A History of the Vietnamese

K. W. Taylor is a professor in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University, New York. His career began in the US Army, where he was deployed in the US-Vietnam war. He has now been researching Vietnam for nearly forty years, and his work has made a fundamental contribution to the development of the field.

• Introduction; 1. The provincial era; 2. The Ly dynasty; 3. The Tran dynasty; 4. The Le dynasty; 5. The beginning of inter-regional warfare; 6. The Fifty Years War; 7. The south and the north diverge; 8. The Thirty Years War; 9. The Nguyen dynasty; 10. The French conquest; 11. Franco-Vietnamese colonial relations; 12. Indochina at war; 13. From two countries to one; Retrospective; Bibliographic essay; Figures; Tables; Maps; Index.

'This book is a landmark in scholarship, the product of Keith Taylor's four decades of intensive and prolonged engagement with Vietnam. There is no other book quite like it: it is the most authoritative work yet written on the full sweep of Vietnamese history. In these pages, stories from this past - whether of cannibals or kings, eunuchs or slaves, queen regents or revolutionaries - are woven into a rich historical account of the Vietnamese past. A magisterial achievement.' Shawn McHale, George Washington University