In a new article on Vietnamese history, Associate Professor Liam C. Kelley reinterprets what we know about the historical development of the southern half of Vietnam.
The southern half of Vietnam has long been characterized by historians as historically less-centralized, less-Confucian, and less-bureaucratic than the Vietnamese heartland in the Red River delta. However, through a comparative examination of tax collection and military recruitment in these two regions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dr. Kelley argues that the southern half of Vietnam in many ways surpassed its northern counterpart in its centralized control of the population.
This paper enables historians to gain a better sense of Vietnam’s governmental and economic development just prior to the colonial era.
Kelley, Liam C. “Taxation and Military Conscription in Early Modern Vietnam: Nguyễn Đàng Trong in Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 15.2 (2020): 1–39.
