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Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present
Ben Kiernan
Oxford: 2017

Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold professor of history at Yale University. He rose to academic fame in the 1980s as an expert on the Khmer Rouge. In the 1990s he put that expertise into action by establishing the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale and a research institute in Phnom Penh, the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, to facilitate the collection, preservation and study of historical materials from the Khmer Rouge period

Since the 1990s, Kiernan’s research has extended to the topic of genocide more broadly; his Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur was awarded the best work of history published in 2007 by the US Independent Publishers Association. Through his numerous publications on the Khmer Rouge and genocide, Kiernan has established himself as a world expert on these topics. Now apparently not content to rest on his laurels, he has published a survey of the entire span of Vietnamese history, Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present.

Vietnam is of course not the same as Cambodia, and the skills required of a historian to research and write about the Vietnamese past are therefore different. Here, the greatest challenge lies with the period of pre-modern Vietnamese history, that is, the period before the twentieth century. The primary sources for pre-modern Vietnamese history are largely in classical Chinese. Some have been translated into Vietnamese and French, but the quality of available translations is uneven, and it is difficult to make use of them if one does not possess knowledge about the intellectual and cultural contexts in which the originals were produced, knowledge which ultimately comes only from reading those sources in their original form. The extant secondary scholarship on pre-modern Vietnamese history is also uneven in quality.

• Tags: Issue 9, Liam Kelley, Vietnam