Quagmire: Nation‐Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta. By David Biggs

Abstract

QUAGMIRE: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta. By DAVID BIGGS. xviii and 300 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. $23.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780295990675. In Quagmire David Biggs unfolds an environmental history equally rewarding for regional specialists and lifelong residents as well as those for whom the Mekong Delta evokes only vague memories of war. Drawn skillfully from Vietnamese, French, and archival sources augmented by contemporary on-site observations and oral histories, Quagmire provides unparalleled historical depth and detail on the coevolution of the region's environmental and political landscape, artfully composed into a narrative that connects the delta's precolonial past with the French colonial oeuvre through the convulsions of nearly a half-century of war. The book makes a significant contribution to development studies and political geography around the role of nature in nation-building projects. Biggs asks what role nature plays, as obstacle and as instrument, in state formation. How is the political geography of government authority shaped by environmental modifications enacted by nation builders and by those whom they presume to govern, especially when they are in violent opposition? What does the violence of state formation do to the environment, and what does that consequent landscape do to prop up or undermine state power? While echoing past political ecological studies in its critique of politically authoritarian, ecologically ignorant development policies, Quagmire diverges from this literature and seminal works on Mekong Delta history by placing the pacification of nature--not the peasantry--at the center of its analysis of nation building. Rather than frame his argument in familiar terms of subaltern resistance against a modernizing state, Biggs argues that nation-building projects are complex processes of environmental transformation wherein local residents are active participants in both propelling and retarding their progress. Successive nation-building attempts in the Mekong Delta partially co-opted and were partially co-opted by people on the land and modified by the exigencies of the environment, in the end profoundly transforming the political-ecological landscape of the delta despite failing to achieve their aim of forging an easily governable space out of the area's water, land, and people. With a few exceptions the book accurately translates from the Vietnamese and conveys a wealth of often-obscure geographical and historical details. Quagmire narrates the evolution of environmental modification and political power in the Mekong Delta from the establishment of Vietnamese sovereignty in the eighteenth century to the end of the American War in 1975. The introduction lays out the book's primary themes: The overlapping nature of successive nation-building projects in the delta; the dynamic of resistance and adaptation by residents to state-led environmental transformations; the repeated failures of development schemes to control the environment or the people, with each new iteration creating a more intractable set of socioecological crises. Chapter 1 describes the French conquest of the Mekong in the 1860s and subsequent attempts to disseminate France's authority. The introduction of mechanized canal dredges and the extension of existing canal projects initiated by Vietnamese authorities opened up huge areas of the delta previously inaccessible for settlement. The canals allowed authorities to circulate through the delta, creating a mobile governmental presence in the region but also accelerating population displacement and environmental calamity. Chapter 2 explains continuities and ruptures between the Vietnamese empire's settlement policies and those of the French and the radical shifts in land tenure and land cover that followed in the wake of the colonial dredges. The Mekong Delta became a society of tenants and landlords in an unstable, degraded environment that was prone to flooding and soil exhaustion exacerbated by poorly designed canal projects. …