HY4B1      One Unit
The Vietnam Wars, 1930-75: Regional and International Perspectives

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

The purpose of this course is to place the wars in Vietnam in a fuller regional and international perspective in order to understand their course, outcomes and consequences.  Hence, this will involve not just studying the internal dynamic of conflict within Vietnam, as first French colonialism was met with nationalist and Communist resistance, and then from c. 1959 when insurgency in the southern part of Vietnam eventually triggered wholesale US intervention, but the involvement and interests of other major powers, including the Soviet Union and China.  There will also be a need to examine the relationship between developments in Vietnam and the rest of South East Asia (such as in Laos, Thailand and Indonesia), the connections between the wider Cold War and events in Vietnam, and decision-making on the part of the Vietnamese Communists. Although it will necessarily be important to look at US policies and attitudes, the general aim of the course is to encourage students to depart from a ‘Washington-focused’ perspective and consider the wars in Vietnam as multifaceted, where the interaction of different actors, ideologies, and agendas produced either conflict or moves toward negotiated settlements (as in 1954 and 1970-73).

20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Students will be expected to read essential primary and secondary material for each weekly two-hour class and to participate in seminar discussions. 

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the AT.

• Pierre Asselin, Vietnam’s American War: A History (2018).
• Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (2013).
• Mark P. Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950 (2000).
• James Cable, The Geneva Conference of 1954 on Indochina (1984).
• Laura M. Calkins, China and the First Vietnam War, 1947-54 (2013).
• William Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, 2nd ed (1996)
• Ilya V. Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954-1963 (2003).
• Christopher E. Goscha, Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 1885-1954 (1999).
• Kevin Ruane and Matthew Jones, Anthony Eden, Anglo-American Relations, and the Indochina Crisis of 1954 (2019).
• Matthew Jones, ‘U.S. Relations with Indonesia, the Kennedy-Johnson Transition, and the Vietnam Connection, 1963-1965,’ Diplomatic History, 26, 2, Spring 2002, 249-82.
• Mark A. Lawrence, The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (2008).
• Mark A. Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall (eds), The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (2007).
• Fredrik Logevall, ‘De Gaulle, Neutralization and American Involvement in Vietnam, 1963-1964,’  Pacific Historical Review, 41, 1992, 69-102.
• Lien-Hang Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (2012).
• Mari Olsen, Soviet-Vietnam Relations, and the Role of China, 1949-64 (2006).
• Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950-1975 (2000).

Presentation (20%)

Source analysis (30%, 1000 words)

Essay (50%, 3000 words)