Winner of the 2012 George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental HistoryIn the twentieth century, the Mekong Delta has emerged as one of Vietnam?s most important economic regions. Its swamps, marshes, creeks, and canals have played a major role in Vietnam?s turbulent past, from the struggles of colonialism to the Cold War and the present day. Quagmire considers these struggles, their antecedents, and their legacies through the lens of environmental history.Beginning with the French conquest in the 1860s, colonial reclamation schemes and pacification efforts centered on the development of a dense network of new canals to open land for agriculture. These projects helped precipitate economic and environmental crises in the 1930s, and subsequent struggles after 1945 led to the balkanization of the delta into a patchwork of regions controlled by the Viet Minh, paramilitary...
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