Book Review

Michael G. Vann and Liz Clarke, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xvii+263. $19.95 (paper).

     Michael G. Vann and Liz Clarke's new work is another wonderful addition to Oxford University Press's Graphic History series.  The most high profile work in this series is Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke's Abina and the Important Men, which has been well received by instructors and in classrooms.¹ These graphic histories combine art and historical narratives, with rich appendices, that make them particularly useful for high school and university level courses. The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt takes on several extremely complex topics, which tend to be difficult to teach in the setting of a broad historical survey. Often students have very little previous knowledge of the topics of epidemics in world history, imperial culture, and the history of Asia in the twentieth century (with the exception of U.S. interventions). Vann's narrative successfully offers rich historical insights about all of these topics, while also providing strong contextual information that could serve as the basis of further student enquiry.  

     Michael G. Vann, a historian of French Indochina and world history, has written the work to speak to scholars and students of the history of Vietnam, imperialism, urban history, the history of medicine, and modern world history.  The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt describes a period during which the colonial government of Indochina paid local populations to kill rats as an attempt to stop the bubonic plague in colonial Hanoi in the early twentieth century. Vann sets these events within the context of French attempts at social engineering and the "civilizing mission" in Indochina. Vann achieves his goal of successfully conveying the "ambiguity and nuance that many felt toward colonial modernization projects," while also depicting Vietnamese populations' exploitation of the "rat bounty" as acts of agency and resistance (xiv).

     The book is arranged in five parts. The first part is the graphic history. The other four are appendices containing excerpts of primary sources, a description of the making of the book, a classroom guide, and historical essays providing background on topics such as the New Imperialism, the plague, and China. The graphic history is structured around the depiction of a lecture given by Michael Vann to his students. Vann becomes a "character" in the book and serves as a guide through the historical narrative. The lecture format is conveyed in side panels that include images of students looking at PowerPoint slides and asking each other informed questions. This format works well as it allows the reader to gain context throughout the work. This also reminds the reader that this is a work of narrative history based on a modern-day historian's interpretation of these events.

     Clarke's beautiful and detailed artwork brings another dimension of intricacy to Vann's complex narrative. For example, Clarke's illustrations depict the anguish felt by the people of Hanoi as they lost their places of worship and homes through French urban planning policies and efforts to eradicate disease. The panels include wonderfully detailed images of colonial Hanoi, such as recreations of the posters and buildings used for the Hanoi Exhibition of 1902–1903 and individual objects in French colonial officers' homes and offices.

     Vann also manages to inject dry humor into the work as he demonstrates the inherent absurdity of aspects of imperial modernization. This is a welcome addition to a volume examining the bubonic plague, imperial exploitation, and the killing of hundreds of thousands of rats. For example, he includes a description of the French's failed attempts to add the Statue of Liberty on top of a pagoda in the center of Hoàn Kiếm Lake. The work also depicts of rats ironically climbing up the modern sewage pipes and arriving in homes through ornate French toilets, and a panel describing bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin's eccentricities, such as his homemade "coca-based" cocktail that he used to help him work deep into the night (20, 81–82).  Vann also manages to use his self-effacing humor to interject important theoretical and historiographical ideas into the work. For example, several panels depict him lecturing his long-suffering friends and baristas about Clifford Geertz, Robert Darnton, Paul Rabinow and James C. Scott (7). Many of us have been one side or another of this type of exchange, and it is a clever way to insert levity and complicated theory into the book and make it palatable for the general reader.

     Clarke reinforces the callousness of the French colonial regime with numerous panels of white-clad French civil servants raising glasses that overlay images of the Vietnamese in distress or, in one case, the receipts for "rat deaths" drifting across the panel. One of the most poignant scenes in the work is a panel in which French-trained Vietnamese sewer technicians were sent down to kill rats in the "modern" sewers. They arose from the sewers covered in sewage, complaining that they were educated to work on an advanced sewer system and are not "coolies." The art shifts the perspective to the point of view of a group of French diners at a café who declared, "My god look at the filthy coolies in our street" (88). This one page depicts the civilizing mission and colonial project of the modernization of Hanoi in microcosm. The eradication of the plague and the improvement of sanitation were meant to protect the European populations of the city, while the project of "modernization" through education was aimed at the creation a servile class of Vietnamese subjects.

     The Great Rat Hunt could serve as the basis for an entire unit in a world history course at the high school or an introductory university level. The book introduces a very wide range of topical material and themes relating to nineteenth- and twentieth-century world history, and it can also serve as a simple primer in historical methodology.   The format of the appendices is extremely accessible, and they contain discussion questions on the topics of the history of Vietnam, China, the history of medicine, and the history of imperialism. For example, an instructor could find fruitful material in the book for a class unit on "World History and Disease" or "The New Imperialism."  The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt would serve as a strong basis for a secondary-source, analytical essay assignment, as Vann is very transparent about his methodology and analysis. The primary source excerpts have been carefully selected to provide students with opportunities to write short primary-source analysis papers. Broader potential essay topics for upper division students are also included, including essay prompts focused on resistance, internationalism, urban history, race, and white privilege. For history majors, the book can also serve as an example of new alternative forms of historical work beyond the article and the traditional monograph.

     For the inevitable second edition, the addition of a few short overviews in the appendices that provide more detail on modern imperialism in Southeast Asia and comparative public health and modernization projects in the region might be useful. This would further augment Vann's argument concerning the global nature of imperialism and disease and also reinforce his section about inter-imperial co-operation or lack thereof, during the period of the third Bubonic Plague pandemic. This might lead to further discussion in the classroom about similar instances in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaya and other colonial settings in Southeast Asia.  For example, rat bounties were used in the Federal Malay States in the early twentieth century as well, with students being incentivized by their teachers to kill rats as late as 1926 in Larut, Perak.

     The Great Rat Hanoi Hunt is a versatile work that is extremely readable and would be a welcome addition to class syllabi or as a wonderful example creative global imperial history. Vann and Clarke should be commended for their ability to blend their disciplines and make a topic likes rats and the plague extremely compelling and entertaining to the general reader. For historians of Southeast Asia, global history, and imperialism, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt can also serve as a gateway for undergraduates into the exciting and diverse topics that historians like Vann are examining in these fields today.   

Matthew Schauer is Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University. His research is on global imperialism and Southeast Asia. He can be reached at matthew.schauer@okstate.edu

Notes

¹ Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke. Abina and the Important Men, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 2015 Second Edition. The book's official website collects reviews: https://abina.org/reviews-and-testimonials/. Historian Trevor Getz has continued to be a proponent of the genre.  Trevor Getz, "Comics offer radical opportunity to blend scholarship and art", March, 29, 2019 Digital Magazine Aeon, https://aeon.co/ideas/comics-offer-radical-opportunity-to-blend-scholarship-and-art.