1974/07/01 by R. B. Smith · 25 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies #Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Reign #Vietnamese #Period (music) #Government (linguistics) #Politics #Economic history #Power (physics) #Administration (probate law) #Face (sociological concept) #History #Political science #Work (physics) #Ancient history #Law #Sociology #Social science
paper · doi:10.1017/s0035869x00131995
published in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 106(2), 153-169 (Cambridge University Press)
openalex publication_date 1974/07/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Professor A. B. Woodside's recent study of Vietnamese government and society in the first half of the nineteenth century is likely to become immediately a standard work for the teaching of South-East Asian history, as well as a point of departure for further research. It is the first attempt by a Western scholar to analyse the institutional developments of a period in which Viêt-Nam attained its greatest measure of “Confucianization” and also its greatest territorial extent as a unified country. The “Đại-Nam” of the later years of Minh-Mang (1820–41) included not only the whole of present-day Viêt-Nam, united for the first time in 1802, but also (after 1836) a large part of Cambodia as well as a portion of eastern Laos. The institutional changes of his reign included the reinvigoration of the examination system, the creation of new organs of central government, and a thorough overhaul of the machinery of provincial administration. In terms of its own previous history, it was by no means a weak or declining Viêt-Nam which found itself face to face with European power in the 1850's and 1860's. By offering a study of government and society in this period, Professor Woodside has gone some of the way towards filling a major gap in Western-language literature on Vietnamese history.