Kirjahaku

In one of the first energy histories of Southeast Asia, Thuy Linh Nguyen explores the environmental, economic and social history of large-scale coal mining in French colonial Vietnam. Focusing on the Qu?ng Yên coal basin in northern Vietnam, known for its world's largest anthracite coal mines, this deeply researched study demonstrates how mining came to dominate the landscape, restructuring the region's environment and upending local communities. Nguyen pays particular attention to the role of various non-state local actors, often underrepresented in grand narratives of modern Vietnam, including Vietnamese and Chinese migrant mine workers, timber traders, loggers and local ethnic minorities. Breaking away from the metropole-colony paradigm, Nguyen offers a new lens through which to explore the dynamics of colonial rule and the importance of inter-Asian networks, arguing that the colonial energy regime must be understood as a complex, multi-layered interaction between empire, capital, labour, water, sea, land and timber forests.

Explores the complex interactions between French medicine and Vietnamese childbirth traditions, documenting the emergence of a plural system of maternity services that incorporated both biomedical knowledge and local birthing traditions. This book explores the interactions between French medicine and Vietnamese childbirth traditions, examining how these interactions shaped maternal and infant health care in Vietnam. Armed with the language and expertise of modernmedicine, French physicians and administrators set out on a mission to relocate Vietnamese childbirth to a clinical setting. But as the French ventured into indigenous communities, they found themselves negotiating with a myriad of Vietnamese cultural practices relating to childbirth and infant care. Thwarted by local resistance, cultural misunderstanding, and ambiguous policy, the Western model of hospital birth neither displaced nor transformedindigenous birthing traditions in the ways the French had envisioned. Instead, as author Thuy Linh Nguyen demonstrates, the emergence of a plural system of maternity services, many of which were based on local practices and beliefs, served as a testimony to the compromises and adaptations made by both the French and Vietnamese populations. Thuy Linh Nguyen is assistant professor of history at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, NY.