Bibliographic Essay

Any study of the early modern history of Vietnam must include Keith Taylor's survey A History of the Vietnamese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). The value of this work lies in its ability to place rebellions and violence of the early modern period into a larger historical context.

Other important studies include Truong Buu Lam's ‘Intervention versus Tribute in Sino-Vietnamese Relations, 1788-1790', in John Fairbank (ed.), The Chinese World Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); and George Dutton, Jayne Werner and John K. Whitmore (eds.), Sources of Vietnamese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), which includes military edicts, discussions of popular rebellion, and documents describing the context and course of the Tay Son uprising. For military technologies and strategies, see George Dutton, ‘Burning Tiger, Flaming Dragon: Military Technology and Strategy in Pre-Modern Viet Nam', Journal of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 21 (2003).

The events of the earlier Mac struggles with their Le and Trinh rivals, as well as the Chinese dimension to this struggle, are examined in Katherine Baldanza Ming China and Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). On the role of Chinese pirates on the Sino-Vietnamese water frontier see Robert Antony, ‘Violence and Predation on the Sino-Vietnamese Maritime Frontier, 1450-1850', Asia Major, series 3, 27.2 (2014), 87-114, and his ‘Maritime Violence and State Formation in Vietnam: Piracy and the Tay Son Rebellion, 1771-1802', in Stefan Amirell and Leos Muller (eds.), Persistent Piracy: Maritime Violence and State-Formation in Global Historical Perspective (New York: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 113-30. Attention to violence reflected in the early modern Le legal codes is discussed in the three-volume, annotated translation, Nguyen Ngoc Hue and Ta Van Tai, The Le Code: Law in Traditional Vietnam (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1987). On violence against Catholics see Nola Cooke, ‘Strange Brew: Global, Regional, and Local Factors behind the 1698 Prohibition of Christian Practice in Cochinchina', Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 39.3 (2008), which looks at the Catholic community in the Nguyen realm and the court's attempt to suppress their faith.