The inner region : a social and economic history of Nguyen Vietnam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Abstract

The seventeenth and eighteenth century Nguyen kingdom was known as Dang Trong to Vietnamese at the time, and Cochinchina by the Westerners. It was a state built in today’s central Vietnam, separate from the royal Le government which was controlled by the Trinh rulers in the Red River delta and down to Nghe An. This thesis intends to examine Dang Trong in this period in the context of Vietnamese southward expansion, the military character of the Nguyen regime, its taxation system, the social structure, relations between Vietnamese migrants and uplanders, and particularly the involvement in overseas trade. Successful localisation of Vietnamese migrants in this period seems to be the reason why Dang Trong, a state weaker than the Trinh in every sense, not only survived on the former land of Champa, but obtained three fifths of the land of present-day Vietnam in merely two hundred years. The Nguyen experiment seems to suggest a different image of Vietnam, opening a door to an alternative world in which diversity was tolerated, indeed taken advantage of, for Vietnam s own development. Show more