Books by Bradley Camp Davis
Forests have histories that need to be told. This examination of wood and woodlands in East and S... more Forests have histories that need to be told. This examination of wood and woodlands in East and Southeast Asia brings together case studies from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Sumatra to explore continuities in the history of forest management across these regions as well as the distinctive qualities of human-forest relations within each context. With a general introduction to forest histories in East and Southeast Asia and a multidisciplinary set of authors, The Cultivated Forest constructs alternative lineages of forest knowledge that aim to transcend the frameworks imposed by colonial or national histories. Across these regions, forests were sites of exploitation, contestation, and ritual just as they were in Europe and America. This volume puts studies of Asian forests into conversation with global forest histories.
Coming in December 2016 from the University of Washington Press
Papers by Bradley Camp Davis
South East Asia Research, 2022
Written as a response to Katherine Bowie's essay ('Eunuchs in Vietnam: What's Missing?'), this pi... more Written as a response to Katherine Bowie's essay ('Eunuchs in Vietnam: What's Missing?'), this piece presents some introductory research on the role of eunuchs in the court culture and the everyday administration of imperial Vietnam during the Nguyễn dynasty (1802-1945). In addition to explaining the role of eunuchs in Vietnamese historiography, this essay critically evaluates claims about eunuchs in nineteenth-century Vietnam through Vietnamese sources, including secondary research and primary sources.
Intersections are one of the major bottlenecks that aggravate congestion in road networks; effect... more Intersections are one of the major bottlenecks that aggravate congestion in road networks; effective control of which is an important strategy in improving traffic flow. While developing countries have found it hard to adopt sophisticated means of intersection control, they have also not optimised the performance of roundabouts. This paper reviews the performance of roundabouts, which have become increasingly popular in recent years, as simple and low cost forms of intersection control. The performance of three major roundabouts in Dar es Salaam has been analysed and results show that roundabouts can accommodate high traffic volumes without causing excessive delays. The results also show that low-cost improvements on roundabouts, involving minor adjustments in geometry and improved traffic management, can significantly improve their operational performance.
Journal of Chinese History, 2018
Extant Qing prints of the book include a woodblock edition printed by Binchun's family (date unkn... more Extant Qing prints of the book include a woodblock edition printed by Binchun's family (date unknown); woodblock editions by the Wenbaotang (1868), Eryoutang (1868) and Zuiliutang (date unknown); an illustrated Japanese edition published (1872); a woodblock edition commissioned by the Linlangge (1882); and an abridged edition in the Xiaofanghu collection (1891) and the Tiexiangshi collection (1898). It also appeared in Church News (Zhongguo jiaohui xinbao) edited by Young John Allen in 1871. 2 CBYWSM (TZ) 39, 1621.
Page 1. States of Banditry: The Nguyen Government, Bandit Rule, and the Culture of Power in the p... more Page 1. States of Banditry: The Nguyen Government, Bandit Rule, and the Culture of Power in the post-Taiping China-Vietnam Borderlands Bradley Camp Davis A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements ...
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 2015
This article contributes to the continuing discussion concerning the changing relationships betwe... more This article contributes to the continuing discussion concerning the changing relationships between China and its neighbors in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Vietnam, a country within the metaphorical framework of the "tribute system," it analyzes the complex range of relationships in the borderlands during the 1870s. Following the establishment of French consular offices in northern Vietnam, rebellions, counterinsurgency, communities, and commerce in the borderlands fell under a new kind of official gaze, one that ultimately provided self-serving justification to advocates of French imperialism in Southeast Asia. As emblems of foreign influence, French consulates soon became elements in factional struggles that unfolded within the Vietnamese bureaucracy over the role of China in Vietnam, the employment of surrendered bandits as officials, and borderlands administration.
Historicizing Theories, Identities, and Nations
Journal of Chinese History
This book is an excellent study of the powerful armed groups inhabiting southern China and northe... more This book is an excellent study of the powerful armed groups inhabiting southern China and northern Vietnam during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike the newly fashionable studies of Zomia that, often inaccurately I believe, characterize pretwentieth-century Eurasian borderlands regions as places where communities primarily avoided lowlands states, Davis provides a nuanced, erudite investigation into the strong connections between upland bandit networks and the major imperial states in the region: Nguyêñ Vietnam, Qing China, and, later, the French protectorate. In a concise summary of this work, Davis writes, "This book tells the story of bandits, their official allies, and the communities that endured the culture of violence in the China-Vietnam borderlands" (17).
Journal of Chinese History
This book is an excellent study of the powerful armed groups inhabiting southern China and northe... more This book is an excellent study of the powerful armed groups inhabiting southern China and northern Vietnam during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike the newly fashionable studies of Zomia that, often inaccurately I believe, characterize pretwentieth-century Eurasian borderlands regions as places where communities primarily avoided lowlands states, Davis provides a nuanced, erudite investigation into the strong connections between upland bandit networks and the major imperial states in the region: Nguyêñ Vietnam, Qing China, and, later, the French protectorate. In a concise summary of this work, Davis writes, "This book tells the story of bandits, their official allies, and the communities that endured the culture of violence in the China-Vietnam borderlands" (17).
This essay argues that imperial Vietnamese officials produced legible subjects through the genre ... more This essay argues that imperial Vietnamese officials produced legible subjects through the genre of imperial ethnography in the decades before French colonial rule in northern Vietnam. Focusing on one official working in the Northwest, it connects Vietnamese imperial ethnography both to the rationalising administrative reforms of the early nineteenth century and to the scholarly discussion about modern empires and ethnography.
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (No. 11), Jun 2014
This article contributes to the continuing discussion concerning the changing relationships betwe... more This article contributes to the continuing discussion concerning the changing relationships between China and its neighbors in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Vietnam, a country within the metaphorical framework of the “tribute system,” it analyzes the complex range of relationships in the borderlands during the 1870s. Following the establishment of French consular offices in northern Vietnam, rebellions, counterinsurgency, communities, and commerce in the borderlands fell under a new kind of official gaze, one that ultimately provided self-serving justification to advocates of French imperialism in Southeast Asia. As emblems of foreign influence, French consulates soon became elements in factional struggles that unfolded within the Vietnamese bureaucracy over the role of China in Vietnam, the employment of surrendered bandits as officials, and borderlands administration.
In 1890, Qing authorities in Yunnan Province found themselves faced with a rebellion led by Ngụy ... more In 1890, Qing authorities in Yunnan Province found themselves faced with a rebellion led by Ngụy Danh Cao, the leader of a group of refugees from northern Tonkin. Proclaiming himself a former commander in the Black Flag Army, and thus an ally of the Qing government, Ngụy Danh Cao led several thousand refugees into Muäng La, a Tai area bordering the newly delineated Tonkin Protectorate. Within six months, he attempted to seize control of Muäng La. His failed rebellion and eventual capture revealed not only the plasticity of the Tonkin-China borderline, but also the Protectorate's reliance on personal networks in its projection of authority.
Podcast Appearances by Bradley Camp Davis
Recent years have seen an upsurge in studies asking questions about, and in, borderlands. The top... more Recent years have seen an upsurge in studies asking questions about, and in, borderlands. The topic is certainly not new to scholars of mainland Southeast Asia, but as Bradley Camp Davis shows in Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands (University of Washington Press, 2017), plenty of work remains to be done on the parallel processes of border and state formation in the region. Drawing on Chinese, Vietnamese and French written sources as well as hundreds of interviews with villagers in the uplands of Yunnan and northern Vietnam, Davis tells the story of a half-century of violence, trade and taxation at the hands of competing armed groups; of their alliances and wars with lowland states, and of the bandit as symbol in nationalist and local histories and memorials today.
Bradley Camp Davis joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss the malleability of bandits and banditry, Black Flags and Yellow Flags, the merits of oral traditions in study of history, and the place of the imperial bandit in movie and museum.
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Books by Bradley Camp Davis
Papers by Bradley Camp Davis
Podcast Appearances by Bradley Camp Davis
Bradley Camp Davis joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss the malleability of bandits and banditry, Black Flags and Yellow Flags, the merits of oral traditions in study of history, and the place of the imperial bandit in movie and museum.
Bradley Camp Davis joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss the malleability of bandits and banditry, Black Flags and Yellow Flags, the merits of oral traditions in study of history, and the place of the imperial bandit in movie and museum.
This paper proposes that ethnicity has a history beyond the strictures of European colonial and post-colonial nationalist discourses. This history can help us make sense of the seemingly complex realities surrounding ascriptions, rejections, and alterations of collective identities from the early nineteenth century into the present. In Vietnam, before European colonial rule an “ethnographic turn” tied to the ambitions of the Nguyen State (1802-1945) was characterized by detailed official accounts of non-Vietnamese communities. Although the term “ethnicity” only emerged from later translations of European works by East Asian intellectual reformers, these Vietnamese empirical researchers produced ethnographies to promote a Confucian civilizing mission. Non-Vietnamese communities, the ethnē of these works, who once existed outside the realm of lowland political control, now found themselves subject to taxation, settlements, and military occupation. Following the establishment of the French Protectorates of Tonkin and Annam (1884-5), colonial officials worked with imperial ethnographic texts to organize a new form of militarized ethnography, one that influenced early twentieth century European anthropology. As a nineteenth century notion of ethnicity moved across Eurasia through French colonial translations of Vietnamese texts, ethnē in Vietnam adapted to, and resisted, more rigid concepts of collective difference.
This presentation links an act of violence to the broader history of violence in the China-Vietnam borderlands. During the 1890s, both the French “mission to civilize” and anticolonial resistance heavily relied on brute force. The investigation of a priest’s murder, committed by militia with links to bandits, depended on the coordination of imperial Vietnamese and French colonial authorities. This investigation, and the paperwork it generated, demonstrated the multilingual and multiethnic reality of colonial rule. As translators rendered oral statements into French from logographic and Romanized Vietnamese scripts, elisions, paraphrasing, and revisions captured this reality in the capillaries of colonial power.
This paper examines the uses of protocol and tributary status by Vietnam, a smaller state ritually tied to the Qing Empire through the mid-nineteenth century, to both set the limits of Chinese power and mark Vietnamese sovereignty. The Tian Wenzao murder case provides a lens for examining both the empirical realities of protocol below and beyond the imperial centers as well as the often overlooked ability of smaller states to set the terms of sovereignty through diplomatic interactions. Additionally, the involvement of uplands militias in the investigation hints that protocol, rather than a reminder of formal power, has resonance beyond the official realm.
This paper argues that the concept of a “tributary system” as a traditional relationship between China and Vietnam emerges not from centuries of shared Sino-Vietnamese history, but from the more recent late nineteenth century. At both the diplomatic and local levels, the supposedly ancient tributary relationship between China and Vietnam was co-figured with claims of the universality of the Westphalian state-system. For Qing officials, such as Li Hongzhang, who argued for Vietnam’s irrelevance, and Tang Jingsong, who conducted a secret mission to subvert French rule, the defense of traditional tribute often served broader political interests, while Vietnamese officials, including Nguyen Thuat, a Vietnamese representative in Beijing in 1885, often subverted French understandings of the Sinocentric tributary system to protect Vietnamese imperial sovereignty.
This lecture examines the history of Vietnam before the war. Focusing on the French colonial (1860s-1940s) and post WWII periods (1945-1949), it will illuminate the surprising connections between Vietnam and the United States, connections that became obscured in the policies, and the popular imaginations, that dominated the Cold War.
This presentation examines the relationship between violence and oral tradition in the China-Vietnam borderlands. Drawing on years of archival research and fieldwork, historian Bradley Camp Davis, Assistant Professor of History, Eastern Connecticut State University, tells the story of life in the borderlands under the Black Flag Army and the continued resonance of nineteenth century violence in contemporary uplands oral traditions in Vietnam and China.
This presentation revisits the history of the Black Flags as imperial bandits to examine the role of violence in borderlands spaces. As the Black Flags negotiated a position of sanctified power in Vietnam, they pushed the limits of imperial sovereignty. The officials of modern empires such as Nguyen Vietnam, the Qing Empire, and even early French Indochina, all relied on violence to establish their authority and to perform power over subjects. In the case of the Black Flags, the imperial use of violence, which often contradicted the imperial rhetoric of rationalization, enables us to consider the flexible divisions between banditry and governance and to appreciate the strategies of resistance, as inverted forms of violence, that met imperial projects in the borderlands.
An advisor and co-founder of the Yao Script Project, Bradley Camp Davis (PhD Washington) is an assistant professor of history and Coordinator of Asian Studies at Eastern Connecticut State University.