Review: A Maritime Vietnam: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century, by Li Tana

Li Tana’s A Maritime Vietnam: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century is a wonderful foray into a facet of the country’s history that is not often told. Vietnam has traditionally been written about as a landed polity: its wars, institutions, and intellectual culture all have been discussed predominantly as part of its terroir. Li’s book is different. Its primary vantage is the sea, and as such readers get a diverging set of insights from its pages than those arriving from a more landed locus. Starting with some of the earliest materials available on Vietnam and pushing through nearly two thousand years and into the nineteenth century, Li shows how the Vietnamese coasts played a more important role in the development of the Vietnamese polity than has previously been supposed. Tacking back and forth across three thousand kilometers of coastline is not easy—there is a lot of ground to...