(Ebook) A Maritime Vietnam: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century by Tana Li ISBN 9781009237635, 1009237632

(Ebook) A Maritime Vietnam: From Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century by Tana Li ISBN 9781009237635, 1009237632

[Missing cover and some duplicate pages in the beginning.]
Despite its 3,000-kilometres coastline, few people see Vietnam as a maritime
country. Here Li Tana presents a powerful new argument about Vietnamese
history: that key political changes resulted from the impact, economic and
otherwise, of the sea. This is a finely layered account covering the two millennia
before colonisation that radically restructures how we understand the role
of the maritime and trans-regional in Vietnam’s early history. Drawing on
exhaustive research of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese sources, Li reveals
that it is only when viewed against the background of the sea that Vietnam’s
past can be properly understood. In contrast to traditional perceptions of an
inward-looking society dominated by Chinese cultural influence, Vietnam
was shaped by dynamic littoral economic and cultural contact.
Li Tana is Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture, History and Language,
College of Asia and Pacific Studies, Australian National University (ANU).