Conclusion

The early modern period saw significant levels of violence across a now much extended Vietnamese territorial expanse. The series of long-running civil wars, capped by the Tay Son wars that extended from the newly established southern reaches of the Vietnamese realm to the Chinese border, was only the culmination of three centuries of on and off conflict.

This conflict had taken numerous forms, from large-scale state-sponsored military campaigns pitting rival contenders for control of the realm, to small-scale rebellions that remained localised, if often unresolved for years. It was also an era that saw an extension of state-led violence against minority populations, including both ethnic groups in the uplands and new converts to Christianity in the coastal plains. While the Vietnamese had been no strangers to violence over the millennium and a half before the early modern period, the degree of prolonged conflict and its territorial extent was perhaps unprecedented. The violence that shaped the political landscape leading to the rise of the Nguyen dynasty had barely subsided before popular unrest flared up once again in the first decades of the nineteenth century. This would soon be followed by large-scale rebellion, anti-Christian pogroms and eventually the beginnings of a three-decades-long conflict with the French that would culminate in the imposition of colonial control upon the Vietnamese territories.

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Source: Antony Robert, Carroll Stuart, Pennock Caroline D. (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 3: AD 1500-AD 1800. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 710 p.. 2020

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