Intended as a reminder of Europe for soldiers and clerks of the empire, the city of Dalat, located in the hills of Southern Vietnam, was built by the French in an alpine locale that reminded them of home. This book uncovers the strange 100-year history of a colonial city that was conceived as a center of power and has now become a kitsch tourist destination famed for its colonial villas, flower beds, pristine lakes, and pastoral landscapes. Eric T. Jennings finds that from its very beginning, Dalat embodied the paradoxes of colonialism—it was a city of leisure built on the backs of thousands of coolies, a supposed paragon of hygiene that offered only questionable protection from disease, and a new venture into ethnic relations that ultimately backfired. Jennings’ fascinating history opens a new window onto virtually all aspects of French Indochina, from architecture and urban planning to violence, labor, métissage, health and medicine, gender and ethic relations, schooling, religion, comportments, anxieties, and more.
Eric T. Jennings, Professor of History at the University of Toronto, is the author of Curing the Colonizers, and Vichy in the Tropics.
“By using both macro and micro lenses, Eric T. Jennings has written a book which is a model of global history under the guise of a monographic study. He convincingly demonstrates that throughout fifty years, Dalat as a climatic resort built by the French colonizers in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, was upgraded to far more than a mere R&R place for white people. Jennings has kneaded together a huge and rich amount of primary and secondary sources that he masters perfectly due to his sound and balanced method of critical analysis. As we say in French: de la belle ouvrage.”
—Pierre Brocheux, author of Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954
“Written in a vivid and engaging style, Imperial Heights is an exceptional piece of scholarship. It is impeccably researched, drawing on private, institutional, and national archives in at least five countries. Making wonderful use of ‘thick description,’ Jennings brilliantly recreates the story of one small town to capture the varied and complex history of French colonialism and its afterlives in Southeast Asia.”
—J.P. Daughton, author of An Empire Divided
376 pp.6 x 9Illus: 34 b/w photographs, 2 maps, 1 table
9780520272699$34.95|£30.00Paper
Apr 2011