This chapter explores political developments in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) from the coup against President Ngô Đình Diệm in November 1963 to the consolidation of General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu’s power as president in late 1968. The dominant feature of politics in the RVN during this time was the monopolization of political power by a divided military. But noncommunist civilian groups challenged military rule in the form of street protests, armed rebellion, and constitutional assemblies, forcing the military to accede to elections and the return to constitutional government in 1967. These changes created limited opportunities for competitive politics but also granted a veneer of legitimacy to military rule as Nguyễn Văn Thiệu won election and outmaneuvered his rivals within the armed forces. The chapter addresses the powerful influence that the United States, as well as historic faultlines in Vietnamese noncommunist nationalism such as religion, regionl and differing experiences of colonialism and communism, exercised on RVN politics. The chapter contends that the RVN was both an outpost of the American empire and a site of febrile postcolonial politics.

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 American War in Vietnam is often described as a struggle for the “hearts and minds” of the Vietamese people, a fundamentally political conflict in which “pacification,” the push to uproot the adversarys hold on the villages, became a primary mechanism in fighting the war. This chapter opens with an inquiry into the meaning of the terms of art, not just pacification but “counterinsurgency,” “civic action,” “nation-building,” and others. It observes this schema applies to an essential problem, the degree of South Vietnamese commitment to pacification, which remained problematic. To show this I start with a description of how pacification evolved under Ngo Dinh Diem and his successors. On the American side we see presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who took a conventional view, to John F. Kennedy, who applied counterinsurgency, to Lyndon B. Johnson, who championed the “other war,” one that privileged economic and social development. LBJ became the first to create an organizational structure to conduct pacification programs. The late-war innovations to these efforts, including measures of village loyalty, the Phoenix program attacking the National Liberation Fronts infrastructure, and the emphasis on elections from national to village level, were products of the Johnson administration. From the beginning, American pacification policy oscillated between emphasizing security versus social development before settling on security.

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 East India Company conquest of Bengal opened a field of intellectual contestation centered on questions of rights. At issue were competing conceptions of the place of rights in the history of India. Rights as such could be regarded as having held little significance in light of an underlying history of despotism. On the other hand, the claims of subjects on donative largesse, state patronage, or public infrastructure could be understood as the exercise of a kind of right. Cutting across these positions and their variations was an engagement with the administrative idiom and historical example of the Mughal empire (ca. 1526–1857). Indeed, this rights discourse included contributions from figures who posed themselves as direct interlocutors as much with the Mughal old regime as with the evolving order of the Company. In their works, critiques of the Company could be made by recasting the old regime in new molds to challenge the practice and conceptual underpinnings of Company rule. In order to situate this field of contestation in the intellectual history of rights, this chapter analyzes the views of some singular figures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This chapter offers an approach to the discourses of race and ethnicity in ancient Greek epic, specifically Homer’s Iliad and Apollonius’ Argonautica. The chapter begins by defining, theorising and applying a transhistorical concept of race and ethnicity which makes it possible to analyse the literary representations of ancient manifestations of ethnic and racialised oppression. Murray argues that epic poetry transmitted to its receiving society, whether ancient or modern, a mythical social order that placed the heroes, the demi-gods, at the top of the human hierarchy, and non-heroes, the people who are oppressed and exploited by the heroes, at the bottom. She also examines the specific construct of the epic hero, who can only really exist where non-heroes can be and are dehumanised by him. Murray analyses examples of this hierarchical structure and argues that this mythic social order, so integral to the society of Greek epic, was racial.

The rights of man and the citizen were in conflict in West African abolitionism because the universalism of the rights of man was not enforceable without encroaching on the sovereignty of African states. This chapter will explore the development of ideas of rights in the engagements between West Africa and the abolitionists and imperialists who intervened there across the nineteenth century. The three sections explore the forms of civil, political, and ‘universal’ rights that existed in West Africa at the beginning of the nineteenth century; the ideas of rights that abolitionists developed in their antislavery interventions against the slave trade in West Africa; and the ideas of rights that emerged in debates over imperial citizenship in these colonies towards the end of the century. A multiplicity of rights regimes existed in overlapping and competing spaces as West Africa became a site for differentiating the civilizing mission and citizenship; duties and rights; and the boundaries of universal privileges and assertive versus paternalistic rights. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen may have laid out the theory for citizenship, law, and universal rights, but it was through the attempt to implement those ideas as universal that differentiation between basic rights and citizenship rights began to be articulated. That differentiation emerged through negotiations over the power to implement universal ideals in places like West Africa, which were undergoing their own revolutions in ideas of universal legal regimes and notions of citizenship, while maintaining political privileges for a subset of the population. In the process, European colonial governments came into conflict with each other and with African governments’ ideas of the universal moral values that conferred rights on their members.

The theories of rights articulated in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were innovative in their own time and have exerted widespread influence ever since, but they were marked by profound contradictions that spurred generations of critical engagements. This chapter offers an explanation for these dynamics by considering the social position occupied by rights theorists within the Americas. It begins with the British and Spanish American independence movements, considering the roles of universalist and particularist rights claims within the ideologies of the movements’ European-descended leadership. Next, it explores how, in the instances where Americans that occupied less privileged social positions took over the leadership of struggles for independence, the kinds of rights claimed, the grounds upon which these rights were claimed, and the range of persons on behalf of whom rights were claimed varied in such a manner as to reflect the difference of leadership. Finally, it traces the ways that Americans initially excluded from enjoyment of the rights claimed by the independence movements and enumerated in the Americas’ early constitutions sought both recognition as equal rights-bearers and revisions to the rights that they and other Americans bore over the course of the nineteenth century.

Mathelinda Nabugodi traces the shifts in Coleridge’s thoughts on race from his early abolitionist writings to his later reflections on beauty and aesthetics. Focusing on his comments about Africans, Nabugodi demonstrates a crucial tension between the Romantic poet’s youthful commitment to abolition and the embrace of scientific racism in his later writings. This tension also informs the revisions that Coleridge made to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) when he prepared it for republication in Sibylline Leaves (1817). Nabugodi’s careful comparative reading of the 1798 and the 1817 versions highlights the way a representative poet’s work embodies the contradictions of a Romanticism in which freedom could be imagined as universal even as European superiority was taken for granted.

This chapter explores the spatial dimensions of the trope of the epic return journey (the nostos) and focuses on the physical and emotive experiences which such a journey produces. Loney first highlights dislocation as an important feature in epic, and a motivating force behind its plot: the feeling of being separated in time or space from a more ideal past or home. Under this single conception of ‘dislocation’, the chapter brings together two poetic themes which scholars have traditionally treated discretely: nostalgia and homesickness. Archaic epics, especially Hesiod’s Works and Days, rely on a narrative of decline—of temporal dislocation—from an antecedent ‘golden age’, for which internal characters and external audiences are nostalgic. Similarly, characters in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey may be spatially dislocated and homesick, motivating a return journey (prototypically Odysseus, but also at moments Achilles and Helen).

This chapter introduces the essays in the volume, which work through various understandings of “romanticism” and “race,” addressing how these terms acquire meaning via other concepts taking shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as “blackness,” “whiteness,” “sovereignty,” “property,” and “freedom.”

This chapter studies how the ocean became a realm of human rights aspiration. It illuminates the emergence of an oceanic idea of human rights as an antislavery work, the invention of African Americans who had been held as slaves as well as of freeborn abolitionists. In antislavery thought, the ocean constituted not a space for traversing, creating wealth, or making war – of commerce and of empire – but a realm of natural human liberty. The chapter traces the origins of this idea to a slave rebellion aboard an American ship sailing on the Atlantic ocean in 1841– a coastwise slave trade voyage– and the conflict of laws caused by the rebellion. Out of this conflict, the chapter argues, emerged emancipatory doctrine that contributed to a burgeoning antislavery invocation of human rights while transforming a conception of the free sea that was centuries old.

This chapter analyzes the United States’ relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam from 1975 to the present. The termination of war in 1975 brought conflict of a different sort. Washington retained the wartime trade embargo and rejected Hanoi’s demands for “reparations.” Vietnam ignored US requests to account for possible prisoners of war and missing in action (MIA) on its territory. Attitudes shifted in the 1980s. America’s détente with the USSR opened possibilities for Moscow’s ally, Vietnam. Now in dire straits economically, Hanoi’s new leaders revamped the nation’s stagnant economy and opened trade with numerous nations. Vietnam was sufficiently pressed that in the 1990s it bowed to harsh US demands for what was called normalization. Diplomatic relations and trade followed. Vietnam–US relations took an ironic turn in the new century. As China emerged the dominant power in East Asia and expanded into the South China Sea, America increased its military presence in the region and formed a strategic partnership with Vietnam. Wary of China, Hanoi needed US assistance. But it feared dependency on its former enemy. Americans still condemned Vietnam’s authoritarian government and human rights’ abuses. Both seemed content with a relationship a Vietnamese diplomat called the “Goldilocks Formula”: “Not too hot, not too cold.”

Advocates of institutional economics in history have pointed to the adoption of systems of rights inspired by economic liberalism as a major factor behind inequalities of development. This chapter assesses the claim’s validity in the nineteenth century, when legal reforms grounded in liberal economic theory – most importantly the securing of exclusive private property rights – swept first Europe and its colonial offshoots and then the rest of the world. It considers the intellectual origins of such legal changes, their revolutionary implementation in the European world, their enforcement often by means of empire elsewhere, and the retreat from economic liberalism at the end of the century. Theories of development based on institutional economics are right to stress the extent of legal changes ushered in by economic liberalism. But adopting a social and political perspective on the new economic rights of the nineteenth century imposes several nuances. First, outside the anglophone world, liberal economic rights were neither the product nor the precursor of liberal political institutions: the adoption of free market rules was more often the result of revolutions from above or imperial rule. Second, liberal economic rights were granted selectively. Even in the European world, those of women remained significantly restricted, while in colonial worlds a very large share of Indigenous populations was excluded. Third, when faced with some adverse effects of unfettered competition and under the influence of new nationalist and socialist ideas, lawmakers in the last decades of the century began to temper liberal economic rights to protect national producers, small business owners, and industrial or agricultural workers. Contrary to the sanguine interpretation derived from institutional economics, the triumph of liberal economic rights did not entail that of political liberty, it chiefly benefited wealthy European males, and it lasted only a few decades. Private property may not have been theft, but nor was it the infallible elixir of economic development.

The escalation of US military involvement in Vietnam in 1965 sparked a surge in international diplomacy to broker peace, or at least open direct peace talks, between Washington and Hanoi. This chapter recounts some of the myriad (failed) attempts to make progress by third parties – from countries to groups of countries (e.g., the Non-Aligned Movement and the British Commonwealth) to multilateral institutions (e.g., the United Nations) to nonstate actors (organizations, individuals) – in the three or so years before direct US–DRV discussions finally began in Paris in May 1968. Perhaps the most intriguing of these initiatives involved the communist world (i.e., the Soviet bloc, since Mao Zedongs China strongly opposed peace talks), which had embassies in and fraternal interparty contacts with Hanoi that most noncommunist countries lacked. As the communist representative on the three-member International Control Commission, Poland had especially intimate involvement with several peace bids. The chapter examines this history and whether (or not) genuine diplomatic opportunities may have existed to end the Vietnam War, or at least start serious peace talks, earlier, potentially saving many lives. It also probes the concurrent interrelationship between this diplomacy and broader international factors such as the Cold War and Sino-Soviet split.

Throughout the long period of American involvement in Vietnam, Washington officials often justified US intervention by referring to the domino theory. Even before President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally articulated the theory in 1954, civilian as well as military analysts had set out a version of the theory, linking the outcome in Indochina to a chain reaction of regional and global effects. Defeat in Vietnam, they warned, would have calamitous consequences not merely for that country but for the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond. Over time, US officials moved to a less mechanistic, more psychological version of the theory. Credibility was the new watchword, as policymakers declared it essential to stand firm in Vietnam in order to demonstrate American determination to defend its vital interests not only in the region but around the world. But it was not only American credibility on the world stage that mattered; also at stake, officials feared, was their own and their party’s credibility at home. This chapter examines these permutations of the domino theory, with particular focus on the crucial 1964–5 period under Lyndon B. Johnson.