Why, Benedict Anderson once asked, did Javanese become Indonesian in 1945 whereas
the Vietnamese balked at becoming Indochinese? In this classic study, Goscha shows that
Vietnamese of all political colours came remarkably close to building a modern national
identity based on the colonial model of Indochina while Lao and Cambodian nationalists
rejected this precisely because it represented a Vietnamese entity. Specialists of French
colonial, Vietnamese, Southeast Asia and nationalism studies will all find much of value in …