolution of 1945. In Vietnam 1945 (1995) he takes readers through the events leading up to the August Revolution and the declaration of independence announced in Hanoi on September 2,1945. Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution (1945-1946), according to Marr in his Preface (p. xv), "focuses on events of the next sixteen months, when Vietnam's future course was largely determined." This statement comes immediately after Marr notes the difference between the August Revolution in Hanoi and in Saigon: "one orderly, one anarchic, [which] showed how the popular upheavals of August could propel Vietnam in starkly different directions." Here we find an implicit contradiction between north and south going in "starkly different directions" while there is but one "future course" that was "largely determined" for "Vietnam"; the implication is that the south had fallen out of the logic governing Vietnamese history.The strength of this book is the depth of detail with which it describes how state and party structures were built from the enthusiasm of the August Revolution in northern Vietnam during 1945 and 1946. However, Marr presents this structure as the predetermined "future course" of "Vietnam." He has no discernible interest in the many Vietnamese who did not agree with this future course and were prepared to resist it, for they, from Marr's perspective, did not represent "Vietnam," being dupes, wittingly or not, of foreign powers.Marr's hardening of focus from "Vietnamese" in his first two books to "Vietnam" in his last two books suggests a bias in legitimizing a particular scheme of state formation. I do not mean to imply that there is anything objectionable about this, but it cannot but be obvious that the general direction of this interpretive strategy is to scrape away a large number of Vietnamese from the bailiwick of "Vietnam," or, at least, to render them into some kind of lessor category of membership in the thing called "Vietnam. …