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. First published in 1995, the revised edition of this remarkable study is augmented with new material by the author and a foreword by Eric Jennings.

Christopher Goscha is Associate Professor of International Relations and Southeast Asian History at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He has published widely on cultural, social, political, and diplomatic aspects of colonial Indochina and the wars for modern Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.