Intimate Economies of War: Introducing Books on the Vietnam War’s Black Markets and Sexual Economies

 Intimate Economies of War: Introducing Books on the Vietnam War’s Black Markets and Sexual Economies

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The Vietnam War has long been studied as a military and political conflict, but a growing body of scholarship now turns to its intimate, underground economies: black markets, military‑linked trade, and sexual economies around U.S. bases and occupied zones. These works show that the war was not only fought in jungles and villages, but also in markets, brothels, and back‑alley exchanges where sex, money, and survival intertwined. For readers familiar with Jeongmin Kim’s Black Market Intimacies, the Vietnam War offers a parallel yet distinct case of how militarism reshapes gendered labor, informal trade, and everyday life.

Key Books on Vietnam’s War Economies

Several recent studies explicitly connect the Vietnam War with illicit and gendered economies:

• Amanda Boczar, An American Brothel: Sex and Diplomacy during the Vietnam War(Cornell University Press, 2022)
  Boczar examines sexual encounters between American servicemen and Vietnamese and other Asian women, focusing on how brothels and “entertainment” spaces functioned as sites of diplomacy, surveillance, and racialized desire. Her work reveals how sexual economies were embedded in U.S. military and diplomatic strategies, and how Vietnamese women navigated both exploitation and agency within these structures.

• “Imperial Gift: Soap, Humanitarianism, and Black Marketeering in South Vietnam” (Radical History Review, 2023)
  This article by an emerging scholar theorizes U.S.‑distributed soap as a “gift” turned black‑market commodity. It traces how South Vietnamese black‑marketeers repurposed military‑supplied soap into an illegal trade good, intercepting U.S. imperial flows and creating alternative social relations under wartime capitalism.

• “Vietnam’s Black Market Economy” (University of Hawai‘i Institutional Repository, 2023)
  This social‑history paper reconstructs South Vietnam’s transnational black market, showing how civilians, soldiers, and traders moved goods across borders and through occupied zones. It highlights how wartime participants later remembered the war through stories of smuggling, survival, and informal exchange.

• The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, Chapter 29: “The Economics of the Vietnam War” (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
  While broader in scope, this chapter situates the war’s economic history in global context, including U.S. aid flows, inflation, and the destabilizing effects of military spending. It provides essential background for understanding how formal and informal economies co‑existed during the conflict.

• Anthony P. Campagna, The Economic Consequences of the Vietnam War (Praeger, 1991)
  Campagna’s classic study focuses on the war’s impact on the U.S. economy—spending, inflation, employment, and long‑term structural change—but it also hints at the ways war spending fueled informal and military‑linked markets overseas.

Together, these works suggest that the Vietnam War, like the Korean War, produced a complex sexual and black‑market economy around U.S. military presence. They share with Black Market Intimacies an interest in how intimacy, gender, and informal trade become central to the material foundations of war and occupation.

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