David Biggs’s Quagmire is a politico-environmental history of nation-building in the Mekong delta of southern Vietnam from the precolonial Nguyen incursions into what was then Khmer land to post-colonial state-socialist Vietnamese, through the French conquest and colonization, Vichy-Imperial Japanese occupation, French reconquista, Geneva two state solution, and American occupation. Since David Halberstam’s Pulitzer prize winning coverage of American involvement in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, Americans have understood Vietnam as a political and military quagmire, and since our 2001 invasion of Afghanistan we have come to relearn the full meaning of these political and military kinds of quagmire, but Biggs, through a locally-attuned environmental and infrastructural history of the Mekong delta, allows us to see this region as a very literal material quagmire and allows us to understand the political/military quagmire of French/American involvement in Vietnam as being directly related to its being an ecological/topographical quagmire — that is, the material wetness, bogginess, messiness, viscosity, muddiness of the quagmire ecosystem is historically salient to Vietnam’s status as a politico-military quagmire.

First things first, is nation-building just another word for “development,” that is, can we place Biggs’s work in a larger conversation about the colonial and post-colonial histories of development? Biggs describes nation-building as “state-centered development,” and I think it is historiographically valuable to think of technological or infrastructure projects aimed toward the increase of tax revenue, security, or legibility (i.e. serving the interests of the state) or toward public health outcomes, farmer/laborer incomes, food supply, electrification, etc. (i.e. serving the interests of denizens) as all being under the aegis of development. I think it is an especially useful taxonomic consolidation in the context of environmental history or the history of technology because, regardless of the intended interests served, these interventions manifest in similar kinds of environmental transformations through similar kinds of infrastructural/technological means. As an example, whether the French colonial government is dredging such and such canal for the nominal purpose of extending colonial military authority into the hinterlands in order to increase security and its sphere of taxation (nation-building) or instead to increase locals’ access to medical, educational, and commercial opportunities (“development”), the environmental transformations and technological means involved are often the same.

If we can think about statist nation-building and humanitarian development under the same umbrella, we can begin to think about the technologically-mediated environmental transformations of the Mekong delta as part of a historiographic continuum that ties pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial agricultural and transportation infrastructure in Vietnam together. Biggs does this by contextualizing his narrative in precolonial Nguyen attempts to terraform the Mekong delta (although, depending on one’s perspective, this “precolonial” period can be viewed as simply another era of colonization (of the Khmer and ethnic Chinese inhabitants of the Mekong by a southwardly-expanding Nguyen state)). Like Moon and Tilley, who historicize Cold War postcolonial development projects by looking back to their earlier manifestations under colonial rule, one of Biggs’ historiographic accomplishments is to historicize colonial development projects with precolonial schemes in the Delta. The constancy (at least on the human temporal scale) of the delta’s flatness, its freshwater moving in one direction while the moon pulls the ocean in an opposing direction of saline pulses, creates a consistent environmental and topographic material reality that people have to contend with across political eras operative at smaller time scales, resulting in a material substrate that connects precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial activity.

Speaking of a material substrate, I want to talk about infranature. This may not be the best term for what I am trying to describe, and there may already be an alternative term in use, but by infranature I mean stuff that performs like infrastructure but whose creation is more attributable to non-human activity than to human activity. One good example of what I would consider infranature from Biggs’s story is the road in the hinterlands of the Mekong delta through the cajeput forests that were formed by roaming elephant herds. These herds defoliate the canopy along their path, uproot underbrush, and compact the soil underfoot into a hardpan good at running water off instead of absorbing it and turning to mud (maybe these elephants even preferentially travel along relatively high ground, who knows, not me). French colonial engineers would use these elephantine road systems and then expand upon them to enable resettled farmers to penetrate and clear the forest for agriculture. I see infranature, therefore, as an extension of, or, when elaborated with -structure, a subclass of, envirotechnical systems. Perhaps the most significant kind of infranature in Biggs’s story are the dos d’âne or giáp nước, the sandbars that form amid canals when silt-laden outflow freshwater is stymied or slowed by countervailing salt water rising from a waxing tide. In the balance of forces from countervailing flows, the water is stilled and the silt in solution in the river water deposits to the floor of the canal, eventually accreting into sandbars. For the French who sought to unimpededly travel the canals in heavy wood and then metal boats, these dos d’âne were a constant source of frustration and reengineering, forcing them to develop and construct flushing basins along the canals that could discharge deluges at high tide to unbalance the forces in the slow moving bends by forcing water down them toward to ocean, thus preventing siltation. For the Vietnamese, typically traveling by lightweight canoes and dugouts, and who could with relative ease portage their boats over the giáp nước, the sandbars functioned as meeting places where goods, news, and conversation could be exchanged, rest could be taken, or camp could be made for the night. What, for the French, then, was a man-vs.-nature source of friction in their system of water infrastructure was for the Vietnamese a kind of infranature —  a naturally occurring information/goods terminus/junction. This is something I would like to elaborate further because I think it could be analytically useful in understanding indigenous/subaltern technoscience which Westerns often romanticize as “being in tune with nature” or “harmonic with natural rhythms” or whatever, but I think the idea of infranature might allow me to accord some explanatory and technoscientific status to such envirotechnical systems.

• Foreward by William Cronon – xi – To gain such understanding, there are few better places to turn than the book you hold in your hands. Quagmire: Nation Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta uses the seemingly unlikely tools of environmental history to reinterpret the full sweep of the Vietnamese past, from precolonial times through the French and American eras to the postwar present. Although there is intentional irony in David Biggs’s decision to adopt Halberstam’s famous word for the title of his own book, that irony points toward a much deeper truth. Beneath the metaphysical symbolism of the stories that the French and Americans told to explain their activities in Vietnam was an actual physical quagmire whose material and environmental realities can tell us far more about the Vietnamese past than do the colonial narratives that have been fashioned from its muck.
• Xi-xii – Twenty-seven hundred miles in length, the Mekong River drains more than 300,000 square miles as it makes its journey from Tibet through China’s Yunnan Province southeast to Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. There, before it reaches the ocean, it spreads out in countless channels or distributaries across a vast plain occupying more than 15,000 square miles. Much of the terrain varies no more than a meter in height, making this one of the flattest delta landscapes anywhere on the planet. Tidal pulses can reach as much as a hundred kilometers upstream from the sea, and the seasonal monsoon rains regularly bring floodwaters that inundate thousands of square miles. Human beings seeking to make homes for themselves in such a place quickly come to understand meanings for “quagmire”—no matter what words they use for it—that are richer and subtler, damper and earthier, than the moral metaphors of failed colonial wars.
• Xii – Among Biggs’s most important contributions is his insistence that there is more continuity between the precolonial and colonial periods in Southeast Asia than recent scholarly interpretations have sometimes suggested. He is equally insistent that neither the colonizer nor the colonized can be understood if we fail to explore their relationships with the landscapes on which they strove to create state structures and national identities. He goes further than almost any other scholar before him in demonstrating how essential it is to take environment seriously even if one’s primary goal is to understand the political histories of colonies, empires, and nations.
• INTRODUCTION – 5-6 – Like Rénaud’s investigation of nature and history along the Vĩnh Tế Canal, this book is motivated by a similar interest in how the activities and politics of nation-building were connected to the historically and environmentally complex places where they occurred. Whether imperialist or nationalist in design, public works such as roads and canals incorporated many overlapping layers of negotiations between different groups of people and the environments they inhabited. Technology also figured centrally in these struggles as newer, laborsaving machines such as steam-powered dredges reconfigured the costs and benefits involved in construction. 
• 7 – With nature playing a more prominent role in the modern history of nation-building, the old metaphor of foreign military intervention in Vietnam as a (political) quagmire gives rise to another question: what of real quagmires?
• 7-8 – Considering the fates of both the nation and nature in this history of a quagmire, I have set out to recast the colonial and postcolonial history of nation-building in Vietnam by leaving behind the smoke-filled, airconditioned spaces of downtown government offices and foreign agencies in Sài Gòn, Hà Nội, Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and Paris for the immense, watery surfaces of the Mekong Delta.
• 8 – The history that follows is less a critique of the modern philosophy of nationbuilding or state-centered development than a study of the ways that nature figured into these designs.7 I examine how technology, landscape, nature, and ideas produced the historically complicated, densely occupied environments in the present. I draw ideas from environmental history and from science and technology studies that over the past few decades have extended consideration of the permeable boundaries separating things of man-made and nature-made origins.
• 10 –  I am neither the first to consider colonial struggles in the Mekong Delta nor the first to study American experiences there after 1954; however, I am one of the first to consider continuities and overlaps between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras of nation-building. 
  • If we backdate “development” from the postcolonial to the colonial era, as Moon, Tilley, and others have done, and backdate it further, to the precolonial era, then we need histories of the continuity of development across these 3 periods
• CHAPTER 1 – 33 – People coming from one end of the canal traveled to the giáp nước to buy and sell goods produced in the Mekong Delta—areca, coconut, oranges, sugar, and rice—while people coming from the other end brought goods from Sài Gòn. Sellers traveling by oar used the shift in currents to and from the giáp nước to time their trips. After high tide peaked and the current reversed, they returned home with the current. For longer trips, a person might rest at the giáp nước before continuing on with the current.
  • So for the vietnamese these canal-sandbar-tidal estuary confluences were working envirotechnical systems but for the french they were failed envirotechnical systems
  • infranature
• 34 – The same tides that irrigated fields and rendered French canals impassable might have ended colonial expansion into the Mekong Delta had it not been for a major shift in French politics and technologies used in the colonial building programs under the Third Republic.
• 35 – Not only was canal building “improvement,” but in its new form it would now hinge on two key aspects of colonial modernization that made such activity palatable back home: implementing core ideas about labor reform from the French Revolution and introducing new science and technology that would carry out much of the work.
  • Paid labor costs too much so you need dredging machines
• 36 – French builders’ desires to build a transportation network separate from a Chinese-controlled water world prompted them to build railroads instead of canals to convey their passengers and commodities quickly.
• 41 – Despite the successful trials [of the flushing basins to release water into the canal to counteract the countervailing force of the rising tide, keep water moving down the canal, and therefore eliminate the formation of depositing sand bars], the breakthrough on dos d’âne did not result in a new dredging program. A year after completion of the flushing basin on the Saintard Canal, local people cut through the dam blocking a tidal creek, and within a few weeks, the dos d’âne had returned.40 The apparent “sabotage” of the canal received only passing mention, but evidence from similar incidents a few decades later suggests that such conflicts stemmed not so much from organized political resistance aimed at damaging colonial works as from particular villagers’ attempts to restore water circulation that was vital to their survival. By damming tidal creeks to eliminate “dead points,” the engineers caused major disruptions to the existing hydraulic landscape. 
• 43 – The colony’s return to building waterways depended less on good science or negotiation than on politics and the sheer power of new dredges moving a chain-driven circuit of huge iron scoops. Such machines consumed approximately 150 meters of earth each day and replaced the armies of laborers required to cut a channel with fewer than a hundred men. Machines also rendered the work of digging canals, like the work of building railroads and roads, legible—work could be calculated as a ratio of volume (cubic meters) dredged in a day to various capital and labor costs (fig. 8). Borrowing a term from anthropologist James Ferguson, they were “anti-politics machines” in the sense that such a colonial “apparatus” of men and machines altered the terms in which people interacted with the water landscape to such an extent they could not be easily opposed.
  • Anti-politics machines that are so transformative that they eliminate social control over a decision
• 48 – In Cochinchina before 1900, cholera spread along the same water network that had fostered the creation of the colonial state: it traveled with colonial troops; it flourished in the polluted water of unfinished canal projects; it passed into new regions upstream through the sewage discharge from steamers departing from Mỹ Tho. Once infected with the bacteria, a person quickly became dehydrated from diarrhea and vomiting, returning bacteria to the canals and creeks where others bathed and took their drinking water. One person could release over a trillion such bacteria back into the water
  • Bioenvirotechnicalsystem
• 51 – If we keep this turbulent, precolonial history in mind, we see that what makes the colonial period distinct from earlier periods is not so much the violence of the French incursion into the existing water landscape but the new inventions—dredges, Eiffel bridges, steamships, cholera vaccines, photographs, telegraphs, machine guns, newspapers, and military service. These new inventions depoliticized the old water landscape and often allowed colonial actors to float above it for a time. Inventions such as the telegraph and the steam engine compressed distances, while dredges replaced thousands of laborers with small, mobile groups. What distinguished the water’s edge in the colonial era was a speeding up and intensification of commerce.
  • What are we to make of this supposed depoliticization?
• CHAPTER 2 – WATER GRID – 63 – Rice species also changed in the region as settlers crossed short-stem strains introduced from northern Vietnam and China with long-stem strains favored by Khmer farmers.20 The two families of rice plants grown in the delta were short-stem rice (Oryza sativa) and a floating rice (Oryza rufipogon) closely related to a wild, perennial species of rice common in the marshes. Floating rice did not actually float, but because its stem grew rapidly up to four meters, it appeared to float as it responded to the delta’s high flooding by growing fast and keeping the rice above the water.
• 64 – Tools also changed to accommodate the rice. For short-stem rice, farmers used a short-handled sickle. Longer-stem varieties such as floating rice required use of a small blade attached to a longer and curved wooden handle. Handles were typically fashioned from the resinous tree
• 75 – Even in such remote interiors, then, colonial engineers relied on existing infrastructure—even that created by animals [elephants in this case]—and expanded it to allow greater numbers of migrants to accelerate the clearing of the forests beyond.
  • Infranature
• 82 – Thus, mapmaking, perhaps the signature act of defining territory, was not simply a hegemonic inscription of state power but an enterprise that also revealed the shortcomings and vulnerabilities of an expanding, modern state. Failures to accurately measure canal elevations to the nearest centimeter could not only cost the state huge sums but also bring widespread ecological damage and political fallout.
• CHAPTER 3 – HYDROAGRICULTURAL CRISIS – 94 – The water landscape became a social and ecological laboratory where a broader cast of characters attempted to create new agricultural and social conditions through settlements aimed at solving the region’s growing environmental and political problems. Such experiments did not break up old alliances (landowners, entrepreneurs, engineers, and officials), but they often reconfigured them with the addition of new groups. In such a social and environmental laboratory, ideological and scientific foundations were laid by different groups with often-conflicting solutions to the “rural problem” and different appeals to the “hearts and minds” of farmers. 
• 104 – The protests of 1930 and the violence that followed, especially in northern Vietnam, combined with the economic and ecological crises to cause a widespread reexamination of colonial development policies in the Mekong Delta. Colonial social scientists and others responded to the agricultural crisis of the early 1930s by comparing water management in the Mekong Delta with other agricultural regions, especially the Red River Delta. They sought to explain how Tonkinese peasants had managed for hundreds of years to protect their fields from floods and achieve steady crop yields while plantations in the Mekong Delta routinely suffered from flooding and other disasters. 
• 106 – Thus, over decades and centuries, preserving this built, cultural landscape became ever more difficult as the walls of the dikes had to rise ever higher. As the casiers were extended farther outward into the delta, flood damage was contained within individual cell-like structures rather than spreading across the entire region.
  • So the entire delta is one envirotechnical system 
• 122 – Such projects, both implemented and imagined, attempted to realize a modern development philosophy: engineered environments intended to deliver technical and social changes at every level of human activity in formerly nonstate, nonterritorialized spaces.
• CHAPTER 4 – BALKANIZATION
• 143 – The Việt Minh effectively controlled less densely populated provinces such as Bạc Liêu and Rạch Giá Provinces, more than half of which were undeveloped or classified as forests and swamps. Anecdotal evidence from individual reports suggests correlations between specific landscapes and political conditions in these areas. For example, in Châu Ðốc and Long Xuyên Provinces, where there were large populations of Hòa Hảo followers, 477,000 hectares were listed in 1936 as under cultivation, and 87 percent of this land was classified as planted in floating rice, not the more common, short-stem rice planted in other parts of Vietnam.
• 150 – Abandoned land (đất bơ hoang) reverted to swamp and, in some cases, young cajeput forest. What French and ASV officials called terres mortes and criticized as part of the Việt Minh’s scorched-earth tactics was for the resistance a terrain that suited the terms of survival in this war. This period of strategically planned degradation of agricultural landscapes opened up the possibility, unique in the mid-twentieth century, for the restoration of large areas to precolonial ecological conditions.
• CHAPTER 5 – MODERNIZATION
• 170-71 – The return of a former colonial, the chief engineer of irrigation, to work in Vietnam after independence was part of a broader trend in the late 1950s in which former employees of government and colonial services joined private consulting firms to undertake projects in postcolonial countries. As Dutch hydraulic engineers returned to Sukarno’s Indonesia and British engineers returned to Nehru’s India, a growing cohort of French, Japanese, Israeli, Taiwanese, Dutch, and other nationals joined Americans and Vietnamese in Sài Gòn to consult on individual contracts, most funded by the United States through the USOM and some funded through the United Nations and foreign embassies.
  • Continuity of colonial and post-colonial developmentalism
• 181 – The old symbol of colonial technological prowess in the Mekong Delta— the towering, clanking apparatus of the dredge—returned after 1954 in the form of smaller (but no less expensive) American dredges. Although the new machines still signified the power of the state and the promise of this advanced technology to quickly render wasteland into fields, rehabilitating and extending the colonial water network was no longer a centralized task.
• 183 – Thus, by continuing to insist on using such expensive machinery, American advisers perpetuated an old colonial problem: associating nation-building with preferential treatment for home-based manufacturers and parts suppliers.
• The tendency to favor plans to import expensive, high-end machinery (such as the cutter-suction dredges, which cost about one million dollars each) instead of funding more feasible, low-tech alternatives (such as hiring local labor contractors to dig canals by hand) reproduced the old colonial dilemma: a high proportion of currency flowing back to home-based companies rather than into the local economy, increased vulnerability of projects due to equipment failures or insurgent attacks, and, in the case of SFEDTP, a perpetuation of colonial-era enterprises that competed directly with new Vietnamese agencies for skilled labor. 
• 187 – Among the first targets for revolutionary action, besides particularly notorious district chiefs and police, were the symbols of American nation-building: the scores of tractors and other heavy equipment that since 1956 had served as symbols of American assistance. Reports from various Dinh Ðiền sites in 1959 describe well-organized, platoon-sized assaults on the equipment. For example, on April 24, 1959, forty men armed with a variety of machine guns attacked four International-McCormick 650-D tractors. After the operators and farmers scrambled for cover, the group riddled the tractors with bullets and then set fire to them, destroying their engines.82 Earlier, on March 24, ten “Việt Cộng” dressed all in black had launched an assault on two John Deere 80 tractors in Ðồng Tháp. Local officials had been using the tractors to plow an area about ten kilometers from the Cambodian border at Rạch Sa Rài (near Binh Thành Thơi; map 11). After scattering the crew operating the tractors with several warning shots, two men placed improvised explosive devices inside each tractor and detonated them. 
• CHAPTER 6 – AMERICAN WAR
• 198-99 – What Vietnamese typically call the American War—short for the War of Resistance against America to Save the Nation (Kháng Chiến Chống Mỹ Cứu Nước)—differed the most from past conflicts in the delta with respect to the new technologies it introduced. Americans brought a spectacular array of jet aircraft, helicopters, jeeps, patrol boats, radar, microwave communications equipment, television cameras, munitions, and chemicals to places where before 1965 only the wealthy owned televisions and only large towns had electricity. For Americans, the delta was both a counterinsurgency and a nation-building laboratory. A generation of social scientists from American think tanks and universities worked alongside military advisers, private contractors, and CIA agents to study the effects of this mass deployment of new machines. 
• 199 – This unprecedented investment in military technology and construction soon facilitated a new era of military destruction, but it also prompted a revolution in everyday technologies such as small engines attached to boats and pumps for irrigation. These small-scale, everyday technologies became essential to survival, compressing times and distances required to travel across dangerous terrain. While this radical change in individual experiences of time and space can be associated with the expansion of a more global, capitalist economy to delta farmers, it was farmers who drove this revolution in everyday technology.4 More than the violence or spectacular displays of military hardware, the proliferation of boat engines, radios, and motor pumps played a central role in the delta’s environmental history
• 207 – Beyond the battlefields and base areas, however, many more experiments were under way with new technology—pumps, motors, and generators—that profoundly altered the terms in which millions of inhabitants engaged with the delta’s water environments. The sudden flood of new imports into the delta fueled a kind of modern agrarian revolution quite unique from that in neighboring countries, where the Green Revolution meant a state-sponsored push away from traditional, subsistence agriculture and toward chemical fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, and industrial farming. Works on the Green Revolution in Southeast Asia address the interconnected ways that booming rural populations, modernist state policies on land tenure, commercialization of agricultural crops, global commodity markets, and new technologies transformed rural societies across Southeast Asia.22 Vietnam was somewhat exceptional because many of these agents of change, especially global markets and powerful central states, did not really reach beyond the edges of national highways or downtown quays. Nevertheless, people in the delta were experimenting with similar technologies.
• 211 – In spite of the fighting and the restrictions of various governing forces, individuals throughout the region adopted new technologies that altered ages-old patterns of work and communication, compressing distances and speeding up daily activities.
• 215 – Although this project, like Lilienthal’s, largely expanded on the ideas of colonial-era engineers, it was unique in two key ways. First, DARPA commissioned ecologists and geologists to travel to secure parts of the region and develop more nuanced maps of the region’s subecologies— specific ecological communities defined by plants, water and soil conditions, and land use. Rather than view the floodplain as a vast “empty” space, the ecological surveys presented it more as a mosaic, as was increasingly popular in landscape studies in the late 1960s.
• 219 – Although farmers no longer used these lands for commercial agriculture, they nevertheless continued to depend on wild rice and wild fauna for survival. In what is one of the more ironic twists of the American War, the intensive bombing and dislocations caused by post-1968 strategies encouraged farmers to become allies with the delta’s wild environment and species. They shifted cultivation techniques from transplanted, shortstem rice (Oryza sativa) to long-stem floating rice (Oryza rufipogon), which tolerated higher flood levels and spontaneously regenerated. Once a staple in the floodplains before 1900, phantom rice (lúa ma) again flourished in the region. Other farmers stopped farming rice altogether and instead constructed temporary clay mounds for raising tobacco.
• EPILOGUE
• 229 – At over four kilometers long, the new span would have completed an old dream of urban engineers to extend the highway network from Sài Gòn to the farthest reaches of the delta and on to Cambodia. But on September 26, 2007, after several days of torrential rains, a section of an approach ramp collapsed, killing over fifty people and injuring one hundred more.4 Subsequent investigations pointed to the unexpected sinking of a newly completed, six-thousand-ton supporting structure as the cause. The engineers had again failed to reach solid ground. 
• 236 – Institutions and practices are still far from perfect in the delta, but processes of negotiation and mediation have come a long way from the injustices of the colonial era. For people accustomed to a life mediated by negotiation between changes in their communities and changes in nature, the quagmire metaphor suggests a means for reintegrating stories about nature—actual earth (đất) and water (nước)— into the core of popular histories that outline the contours of the nation (đất nước)