Аннотация:Professor A. B. Woodside's recent study of Vietnamese government and society in the first half of the nineteenth century is likely to become immediately a standard work for the teaching of South-East Asian history, as well as a point of departure for further research. It is the first attempt by a Western scholar to analyse the institutional developments of a period in which Viêt-Nam attained its greatest measure of “Confucianization” and also its greatest territorial extent as a unified country. The “Đại-Nam” of the later years of Minh-Mang (1820–41) included not only the whole of present-day Viêt-Nam, united for the first time in 1802, but also (after 1836) a large part of Cambodia as well as a portion of eastern Laos. The institutional changes of his reign included the reinvigoration of the examination system, the creation of new organs of central government, and a thorough overhaul of the machinery of provincial administration. In terms of its own previous history, it was by no means a weak or declining Viêt-Nam which found itself face to face with European power in the 1850's and 1860's. By offering a study of government and society in this period, Professor Woodside has gone some of the way towards filling a major gap in Western-language literature on Vietnamese history.
