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 third and final volume of The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War examines key domestic, regional, and international developments in the period before and after the war’s end, including its legal, environmental, and memorial legacies. The latter stages of the Vietnam War witnessed its apex as a Cold War crucible. The Sino-Soviet dispute, Sino-American rapprochement, Soviet–American détente, and global counterculturalism served in various ways to elevate the already high profile and importance of the conflict, as did its expansion into Cambodia and Laos. After the “fall” of Saigon to communist-led forces and Vietnam’s formal reunification in 1975–6, Hanoi’s persecution of former enemies, discrimination against ethnic Chinese, and economic mismanagement triggered a massive migratory crisis that redefined international refugee policies. In time, the migration changed the demographic landscape of cities across North America and Europe and continued to impact our world long after the conflict ended.

The politics of Vietnam was born in the early Cold War when Republicans made a concerted effort to undercut the national security advantage that Democrats enjoyed after a decisive victory in World War II. The years after the war are often remembered as a period when politics stopped at the water’s edge. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although there were a number of factors that moved the US military deep into the jungles of Vietnam, including a “domino theory” positing that if one country fell to communism everything around it would follow, partisan politics was a driving force behind this disastrous strategy. The same political logic and prowess that led President Lyndon Johnson to strengthen the legislative coalition behind his Great Society simultaneously pushed him into a hawkish posture in Southeast Asia.

This chapter places Marx’s well-known critique of individual rights in On the Jewish Question (1843) in the context of a more widespread indifference to rights languages in the early socialist movements of Britain, France, and Prussia. For all their differences, early socialists agreed that genuine human flourishing would require transcending what Marx was to call the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right.” The chapter charts the swinging pendulum of rights discourse in the early nineteenth century. While the century began in both Britain and France in reaction against revolutionary rights language, the years from 1815 through the early 1830s saw a revival of rights claims among British radicals, culminating in the Chartists’ embrace of natural rights, and in France, where radical republicans demanded manhood suffrage in the name of the Rights of Man. Proudhon’s What Is Property?, written in reaction to the 1830 Revolution, signaled and also helped to shape a decisive turn against rights among incipient socialist movements: in its explicit critique of individual property rights as failing to recognize the socialized character of production, but also in its more general lack of interest in rights discourse. French socialists, in the splintering Saint-Simonian movement, embraced democracy rather than rights as the language of emancipation, while in Germany the socialists emerging out of the fragmenting Young Hegelian movement likewise saw rights, especially property rights, as impediments to true, human, emancipation. Yet because rights were not central to their adversaries’ program, socialists including Marx largely ignored them. Finally, after 1860, rights claims saw something of a resurgence among socialists, with social democratic textbooks asserting rights demands as appropriate in the early stages of socialism.

Though their experience was in no way typical of American service in the Vietnam War, American prisoners of war have dominated American perceptions of the conflict. A small, strikingly homogenous group, the POWs were important because of, not despite, their unusual character. As most were pilots captured while waging air war against North Vietnam, they were subjected to harsh treatment by Vietnamese authorities, who sought to make them confess and repent their aggression against the Vietnamese people. But because aviators tended to be older, well-educated, white, career officers who identified deeply with the United States and its mission in Vietnam, American POWs were determined to resist Vietnamese coercion. In enduring torture rather than admit guilt, they inverted the wars moral framework, representing themselves as victims of Vietnamese aggression. Because they so neatly embodied the nation as its white majority wished to imagine it, their suffering and sacrifice worked to redeem the American cause in Vietnam and restore national honor. This chapter explains this phenomenon through close attention to the POW experience in North Vietnams prisons.

This chapter explores the methodology behind the attempts of Nigeria’s colonial administration to consolidate the complex patchwork of peoples, cultures, polities, and interests acquired throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As with their conquests and acquisitions of Nigerian polities, the strategies used by colonial officials differed from region to region due to the differing conditions and extreme diversity of Nigeria. The chapter will detail these different strategies and why they were assigned to the regions in question. However, despite the great diversity in administrative techniques, the chapter seeks to contextualize the overarching strategies and policies implemented by colonial officials who wished to maximize control while minimizing costs. To this end, the British colonial government sought to promote local authorities who would bear the brunt of “less important” administrative responsibilities. This marked a shift from previous colonial policies, which sought to destabilize native power structures to make their acquisition easier. The process of administrative consolidation was far from a one-sided affair. The chapter details how native authorities, cultures, and people reacted to and influenced the activities mentioned earlier.

After addressing Hamas’s intelligence collection in previous chapters, this chapter focusses on Hamas’s efforts to counter Israeli intelligence efforts against it. To overcome Israel’s attempts to infiltrate its ranks, Hamas went to great lengths to screen those wishing to join it, while diligently acting to detect collaborators with Israel, both within its ranks and in the broader society in which they operate, while applying internal compartmentalization to the organization. To counter Israel’s SIGINT activity, Hamas tried to avoid the use of wireless communications, and also made use of encryption, both in telephone communication and in correspondence; over time, Hamas developed an internal communication system that is separate from the public system. To defeat Israel’s GEOINT efforts, Hamas tried to conceal its activities to the greatest extent possible. This included a range of strategies, including camouflage, the assimilation of military installations in civilian surroundings, and the use of subterranean spaces. Regarding open-source media publications, Hamas developed the awareness of the need to impose censorship to hide certain characteristic signs of its activity.

The chapter deals with Hamas’s human intelligence (HUMINT) activity. Hamas, of course, makes use of the most traditional method of intelligence gathering – information from human sources. This chapter details how Hamas first recruited local sources for short periods and specific missions. Gradually, sources were recruited who could operate outside of Israel; these sources were sent on longer-term and more advanced missions. Hamas also used the internet, i.e., social media and email, to contact and handle potential sources. This chapter also describes how Hamas turned collaborators with Israel into double agents and ran operations using these agents.

Chapter 12 details the economic exploits of Nigeria’s colonial government and private foreign firms and explores the responses from local economic and political forces. The extraction and exploitation of Nigeria’s natural and labor resources were the primary driving factors behind British efforts, aiming to create a lucrative territorial possession that would fit snugly into a global imperial patchwork. To do so, the colonial government and some Indigenous polities promoted the construction of expansive, colony-wide infrastructure projects and extensive investments into its extraction economy, such as the development of commercial cocoa plantations. Such efforts yielded significant economic growth, but, as this chapter details, British actors would receive the most economic gains due to the attempted monopolization of these growing industries. The integration of indirect and legal forms of discrimination would harm local economic actors and non-British foreign firms, resulting in widespread poverty and social disturbance. With the onset of World War I and the economic depressions which followed, even this imbalanced economic growth would slow. Because Britain could no longer focus as much on its colonies, Nigeria’s growing class of educated elites would slowly gain more political representation.

The work of Gregor Mendel was rediscovered and fused with natural selection to make for adequate evolutionary understanding. The key figure in England, working as a mechanist, was R. A. Fisher. In America, the key figure was Sewall Wright, working as an organicist. In England, E. B. Ford provided empirical evidence. In America, the Russian-born Theodosius Dobzhansky did likewise.

Newspapers expanded around 1900 to reach a wider readership, often reporting sensationalized stories about science. Attacks on the Darwinian theory of natural selection intensified, leading to claims that the theory was on its deathbed. Lamarckism remained active along with the theory of directed variation (orthogenesis), both presented as less materialistic than Darwinism. New alternatives appeared, including the ‘mutation theory’ (evolution by jumps) and genetics, which was at first presented as a threat to Darwinism rather than a supporting factor. In the 1920s a new surge of creationism in the United States intensified the attack on Darwinian materialism, culminating in the widely reported trial of J. T. Scopes. The same critiques appeared in a less muted form in Britain. The Darwinian ‘struggle for existence’ remained a source of anxiety for those who feared a potential threat to moral values and social stability.