He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Inadvertent Expansion: How Peripheral Agents Shape World Politics, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Inadvertent Expansion: How Peripheral Agents Shape World Politics brings the reader to the middle of one of the book’s ten historical case studies—in this case, of France’s failed inadvertent expansion into the Vietnamese kingdom of Tonkin in 1873. A French naval officer by the name of François Garnier had, without authorization from Paris, conquered the kingdom by force. While Garnier would be captured and decapitated by Chinese river pirates over the course of this invasion, he had hoped that his fait accompli would be accepted by his superiors in the capital. This page presents key pieces of evidence for why Paris would turn him down: because of France’s weak position in Europe (in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War) and the geopolitical threat it faced from the great powers there. Thus, Tonkin was returned to local authorities, and the French cabinet ordered the immediate withdrawal of all its forces. While another French naval officer would follow almost exactly in Garnier’s footsteps less than a decade later, and would succeed (covered later in the chapter), for now Tonkin was to remain independent.Learn more about Inadvertent Expansion at the Cornell University Press website.
The Page 99 Test is only moderately successful in the case of my book. On the one hand, it does serve to highlight one of the two key factors explaining when and why inadvertent expansion occurs: variation in geopolitical risk. It also takes the reader into one of the book’s detailed historical case studies and highlights the kind of primary, documentary evidence that is in abundance throughout the book. On the other hand, simply reading this page in isolation wouldn’t tell you much about the book as a whole—about the puzzling nature of inadvertent territorial expansion, about the details of the theory explaining it, about the nature of the quantitative and qualitative evidence presented in it, or about its relevance to contemporary issues and concerns.
--Marshal Zeringue
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