Is "Revisionist History" Redundant? Not Always.

At first glance, this title seems to contradict my previous post, where I argued that revisionist history is redundant because all historical writing revises existing interpretations. Without change or new perspectives, what would be the point of writing history?

Now I’m saying revisionist history isn’t always redundant. Why? In some fields, the term revisionist has evolved into a label for historians who take a distinct and often controversial new direction in their research. Here are two examples: the English Reformation and America in Vietnam.

The English Reformation: A Revisionist Turn

For many years, historians of the English Reformation portrayed it as inevitable, overdue, and widely welcomed. They argued that Roman Catholicism had grown stale and oppressive, making the Reformation a relief. Prominent historians in this tradition include A.G. Dickens and G.R. Elton.

But starting in the 1980s, historians like J.J. Scarisbrick and Eamon Duffy challenged this narrative. They focused instead on what was lost during the Reformation, presenting evidence that many English people resisted or lamented the changes. They argued the old system was effective, meaningful, and didn’t need replacing.

These historians embraced the label revisionists. Over time, their arguments reshaped the conversation so thoroughly that scholars now describe the field as post-revisionist. The key point is that revisionist wasn’t used as a slur in this context—it became an accepted term for a distinct school of thought.

U.S. Involvement in Vietnam: Another Revisionist Turn

A similar dynamic exists in the historiography of America’s involvement in Vietnam. The dominant view—advocated by journalists like Neil Sheehan and historians like John Prados—holds that U.S. intervention was a mistake: poorly planned, poorly executed, and ultimately disastrous. This perspective is exemplified in Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War documentary.

However, a small group of historians, described as revisionists, offer a different take. They argue that U.S. involvement in Vietnam was justified to prevent the spread of communism, that the war was winnable, and that the United States withdrew prematurely. Among these historians, Mark Moyar stands out with works like Triumph Forsaken and Triumph Regained.

My Take

In both cases, I find myself siding with the older, traditional interpretations. At the same time, I recognize that the revisionists often make insightful points. What’s important here is that the term revisionist history isn’t always redundant or pejorative. Sometimes, it’s a meaningful label for a specific approach embraced by its proponents.

In these contexts, revisionist history is not just about change—it’s about redefining the conversation entirely.

Reading List for Vietnam

The following reading list is for the topic of "Vietnam" in a much longer list for U.S. History after 1877. It includes seven titles. I am an Americanist, but I do not focus on the Vietnam War. So this is a set of books for the topic, geared toward preparation of a nonspecialist for comprehensive exams. Recommendations? Suggestions? Tell me what you think:

Berman, Larry. Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent. HarperCollins/Smithsonian, 2007.

Bilton, Michael and Kevin Sim. Four Hours in My Lai. Penguin, 1992.

Milam, Ron. Not a Gentleman's War: An Inside View of Junior Officers in the Vietnam War. North Carolina, 2009.

Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Cambridge, 2006.

Prados, John. Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975. Kansas, 2009.

Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. Vintage, 1989.

Vuic, Kara Dixon. Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War. Johns Hopkins, 2010.

All's Fair in War? Larry Berman's Wonderful Book about Pham Xuan An

Berman, Larry. Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent. New York: HarperCollins/Smithsonian, 2007.

This finely-written book tells the story of one of the most fascinating real-life characters ever. If you like history with a bit of mystery, you'll love this.

*Spoiler Alert*

In early 1953 in the southernmost province of Vietnam, the legendary Le Duc Tho presided over a ceremony in which Pham Xuan An, the subject of this riveting story, became a member of the Communist Party. Shortly afterward, the Party determined An's career. They realized he had the intellect and disposition to become a first-rate spy. For many years to come, An would lead a brilliant double life.

As historian and author Larry Berman explains, in the early 1950s, the leaders of the Communist Party fully realized that the United States was in the process of replacing the French colonialists in Vietnam. To the U.S.--in spite of American propaganda--Vietnam was never about the Vietnamese people. It was always about Cold War containment and the incredible task of keeping all of the dominoes in Southeast Asia standing straight.

For their part, many of the Vietnamese people had no interest in being told by the French or the Americans or anyone else that they would not be allowed to determine their own national future. As they had with the French, the Vietnamese would do everything they could to resist the Americans. Secretly, Pham Xuan An and his network would become a powerful component of that resistance.

In 1957, An came to Orange Coast College in California where he learned English, became acquainted with American culture, and developed many contacts inside the U.S. He even worked for the college newspaper where he made several new friends. Upon returning to Vietnam, An was at first quite nervous. Living in Saigon, he wondered, would he be suspected and arrested? Once he settled down, An began to develop relationships with important Americans and high-ranking leaders within the South Vietnamese government. In the years to come, An worked for the Reuters news service, the New York Herald Tribune, and eventually for Time magazine. All along, he was one of Hanoi's most valuable informants. He didn't have to steal information. It was freely discussed and shared with him by people who considered An a colleague and friend.

In short, Pham Xuan An may have been the one of the greatest con men and informants ever. For many years, he lived as both a first-rate journalist in Saigon working for American news outlets, and also as a hero of the Communist government headquartered in Hanoi.

Ap Bac: The Event and Interpretation of a "Miserable Damn Performance," January 2, 1963

In his recently-published Historical Dictionary of the War in Vietnam, Ronald Frankum includes the following in his entry for “Ap Bac”:

On January 2, 1963, the 7th Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) engaged the 261st Main Force Battalion near the village of Ap Bac and the 415th Regional Battalion in Ap Tan Thoi. The American advisor to the 7th ARVN Division, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, had encouraged the move in order to achieve a quick and decisive victory against an enemy that had hurt the morale of the ARVN forces earlier in an October 1962 defeat of an ARVN ranger platoon.  . . . In previous encounters with helicopters, the troops of the National Liberation Front (NLF) had fled or exposed themselves to ground and air fire . . . In this instance, the NLF practiced strict fire discipline and stood its ground along a tree and canal line, maintaining a strong defensive position.  . . . It was not until early evening that the ARVN forces reinforced the troops fighting on the ground to such an extent that they forced the NLF to leave the battlefield.  . . . Ap Bac was a lesson for the South Vietnamese military and American advisers who were filled with frustration at opportunities lost. It also marked the beginning of more pronounced media criticism of the ARVN and the American military role in the war after Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, commander General Paul Harkins declared that the operation was a success, because the ARVN had secured Ap Bac. (54-55)

During the half century since that battle, American military advisors in Vietnam, journalists on the scene, and historians of the war have weighed in on a number of related questions. What exactly happened at Ap Bac? Why did the engagement unfold as it did? What were the keys to the Viet Cong victory? Why was the ARVN so soundly defeated in spite of its having what seemed to be every advantage? How did Gen. Harkins’ ridiculous, upbeat reports on the battle expose and perhaps reinforce inconsistencies within both the ARVN and American military? And how did those inconsistencies damage the relationship between American military leaders and the international press?

In what follows, my goal is to discern some answers to at least a few of those questions by exploring an array of important contributions to the historiography of the battle of Ap Bac, and to see how each source compares to and contrasts with the others. Is it possible to see a defined picture, one that fits with a coherent interpretation of the rest of the war?

A good place to begin is with the Pulitzer-prize winning book A Bright Shining Lie, by journalist Neil Sheehan. First published in 1988, Sheehan’s work is essentially two books which the author names in the subtitle: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. Basic to his widely-read account is Sheehan’s idea that the life of John Vann, an incredibly talented yet deeply flawed American military officer, is a powerful lens through which to view the much larger landscape of the war.

For my purposes here, the most significant aspect of Sheehan’s work is that he devotes all of Book III to “The Battle of Ap Bac.” Beyond that, the first several pages of Book IV, “Taking On the System,” recount the aftermath of the battle. In all, Sheehan provides 80 pages directly focused on Ap Bac (i.e., 203-83). Something else makes his narrative especially important: Sheehan was himself part of the press corps in Vietnam at the time, and actually traveled to the scene the morning after the battle. Years later, along with his interviews with several military leaders who were involved in the battle, the author consulted the finest of primary sources: “John Vann’s exhaustive after-action report” and “the equally thorough Viet Cong report that was later captured,” which, Sheehan notes, “tended to corroborate each other” (805-06).

Sheehan’s account establishes, or at least identifies and reinforces, several important particulars associated with the Battle of Ap Bac. First, regarding its relative significance, Sheehan not only devotes an entire section to Ap Bac, he calls it “the first great battle of the American war in Vietnam” (199), one “that would affect the course of the war” (205).

Second, the Viet Cong at Ap Bac had the advantage of excellent intelligence. They “knew that an attack was coming on the morning of January 2, 1963” (206). Consequently, according to Sheehan’s account, they had established the best possible positions. They were dug in so deeply and camouflaged so well that not even their muzzle fire revealed their positions. To top it all off, they also had a solid escape plan. By contrast, the American planner who served under Vann estimated that there would be no more than 120 Viet Cong regulars, if that many, protecting the target, a VC radio transmitter located at nearby Tan Thoi. In fact, there were approximately three times that many guerillas waiting (205).

Third, by the time of Ap Bac the Viet Cong were trained in tactics designed to neutralize the ARVN advantage of using American helicopters and M-113 armored personnel carriers. They had been training to lead and shoot moving aircraft (218-19), a technique at which they apparently had become well-practiced. From Sheenan’s description it also seems clear that the VC had some idea of how they might slay the “green dragons,” their name for the feared M-113s. Their tactic was to shoot at the exposed, unprotected machine gunners and drivers of the M-113s once they came within range. Then, after the machines had stopped, the guerillas would explode grenades thrown onto or just above the carriers, wounding and demoralizing the troops inside (255-57).

Fourth, a hesitancy that often appeared to stem from sheer cowardice undermined the ARVN “attack” throughout the day. Sheehan tells, for example, how ARVN lieutenants refused to allow American advisor Sgt. 1st Class Arnold Bowers to use their radios, sometimes feigning that they could not understand English. It became clear to Bowers that if he were allowed to use the radio, the lieutenants might be ordered to do something they didn’t want to do (224-25).

Fifth, in the aftermath of the Ap Bac catastrophe, the relationships between the American military, the press, and the American people began to change. Hours after the Viet Cong had been permitted to make a clean getaway, John Vann did not attempt to hide his rage, even in the presence of the international press. What made matters even worse was that Gen. Harkins seemed to believe the duplicitous reports of the ARVN’s General Huynh Van Cao. Too, Harkins did not appreciate Vann’s withering post-battle write up, and he resented the colonel’s angry conviction that what the ARVN turned in at Ap Bac was “a miserable damn performance” (277). It soon became clear to some observers that, although Harkins was not the only one, he was the most prominent example of an American military leader involved in Vietnam who saw only what he wanted to see. Sheehan, speaking for himself and other representatives of the American press in Vietnam, says that until that time, they “believed in what our government said it was trying to accomplish in Vietnam, and we wanted our country to win this war just as passionately as Vann and his captains did” (271). But by then, things had changed: “Ap Bac was putting Vietnam on the front pages and on the television evening news shows with a drama that no other event had yet achieved” (278).

On the question of relationships between the American people, the press, and the U.S. military in Vietnam, perhaps no other scholar has conducted more research than William M. Hammond. In two early books, Hammond provided exhaustive treatments of the military and media in Vietnam during the years 1962-68 and 1968-73. Later, he condensed all the material from those two previous volumes and produced a smaller, more manageable work designed for a broader audience: Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War, published in 1998. Hammond relates that in the aftermath of the battle of Ap Bac, editorials and commentaries that appeared in American newspapers “were biting.”

"The Washington Daily News, for example, termed Ap Bac a ‘humiliation.’ The Baltimore Sun described the enemy ‘slipping away . . . ahead of a half-hearted Vietnamese pursuit.’ The Detroit Free Press wondered how Diem’s harsh dictatorship could give peasant soldiers any motive to fight at all" (9).

Consequently, in spite of Gen. Harkins’ defense of the ARVN and his upbeat assessment of the progress of the mission in Vietnam, Ap Bac “marked a divide in the history of the war.  . . . After it, [American reporters] decided their government was lying and withdrew” (9).

In an environment that became more and more poisonous over time, the U.S. government held at least a temporary advantage: the administration largely controlled the information on which the news media depended. Hammond observes that what eventually broke the ensuing stalemate between the government and the news media was the American public, which chose to go “its own way.” Americans, he says, followed “their own third course, exercising their own independence of mind, and displaying a substantial measure of contempt for all those in the press and government who had sought to manipulate them over the years.” The American people, weary of reading about the “many deaths and contradictions . . . moved to repudiate the earlier decision.” When they did, it was relatively easy for the American press to follow. By contrast, the U.S. military “lacked the ability to do the same.” Wanting to retain whatever honor they could, emotionally tied to the prospect of some sort of victory, leaders of the U.S. Armed Forces “fixed their anger on the press, the most visible element of the society that appeared to have rejected them” (296). A disappointing story, Hammond’s account basically confirms Sheehan’s view that the battle of Ap Bac marked a true turning point in America’s involvement in Vietnam.

When it comes to the question of how and why the Viet Cong could have been so well prepared at Ap Bac, very few other books would be able to match the penetrating insight provided by Larry Berman’s, Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter & Vietnamese Communist Agent, published in 2007. Berman, a good researcher and a fine writer, tells the riveting story of Pham Xuan An, a bright young Vietnamese who officially became a Communist in 1953, and was sponsored and guided by the party to become a spy, likely the best to ever work for the North Vietnamese government. After he attended Orange Coast College in California during the late 1950s, An returned to Saigon and developed relationships with a large number of Americans as well as high-ranking officials in the Diem regime and the South Vietnamese army. Having gained the trust of so many important, well-connected people, An was able to learn the information that only they would know, and acquire copies of documents that he would, in turn, pass along to fellow spies who eventually delivered it to Hanoi. It was in this context that An was able to provide the Viet Cong with the information they needed in order to learn how they could fight against the helicopters and armored personnel carriers which the Americans were providing to the ARVN. “For weeks beforehand,” says Berman, “in order to calculate the most effective shooting range, [the People’s Liberated Armed Forces] had been practicing in the nearby Plain of Reeds by attaching to bamboo poles cardboard models of Shawnee and Huey helicopters that emulated their flight characteristics” (141). Three months after Ap Bac, the CIA observed that “the Viet Cong evidently have been able to maintain intelligence coverage of virtually every level in the South Vietnamese military and civil establishment” (143). An’s clandestine work in behalf of Hanoi was the essential substance behind that report.

Interestingly enough, however, An himself attributed the VC victory at Ap Bac to more than the preparations of the underdogs. He suggested that the Diem regime’s paranoid emphasis on loyalty to the virtual exclusion of professional competence was the undoing of the ARVN. “Diem had generals who should have never received their assignments,” said An, “but they were promoted because they kissed the hand of Nhu and Diem” (142). Here we see a corroboration of especially two parts of Sheehan’s extended narrative. First, the Viet Cong at Ap Bac were prepared far better than anyone among the ARVN or American military ever would have guessed. Berman’s account provides a large part of the explanation for how they could have achieved such a high level of preparedness. Second, Berman’s book also corroborates and helps to explain the obstinate, sluggish responses of ARVN commanders and troops, as well as the frustrations of American military advisors like Vann and Bowers.

Among the more-recent accounts of the Vietnam War, perhaps no project has been more controversial than the one initiated by Mark Moyar in Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1968. The author explains that this book, published in 2006, is the first in a proposed two-volume work covering the entire war. The division between the two comes at July 28, 1965, when President Johnson announced a massive American build up in Vietnam (xi). Moyar candidly explains that his work represents a particular, minority view of the war known as the revisionist school. Orthodox, conventional scholars, who make up the majority, see the war as “wrongheaded and unjust.” Moyar and his revisionist cohort, on the other hand, see it as “a noble but improperly executed enterprise” (xi).

Within this context, Moyar goes to great lengths to overturn the typical reading of Ap Bac. Still in the “Preface,” he asserts that John Paul Vann, the central figure in Sheehan’s Bright Shining Lie, “was more dishonest in dealing with the press than Sheehan ever acknowledged” (xvi). As part of his project to dismantle the reigning orthodox view of the war, Moyar insists that Ho Chi Minh was not a frustrated Vietnamese nationalist who hated the Chinese and adopted Communism only after he was rebuffed by the Americans. In fact, Ho became enamored with the dream of international Communism when he studied and worked in France and Russia while still a young man (1-31). Ngo Dinh Diem, by contrast, was a bright cultural conservative who welcomed advances in technology. Diem was a great man who bravely endured culturally-insensitive, dim-witted Americans (37-38), who turned out to be disloyal to him (115-16). Had it not been for their treacherous meddling, Diem likely could have led South Vietnam to victory. “Supporting the coup of November 1963” which resulted in the deaths of Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, “was by far the worst American mistake of the Vietnam War” (xvi). And, the much-maligned domino theory expressed by President Eisenhower and adopted by his successors was essentially sound (138-39).

Given his very different take on the main outline of the Vietnam War, it comes as no surprise that Moyar also reads the Battle of Ap Bac in a contrasting light. In his chapter devoted to the battle, Moyar offers an alternative view of at least four features in the story. First, John Paul Vann’s strategy for the battle was deeply flawed from the beginning. In the hours and days after the battle, Vann, a deceitful self-promoter, placed virtually all of the blame for the loss on the ARVN leadership and troops in order to cover his own responsibility. The Saigon troops were not guilty of complete cowardice and ineptitude. Second, when Vann bitterly complained about the ARVN, and also about his superior officers, young newsmen like David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, none the wiser, took in his half-truths and reported the misrepresentation to the world. Moyar points out that journalist Richard Tregaskis, who had become famous for his World War II diaries, offered a different, much more positive and accurate view on what was happening in Vietnam. But tragically, the reports that came from the likes of Halberstam and Sheehan were read and believed by a large majority of Americans. This marked a significant difference between the foreign press that American military leaders dealt with during the Second World War and in Korea. While still a U.S. Army General, Dwight Eisenhower preferred to keep the news upbeat and optimistic, and the press, for the most part, cooperated. By contrast, the representatives of the press in Vietnam assumed that U.S. military leaders were either deluded or were cynically attempting to pull the wool over their eyes. Third, says Moyar, in spite of their victories at places like Ap Bac, the Viet Cong would never be strong in the Mekong Delta. Going up against superior fire power in rice paddies added up to an insurmountable problem for the VC. Moyar insists that the real theater of potential victory for the Communists was in the central highlands, much closer to North Vietnam (186-205).

Moyar concludes that, as it was with the entire Vietnam War, so it was with Ap Bac: the problems did not relate to the legitimacy or the fundamental goals of the United States. Rather, the decisive problems related to the execution of the war and its portrayal in the popular media.

With his title, Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War 1945-1975, published in 2009, John Prados unmistakably identifies himself as an orthodox historian of the war. What’s more, Prados insists that the critical points in his three-decade span of time were the early years:

"As will become evident, the core argument advanced here is that, whatever the intentions and aims of American leaders, the United States acted within a context defined along political, military, foreign policy, social, and economic dimensions--in effect, an “envelope”--and that envelope narrowed over time due to developments in all those fields" (xi).

Prados also believes that the wide variety and large number of histories related to the Vietnam War are essentially "atomized." They do not report a "unified field theory." Instead, one discusses U.S. presidential politics, another deals with a certain important battle, another examines the Diem regime, and so on. (In his bibliographical essay at the end of his book, Prados seems to indicate that if one of his predecessors had done a good job of writing something that approximated a unified field theory, it was the late Stanley Karnow).

Because Prados is convinced that whichever way the war turned, it was largely doomed by the end of the Eisenhower years, he does not give nearly as much attention to Ap Bac as does Moyar. Prados situates Ap Bac in the context of Diem’s incompetent behavior and decline, which led to his being murdered as U.S. officials stepped away from him:

"In January 1963 a fight took place at a village called Ap Bac in the delta. This time, despite ARVN’s considerable numerical superiority, as well as mechanized troops and helicopters courtesy of the United States, the PLAF unit not only stood its ground but actually defeated the attackers, who suffered many casualties. . . . Diem replaced neither of the responsible commanders. Kennedy had to notice. If strategic hamlets were to work, they had to be shielded by the ARVN. As for the adversary, the Liberation Front wasted no time exploiting Ap Bac as a psychological success, with propaganda to emulate, or replicate, the victory.  . . . Had Diem spent as much effort prosecuting the war and making his government a dynamic alternative to the NLF as he did countering antipathy toward the Ngo family, the military would have been no problem. Instead, the palace openly played with officer assignments and posts made desirable by opportunities for corruption" (75).

In this way, then, Prados’s discussion both assumes and advances his unequivocal judgment about the war in general. Clearly speaking directly to Moyar, he writes: “Triumph was not forsaken in Vietnam, nor victory lost; there was no day that the war was won, except for Hanoi on April 29, 1975, when its troops marched into Saigon” (546).

Historians will continue to debate the event and significance of the Battle of Ap Bac. It is also certain that they will continue to see the battle as either a turning point in the war or, giving it less significance, at least a reflection of larger, even more important movements as a tragic story in twentieth century military history unfolded.

Works Cited

Berman, Larry. Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent. New York: HarperCollins/Smithsonian, 2007.

Frankum, Ronald B., Jr. Historical Dictionary of the War in Vietnam. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011.

Hammond, William M. Reporting Vietnam: Media and Military at War. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Prados, John. Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2009.

Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Colonizer and Colonized in the Dutch East Indies

Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, With a New Preface. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010.

In this highly-acclaimed book, first published in 2002, Ann Stoler identifies and explains what she calls “connections between the broad-scale dynamics of colonial rule and the intimate sites of implementation.” The author, who teaches anthropology and history at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan, points to Jean Taylor’s 1983 book, The Social World of Batavia, as one of her primary sources of inspiration. What seems clear, however, is that Stoler has moved past the mostly-descriptive approach found in Taylor’s work, and has gone on to build a sophisticated interpretive framework for understanding colonial rule.

In Chapter 1, Stoler offers a rationale for her approach: it is rooted in her observation that “domains of the intimate figured so prominently in the perceptions and policies of those who ruled.” These, she says, “are the locations that allow us to identify what [Michel] Foucault might have called the microphysics of colonial rule. In them I locate the affective grid of colonial politics.” Stoler emphasizes that historians of colonialism have typically ignored or completely missed "the intimacies of empire.” Her goal is to explore them primarily at a certain place and time in colonial history, “the Netherlands Indies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century" (7-8). Beginning on page 13, the author describes each successive chapter of her book, adding that the overall structure is both "modular and recursive." That is to say, while each chapter has a stand-alone quality, the book is not a simple conglomeration; later chapters sometimes refer to and connect with ideas presented in previous ones. The chapters appear in their chronological order of composition. But this is not to say that the chapters are “linear,” although Stoler regards the sequence as “logical” (20).

Chapter 2 begins with Stoler’s complaint that conventional histories entirely miss an interesting possibility: colonial experiments impacted colonizers as much as the colonized. By way of correction, she notes that colonial projects typically gave rise to “new constructions of what it meant to be European.” And, she adds, while racism “is an inherent product of the colonial encounter,” the character and intensity of racism varies widely among different times and locales (24). The emergence of “poor whites” and the arrival of white women in the colony provide plenty of examples. Both categories, says Stoler, “marked and threatened the limits of white prestige and colonial control” (26). By comparing the boisterous Dutch plantation belt in Sumatra with the older, more-settled colonial estates in Java, the author is able to show that the lines dividing the colonizer from the colonized were neither straight nor fixed. Instead, they constantly shifted so as to properly limit “who had access to property and privilege and who did not” (39).

In Chapter 3, Stoler explores her idea that "sexual control was more than a convenient metaphor for colonial domination.” More to the point, it was “a fundamental class and racial marker implicated in a wider set of relations of power" (45). She points, for example, to a typical arrangement in the colonies according to which a European man would take an Asian concubine. These relationships turned complicated and troublesome whenever European men became emotionally attached to their concubines, and especially when children were born. The ambiguous racial character and social standing of the child created an array of problems. In time, because of such dilemmas, prostitution and marriage replaced concubinage. By way of comparison, Stoler notes that this changeover mirrors the Spanish colonization of Mexico during the sixteenth century. At first, concubinage was condoned. But once offspring began to confuse the distinctions between ruler and ruled, colonial authorities imposed sanctions so that either marriage or prostitution would satisfy the sexual desires of colonial men. That factors other than traditional Christian morality were at work is clearly demonstrated by the fact that concubinage was tolerated and even encouraged at certain times, but discouraged and even condemned at others.

Chapter 4 focuses on “the construction of colonial categories and national identities” and on those people “who ambiguously straddled, crossed, and threatened these imperial divides” (79). As an example, the author tells the story of an 1898 court case in Haiphong, French Indochina (modern Vietnam) that involved a métis young man and his French father. The son was convicted of having committed a violent crime. Before sentencing, the father appealed to the court to be lenient to his son who was, after all, of French descent. In response, the attention of the proceedings turned to a different sort of affront; namely that in the eyes of the court the alleged father had apparently so neglected his son that the young man was illiterate and did not bear the qualities of a French subject. Quotations from the record reveal a court in which prejudice and hypocrisy were the rule. Interestingly, at this exact time, Dutch sentiment concluded that anyone who had been raised and educated in the Indies could not possibly be a bearer of Western culture and civilization. Commenting on the Mixed Marriage Law of 1898, Stoler says, “Nowhere in the Dutch colonial record was the relationship among gender prescription, class membership, and racial category so contentiously debated and so clearly defined" (101). In keeping with the new law, a European or Indo-European woman who dared to marry a native man was said to have “already sunk so deep socially and morally” that her decision did not result in ruin. It merely served to “clarify her situation" (103).

According to its subtitle, Chapter 5 takes up the topic of “Children on the Imperial Divide.” Stoler observes that European policy makers and those who commented on the colonial experience seem practically paranoid about the upbringing of children. Parental neglect and the dangers associated with delinquents among the colonized are common themes. In response to such fears, Dutch authorities established schools in the colonies, particularly kindergartens, in order to curb what they saw as the decadence of language and morality in European and Indo children. (Of course, colonizers first had to answer the question of the political identity of a child. Would a mixed-blood child be incorporated or excluded?) Turning from school to the home, Stoler notes that, while having servants represented the wealth and prestige of colonial families, the very presence of those servants were a threat to the "Dutchness" of the children growing up in those families.

Chapter 6, “A Colonial Reading of Foucault,” is the most theoretical section of the book. Throughout this complicated segment, Stoler writes about a previous book of hers, Race and the Education of Desire, and also about the publications and theories of the highly-influential French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Because I have not read any of these works, I found it difficult to follow Stoler’s questions and lines of reasoning, in spite of her summaries. What seems clear enough is that, in this chapter, she attempts to resolve her enthusiasm for Foucault’s ideas with what seemed to her a critical gap in his writings: “the issue of race” (140). This omission had created a dissonance for Stoler who was convinced from her research that “the making of race” was a significant factor in the placing of sexuality “at the center of imperial politics” (142). Listening to a series of recorded lectures delivered by Foucault in 1976 was a revelation to her: in fact, Foucault had at least taken up the subject of race in these lectures which were transcribed and published relatively late. Stoler seems relieved and reoriented when she says,

No one would argue that the 1976 lectures offer a comprehensive analysis either of racial discourses or of racisms of the state. On the other hand, few others have asked such discomforting questions about modern state formations or explored the reversibilities of racial discourses and the process of reversal. If Foucault pressed on some questions more than others, it is for us twenty years later to take on the ones he could and did not (160).

And with that, she states that it is up to the current generation of scholarship “to understand the conditions of possibility that give racial thinking its continuing and refurbished currency.” In fact, the attempt to discern “what joins racisms, biopolitics, and modern states” serves to extend the legacy of Foucault, who encouraged “the writing of histories that nourish reversals, recuperations, and insurrections within them.” She says that next chapter “is an effort in that direction” (161).

Chapter 7, written with Karen Strassler,“attempts an about-face.” It turns away from the viewpoint of Dutch colonizers and focuses on “the ways in which Javanese women and men who worked as servants in late colonial Indonesia saw their Dutch employers” (162).

Throughout this chapter, the authors struggle with theoretical and practical issues like the historical value of personal interviews and the dynamics of younger, western scholars posing questions to older, Asian former servants. Questions about how to conduct interviews in ways that generate candid, accurate, and relevant responses, how to account for facial gestures and body language, and how to interpret what was said, are just as important to the authors as the transcripts of the interviews. Eventually, they put aside their inhibitions and allow the reader to listen in as it were. When they do, conspicuously absent is the nostalgia commonly reported by the Dutch. Javanese former servants rarely speak of emotional attachment to their colonial overlords or their children. What they do remember is that their jobs working for the Dutch were simply that. This book includes several dozen remarkable photographs, many of which appear in this chapter. One of the more remarkable features of several of the photos is how the Asian servants often seem more like props than people, often unnamed and unacknowledged in the original captions. More than anything else, perhaps, this chapter points to an alternate direction for future research.

The book’s epilogue is titled, “Caveats on Comfort Zones and Comparative Frames.” Here, Stoler takes up a phrase coined by Friedrich Nietzsche and repeated by Foucault. By “comfort zones” Nietzsche meant those familiar areas of research that scholars mark off and within which they conduct their work. I take the expression “comparative frames” to mean the recognition or establishment of categories for the sake of comparison. Along these lines, Stoler reflects on the lack of precision and on the interpretive issues yet to be worked out in the field of colonial studies. Stoler’s “Preface to the 2010 Edition” extends that discussion by taking up what she calls “four broad problematics.” These have to do with “(1) the analytics of comparison and (2) the treatment of the intimate and what such a focus is expected to yield.” Stoler says that both of these “put insistent demands (3) on how we read colonial documents.” And each “bears on (4) the relationship between colonial pasts” and “the debris they leave behind” (ix-x).

Clearly, among other things, this book represents a tremendous amount scholarly work. In addition to the foregoing report, the book’s seventy pages of endnotes, with a bibliography running to some twenty-eight pages, testify to years of careful research. Just a glance at the endnotes reveals the author’s knowledge of a wide array of both primary and secondary sources, not to mention her own field work. Further, Stoler does not merely cite sources. She also describes and discusses them. Consequently, a good number of the endnotes read like short bibliographical essays that take up some aspect of the topic.

So what is the upshot? What are the outcomes that readers should take away from Stoler’s work? First, to use different words in order to repeat the author’s most basic point,“[p]rivate sentiments and public policy come together in the colonial . . . because domestic and familial intimacies were critical political sites in themselves where racial affiliations were worked out” (210).

Second, historians must recognize, as Albert Memmi insisted, that “colonialism creates both the colonizer and the colonized” (40).

Third, although conventional historiography emphasizes the differences between the various colonial experiments, what is striking is that “similar discourses were mapped onto such vastly different social and political landscapes” (80). Stoler indicates that this is the case because, although the particulars are always different, what is always at stake are interests like racial superiority and colonial control.

Fourth, probing the intimacies of colonial rule reveals that the historical truth is stranger than the innocent, or not so innocent, “fictions” of traditional historiography.

Fifth, colonial categories should not be understood as fixed, because they were “binding but unbound by those within them, were excessively rigid and exceeded their limits, had nuanced criteria for inclusion that were reworked by people who made them and by those who could not contain them” (8-9).

My main criticism and reservation about this book relates to its complexity. As critics on all sides point out, or concede, the cultural turn has lead to more-sophisticated readings of sources and, therefore, more-nuanced understandings of the past. This is commendable. But when reading Stoler's book, I could not help but think that here we have an example of sophistication gone to seed. Rather than quoting and discussing several passages, I city only one example. On pages 110 and 208 Stoler uses the adjective "Manichaean" to describe the dualistic colonial categories of "ruler and ruled." Why? The word is a rare, technical term. Used as an adjective, it refers to the dualistic cosmology and religious outlook developed by one Mani, an Iranian gnostic who lived during the third century C.E. Given that, there is nothing especially "Manichaean" about the categories the author describes. The use of the word in this context is imprecise as well as confusing. So there is no reason for her use such a term and every reason to avoid it. It confuses the reader and makes the author seem either “scholarly” or pretentious. In my opinion, Stoler could have brought the same very high level of sophistication, and could have provided the same nuanced understandings of the colonial and postcolonial experience, without using such complicated language.