QUAGMIRE: NATION-BUILDING AND NATURE IN THE MEKONG DELTA by David Biggs
Posted by admin on August 3rd, 2010 filed in Your Property And Birdswww.washington.edu Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books from the University of Washington Press In the twentieth century, the Mekong Delta has emerged as one of Vietnams most important economic regions. Its swamps, marshes, creeks, and canals have played a major role in Vietnams 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 …
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