Down and Out in Saigon

Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City

Haydon Cherry

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English

Yale University Press
09 July 2019

History; General & world history; Asian history; 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000; Urban communities; Bargains

A moving portrait of the lives of six poor city-dwellers, set in early twentieth century colonial Saigon

Historian Haydon Cherry offers the first comprehensive social history of the urban poor of colonial French Saigon by following the lives of six individuals—a prostitute, a Chinese laborer, a rickshaw puller, an orphan, an incurable invalid, and a destitute Frenchman—and how they navigated the ups and downs of the regional rice trade and the institutions of French colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century.

“Down and Out in Saigon is marked by three qualities that endow it with unusual value: the originality of its subject matter, as the first and only history of colonial Saigon’s poor population, the excellence of its research, and Cherry’s elegant prose.”—Peter B. Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley

“This is more than a corrective of revolutionary historiography—it is a tour de force that brings marginal and forgotten lives into the story of modern Vietnamese history.”—Charles Keith, author of Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation

By: Haydon Cherry
Imprint: Yale University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 22mm
Weight: 539g
ISBN: 9780300218251
ISBN 10: 0300218257
Pages: 280
Publication Date: 09 July 2019
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Haydon Cherry is assistant professor of history at Northwestern University.

Reviews for Down and Out in Saigon: Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City

[A] book of elegantly narrated tales [and] a fresh perspective on colonial Vietnam from the point of view of the underclass -Ziqi Wu, The Metropole Down and Out in Saigon is marked by three qualities that endow it with unusual value: the originality of its subject matter, as the first and only history of colonial Saigon's poor population, the excellence of its research, and Cherry's elegant prose. --Peter B. Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley Down and Out in Saigon is more than a corrective of revolutionary historiography - it is a tour de force that brings marginal and forgotten lives into the story of modern Vietnamese history. --Charles Keith, author of Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation