Bücher von Geoffrey C. Gunn

It was the trial of a century in colonial Hong Kong when, in 1931-33, Ho Chi Minh - the future President of Vietnam - faced down deportation to French-controlled territory with a death sentence dangling over him. Thanks to his appeal to English common law, Ho Chi Minh won his reprieve. With extradition a major political issue in Hong Kong today, Geoffrey C. Gunn's examination of the legal case of Ho Chi Minh offers a timely insight into the rule of law and the issue of extradition in the former British colony. Utilizing little known archival material, Gunn sheds new light on Ho Chi Minh, communist and anti-colonial networks and Franco-British relations.

This book offers the first detailed English-language examination of the Great Vietnamese Famine of 1945, which left at least a million dead, and links it persuasively to the largely unexpected Viet Minh seizure of power only months later. Drawing on extensive research in French archives, Geoffrey C. Gunn offers an important new interpretation of Japanese-Vichy French wartime economic exploitation of Vietnam's agricultural potential. Gunn asks whether the famine signaled a loss of the French administration's "mandate of heaven," or whether the overall dire human condition was the determining factor in facilitating communist victory in August 1945. In the broader sweep of Vietnamese history, including the rise of the communist party, the picture that emerges is not only one of local victimhood at the hands of outsiders but the enormous agency on the part of the Vietnamese themselves to achieve moral victory, no matter how controversial, tragic, and contested the outcome. As the author clearly demonstrates, colonial-era development strategies and contests also had their postwar sequels in the "American war," just as land, land reform, and subsistence-sustainable development issues persist into the present.

East Timor, also known as Timor-Leste, comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, located at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago. East Timor was among the last of colonial territories to become independent, and it actually had to be liberated twice. First, after more than four centuries of Portuguese colonial rule, it achieved independence in 1975 only to be invaded and occupied by Indonesia. After a blood-soaked occupation of 24 years and following intense international pressure, the Jakarta-regime only grudgingly allowed East Timor to form a nation of its own in 1999. Since then, the new state has faced further armed clashes and is only now able to seriously engage in nation-building. Historical Dictionary of East Timor relates the turbulent history of this country through a chronology, an introductory essay, an expansive bibliography, and over 200 cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events, places, organizations, and other aspects of East Timor history from the earliest times to the present.

Ranging from discussions of the natural world, livelihoods, and religious and intellectual encounters to language play, crime and punishment, and gender, this book replays the themes of enduring hybridity and "creolization" of cultures dating from the first great encounter between Europe and Asia.