The Age of the Sea FalconsMekong and defeated the Tayson in the decisive battle of Thi Nai. The
rise of naval power in this era also shaped Nguyen political projection
and territorial unification. Naval warfare became a significant maritime
dimension of Vietnamese geopolitics. In this aspect, the power of geog-
raphy determined the human choice of combat techniques, and shaped
the territorial orientation of the Vietnamese state accordingly. The navy
and the evolution of warfare shifted the country’s power structure and
transformed the South into a major player on the military and political
stage.
On the basis of his research on Nguyen military adaptation, the in-
tensity of this activity has led Frédéric Mantienne to refer to the period
1790-1802 as “a revolution in the Vietnamese attitude towards the sea
towards overseas countries”.^89 As I have attempted to demonstrate in
this article, however, Vietnam’s shifting attention to the sea can be best
understood as a point on a continuum within the ongoing historical tra-
jectory that had been under way since the sixteenth century.^90 Different
Vietnamese-speaking groups emerged from the maritime environment
and the complex amphibious frontier, and developed their own liveli-
hoods, spatial identities, and socioeconomic systems that diverted from
those in the Red River area. Locating those on the periphery in this
narrative, and by engaging with the emerging frontier through their
employment and innovation of new forms of warfare, it is possible to
suggest an alternative to the conventional centralized, inland-oriented
and nation-state-oriented historiography. This naval history offers a new
perspective in the search for Vietnam’s pasts: a Vietnam viewed from the
water and sea.
The link between warfare and early modern state formation, however,
is not uniquely Vietnamese. The phenomena has been widely recognized
in the global context, especially in Eurasia where modernized warfare
- Frédéric Mantienne, “The Transfer of Western Military Technology to Vietnam
in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: The Case of the Nguyen”,
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34.3 (October 2003): 532. - Charles Wheeler, “The Case for Boats in Vietnam History: Ships and the Social
Flows that Shaped Nguyen Cochinchina (Central Vietnam), 16th-18th centuries”,
in Paola Calanca et al. (eds), Of Ships and Men: New Approaches in Nautical
Archaeolog y (Paris: l’Ecole Francaise d’Extrême-Orient, forthcoming); idem,
“Rethinking the Sea in Vietnamese History: Littoral Society in the Integration of
Thuan–Quang, Seventeenth–Eighteenth Centuries”, Journal of Southeast Asian
Studies 37.1 (2006): 123–53.