Economic developments in Vietnam and Indonesia: A comparative perspective
Professor Adam Fforde (University of Melbourne, Australia) will talk about “Writing the economic history of Vietnam: are diverse views required by the nature of the subject matter?”
Professor Adam Fforde (University of Melbourne, Australia) will talk about “Writing the economic history of Vietnam: are diverse views required by the nature of the subject matter?”
Respondents:
- Prof. David Henley, Leiden University, the Netherlands
- Assoc. Prof. Thomas Lindblad, Leiden University, the Netherlands
- Pham Van Thuy, MPhil, Leiden University, the Netherlands
In this talk Professor Fforde will share his puzzles in the writing of economic history about Vietnam. He will discuss patterns of failure of prediction, of apparently repeated confusions of form and content, and suggest avenues forward for economic historians.
The author is of the ‘between’ generation of foreign scholars working on Vietnam, commencing work after 1975 but well before the opening-up of the country in the early 1990s. He started his PhD in 1977, studied Vietnamese in Hanoi through 1978-79 and has written a number of books and articles, some of which are widely cited and some of which are not. He has mainly made a living as a development consultant, mainly in Vietnam, and has as a result certain experiences in the ‘participatory observation’ of the Vietnamese Party-State. Recently in Vietnam-related areas he has been publishing more about Vietnamese politics, and it is possible that this will mark an ability to complete a long-standing project on Vietnamese economic history since the early 1990s, focussing upon ‘Vietnamese Capitalism’. He also publishes in development studies and economics, and a book Understanding development economics: its challenge to development studies will be published by Routledge later this year.