When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

The 1973–75 period has received scant attention from western scholars. For most, the war ended when the Americans left, but the seeds of the destruction of South Vietnam were sown with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973. Although both Vietnamese antagonists had suffered tremendous physical damage during the 1972 offensive, their irreconcilable political visions prevented them from creating peace. Hanoi had refused to remove its troops from the country after the offensive, and, despite a signed agreement, it had promptly broken the accords, determined to conquer Saigon and unite the country under its flag. Thus, there are four main reasons for the defeat of South Vietnam: North Vietnamese abrogation of the Paris Peace Accords, dire South Vietnamese economic conditions, the reduction of US aid and its debilitating effect on the South Vietnamese military, and President Nguyen Van Thieu’s strategic military blunders. The first three forced Thieu into an impossible predicament, which led to the fourth. The outcome was the fall of South Vietnam.

The Miracle

In 1981, the south Indian state of Kerala was among the poorest regions in India. The state's average income was about a third smaller than the national average. In the late 1970s, by average income, Kerala was in the bottom third of India's thirty-odd states. In 2022, per capita income in the state was 50–60 per cent higher than the national average. Among those states large in land size, populous and with a diversified economic base, the state was the fifth richest in terms of average income in 2022. Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Telangana were the other four. None of the others saw such a sharp change in relative ranking.

Kerala's economy did not grow steadily throughout these forty years. The acceleration, catching up and overtaking were not more than fifteen years old, twenty at the most. Income growth rates were low for much of the 1980s and the 1990s. The numbers changed sharply only in recent decades. The roots of this extraordinary growth performance, however, were much older. This book is a search for these roots.

It is not a common practice among economists to treat a state in India as the subject of long-term economic history. But ‘Kerala is different’ from all other Indian states. A huge scholarship building from the 1970s and drawing in many social scientists insisted it was different. Although poor, the population of the state lived much longer than the average Indian and had a significantly higher literacy rate than in the rest of India. The scholarship trying to explain this anomaly was mindful of history. But the history had a narrow purpose. It was made to work for a specific question: how did an income-poor region make great strides in human development? The discourse that emerged to answer the question had two critical weaknesses. First, it was too state-focused and neglected to analyse enough market-led changes. Second, it took income poverty for granted. Neither the question nor the answers offered are useful to explain the recent acceleration in income. The explanations could not show how the basic premise of a low income might change someday because the research agenda did not consider that prospect very likely.

This chapter summarizes some of the key issues confronting Vietnam after the so-called “liberation of the South” in 1975. Partly because of the fact that it was a military takeover, the new regime was immediately confronted with new economic, political, and diplomatic pressures from the United States, China, and a host of other countries. In addition, the new leadership plunged Vietnam into more than a decade of difficulties on all fronts – including protracted wars with China and Cambodia – because of over-confidence, ideological steadfastness, and miscalculations. Domestic resistance and international pressures of various kinds finally brought about grudging changes that culminated in the reform process of the late 1980s, which thereby helped to open up a new horizon for Vietnam and its people.

This paper aims to present a general overview of the distribution of Byzantine and Early Islamic ceramics (mostly amphorae, but also some examples of fine table wares and coarse wares) on Sicily between approximately the seventh/eighth and the eleventh centuries CE. The focus will range from pottery finds found in some sites on the island, which were still part of the Byzantine Empire, to wares excavated at other sites which became part of the Emirate of Sicily. Comparison between the ceramics found in these different parts of the island will shed new light on the trade and exchange patterns of such commodities in this period.

This chapter argues that the 1848 Revolutions can profitably be understood through the prism of arguments over rights. It highlights a series of contests between those who championed a “thin” conception of individual civil and political rights and those who defended a variety of “thicker” understandings: whether of rights as belonging to collectives, especially national minorities; as protecting cultural, linguistic, or gender identities and differences; or as demands for extensive state action to challenge economic domination of workers by landowners and capitalists. The offer of individual rights under a “thinner” constitutional order in the Habsburg monarchy was insufficient to address conflicts between the dominant Magyar nation and the claims of the regime’s other national groups; at the same time, these conflicts generated nuanced efforts to theorize individual and collective rights by figures such as József Eötvös. Ostensibly “thin” demands for individual equality under the law proved unable to protect individuals – particularly emancipated slaves, peasants, laborers, and women – from domination deep-seated in existing social structures.

In the 1980s and beyond, a variety of ways of thinking about the Vietnam War began to coalesce into conventional recollections: the received knowledge and common sense of the war. A truism was that Vietnam veterans had suffered a difficult homecoming worsened by their sense that they alone bore the war’s moral burdens. Aware of that predicament through the emerging understanding of post-traumatic stress, their fellow Americans felt obliged to offer Vietnam veterans the comfort of recognition. To overcome veterans’ isolation and bring together a divided public, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial acknowledged the service and sacrifices of those who had fought. Vietnam veterans became the principal vectors who overcame Cold War–generated divisions about the war, and brought it into public understanding through their testimony in oral histories and documentaries, literary works, and complaints about their grievances. Although opinion polls indicated throughout the decades that most Americans believed that their nation acted wrongly in Vietnam, a generational shift is now occurring as new cohorts grow up separated from the experience of the war by the span of years. As memories fall away through time, the Vietnam War becomes an artifact of American culture, of which everyone becomes the collective custodian and repository.

In the United States wealthy tycoons funded fossil-hunting expeditions and new natural history museums to display their discoveries. Dinosaurs from the Western states dramatically transformed the way the ascent of life could be represented because they were quite unlike any living reptiles and confirmed that the ‘tree of life’ had many more branches, some of which had disappeared completely. There was increasing evidence of relatively abrupt transitions in the earth’s history, forcing geologists and evolutionists to reconsider their impression that change had been more or less continuous. As the tree of life became more complex, the assumption that the human species was the inevitable outcome of progressive evolution became less plausible. Although non-Darwinian theories were retained by some authorities, the new vision of evolution came to seem more compatible with Darwin’s vision of an open-ended and less predictable process.

Chapter Six offers a careful reading of the first two sedition trials of Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1898 and 1908). While existing scholarship has studied his subversive performances within the courtroom, I extend this analysis to incorporate his efforts at winning executive mercy and commutation from prison. More than any other political leader, Tilak spent his imprisonment exhausting every avenue to petition and appeal against his sentence. This included multiple approaches to the Privy Council and serious plans to petition the House of Lords. In an important and original breakthrough in anticolonial political thought, it was when Tilak failed to win freedom on the basis of justice alone that he connected the availability of mercy to the curtailment of political rights in India.