Vietnam or Indochina?

Offers an innovative concept of space and place that has a wider applicability far beyond Indochina or Vietnam

Why, Benedict Anderson once asked, did Javanese become Indonesian in 1945 whereas the Vietnamese balked at becoming Indochinese? In this classic study, Christopher Goscha shows that Vietnamese of all political colours came remarkably close to building a modern national identity based on the colonial model of Indochina while Lao and Cambodian nationalists rejected this precisely because it represented a Vietnamese entity. Specialists of French colonial, Vietnamese, Southeast Asia and nationalism studies will all find much of value in Goscha's provocative rethinking of the relationship between colonialism and nationalism in Indochina.

First published in 1995 as Vietnam or Indochina? Contesting Concepts of Space in Vietnamese Nationalism, this remarkable study has been through a major revision and is augmented with new material by the author and a foreword by Eric Jennings.