Obiturary Ralph Bernard Smith (05.09.1939 - 12.20.2000)

Dear list members,

I have the sad task to inform you that Ralph B. Smith, professor of history at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS) has died - apparently from a heart failure - in London on Wednesday 20 December 2000 at the age of 61. His death did not come unexpected, as his suffering from a weak heart had been all too apparent, but it was nevertheless sudden.

Although I do not feel the most competent person to write about Prof Smith as an academic and a human being, let me allow to introduce him to those who did not know him, as a proper obituary is unlikely to appear before the new year. As I am writing from memory and pressed by Christmas obligations, it is likely that I will not get the details of his academic career right and hope that these shortcomings will be rectified in a more professional forthcoming obituary.

Ralph Smith originally trained in English medieval history, writing his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Leeds about the Tudor period; his thesis was later published as a book. It was towards the end of his thesis that he considered his career chances in English medieval history and decided to apply for a position in Vietnamese History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, just opposite the Institute of Historical Research, where he wrote much of his thesis.

At a time when area studies and let alone the study of Vietnam was far from being institutionalised, his application stood a good chance of being successful and Ralph was taken onto the academic staff of SOAS. It was a great win for the academic study of Vietnam (and certainly a much lesser loss to the already well-established field of medieval English history), where he soon began to make his impact by setting the standards of scholarship very high and whence he emerged as one of the pioneers and founding fathers of the institutionalised study of Vietnam. Within an extremely short time, Prof Smith had begun to master the intricacies of Vietnamese history and language. His ability to think himself into his subject matter, his incisive analytical skills, and his ability to present complex matters in clear concisive language quickly led to non-partisan and highly original publications, such as his first book in the field ('Vietnam and the West') and a number of innovative articles on colonial Vietnam which were published in the late 1960s and early 1970s and which are still read with great benefit; in fact, one wonders, how much he was ahead of his times. This was followed up by an edited book on medieaval Southeast Asia in which he demonstrated his knowledge of the pre-colonial period.

It was then that he turned his attention towards the writing of a history of the Second Indochina War, perhaps because his earlier efforts on Vietnamese history per se were too much ahead of their time and thus not given sufficient attention. His main thesis was that the events in Indochina and particularly Vietnam could only be understood from a truly international perspective - which did neither ignore the importance of local circumstances nor those of the global financial system - as most other approaches tended to miss part of the whole picture by focusing entirely on Vietnam, or exclusively on the American part in the war, while also avoiding the pitfalls of approaches based too much on political and international relations' theory, or those too closely in the mould of traditional diplomatic history.

Book reviews often referred to Ralph as a scholar-academic, denoting the depth and width of his erudition and the quality of his writings. This is illustrated by his other publications, which included a two-tiered article on the South Vietnamese Cao Dai religion. More recently, his research focused on the 1930s and 1940s in Vietnamese history. In addition to that, he was just about to complete a new international history of Southeast Asia, this time by taking the long view over the regions' international politics by focusing on key years of the last fifty years. To finish his distinguished academic carreer, spanning more than thirty years during which he had stayed loyal to SOAS, Prof Smith had intended to write a book on the philosophy of history.

Apart from his publications, Ralph in particular excelled as a Ph.D. supervisor who followed his students' progress with great interest and care, resulting in a number of excellent Ph.D. theses. Though always highly critical, his questions and remarks were always constructive and done for the sake of the quality of his students' work. While on the surface level appearing to belong to the more conservative kind of historian (in the methodological sense), after some time one recognised that he was very openminded and would accept any approach as long as it was argued for convincingly.

In addition to that, academic training to him extended beyond the training of the intellect, and included the promotion of 'old-fashioned' values with regard to how academics ought to behave towards each other. As such, he furthered contact between normally isolated research students and brought them into contact with other Vietnam specialists. During the last few years, his main forum for such contacts was an informal Vietnam Studies Group at SOAS; the discussion almost inevitably ended up in nearby Italian, Greek, or Chinese restaurants, where Ralph took immense pleasure to invite the participants. Being born in Rabbit/Cat year, Ralph exuded the qualities traditionally attributed to this mysterious Chinese/Vietnamese sign: a very social and yet also very private person for whom right social graces in academic discussions mattered as much as high scholarly standards. As a historian, he managed to marry insight and understanding with intellectual rigour and careful documentation. While outwardly rather distant, this was but a cover for his warm and generous heart, as well as a protection mechanism to avoid overexerting his weak heart.

Ralph Smith will not only be missed as one of the rare species of 'scholar-historians', but to those who knew him above else as a fine human being.

Tobias Rettig

PS According to Prof Ian Brown, Ralph's burial will very likely take place in early January.

Tobias Rettig

Ph.D. student

Dept. of History

S.O.A.S.

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