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Profits or People? Rubber plantations and everyday technology in rural Indochina*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2011

MICHITAKE ASO
MICHITAKE ASO*
Affiliation:
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 469A Tower Block, Bukit Timah Road, #10-01, Singapore 259770 Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between rubber plantations and changes in everyday technologies in rural Indochina. It also explores the effects that improvement projects had on the countryside in which those who were targeted by these programmes lived. Speeches given at the opening of the Bến Cát agricultural school in Thủ Dầu Một province in 1918, for example, show that this school was designed both to train Vietnamese assistants to work on large agricultural exploitations and to improve native agricultural practices. Officials used journals, such as the bilingual French-Vietnamese Cochinchine Agricole, which appeared between 1927 and 1930, to popularize latex-producing science and techniques. Though their motivations often differed from those of officials, the Vietnamese elite, ranging from those in the anti-colonial Duy Tân Hội (Modernisation Society) to French-trained physicians, scientists, and engineers, also often sought to address the problems of rural southern Vietnam through improvements in everyday agricultural technologies. This paper suggests that plantation agriculture, which structured the everyday meanings of rubber in Vietnam, along with the failures of native improvement, began to weaken the support of the Vietnamese elite for the colonial regime during the 1930s. Uneasy compromises and contradictions meant that neither economic profit nor social improvement alone existed in the rubber-producing industry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1: Everyday Technology in South and Southeast Asia , January 2012 , pp. 19 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Quote from Maspéro who was Governor of Cochinchina at the time, ‘Une œuvre indispensable enfin réalisée, inauguration de l’école d'agriculture de Bencat’, Courrier Saigonnais, 4, 5 August 1918, ANOM Agefom 243/325. The original reads: ‘Ici même, en Indochine, la nécessité d'apporter aux indigènes le concours de la science européenne pour régulariser et accoître le rendement des cultures s'est imposée depuis longtemps à l'esprit de ceux qui se sont intéressés au développe-[sic] d'un pays essentiellement agricole.’ All translations from French and Vietnamese are by the author unless otherwise noted.

2 Marianne Boucheret, ‘Les plantations d'heveas en Indochine, 1897–1954’, PhD thesis, Université Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne, 2008; and Aso, Michitake, ‘The Scientist, the Governor, and the Planter: The Political Economy of Agricultural Knowledge in Indochina during the Creation of a “Science of Rubber”, 1900–1940’, East Asian Science, Technology and Society, 3 (2–3), 2009, pp. 231–56Google Scholar.

3 This technique, which consisted of matching three parts of the tree—the roots, the trunk, and the foliage—had been developed in the Dutch East Indies. The difference in yield could be quite substantial. For example, between the fifth and the twelfth years a hectare planted with seedlings on the best quality red earth soil could yield 700 kilograms of latex a year. By contrast, between the fifth and the twelfth years, a hectare planted with grafted trees on red earth could yield 1,200 kilograms of latex a year. ANOM FM Guernut 27, Bareme, p. 4. With large fluctuations in the world price, grafting technology made little difference to smallholder producers in Borneo. These smallholders simply collected rubber when they needed cash and when the price on the world market made it worth their while; therefore they did not have to worry about maximal yields per hectare as did the estate owners.

4 Tania Li notes that programmers enacted ‘programs to move populations from one place to another, better to provide for their needs; programs to rationalize the use of land, dividing farm from forest; programs to educate and modernize’, all of which ‘are implicated in contemporary sites of struggle’. Li, Tania, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Ibid, p. 7.

6 Expanding Vietnamese production was mentioned, for example, in a summary of the desires presented to the Guernut commission by the village of An-Tây-Thôn, which was also in Thủ Dầu Một province, west off route 13, south of Bên Cát (near the Cu Chi tunnels). There were some spin-off industries from rubber that were bringing changes to farmers and artisans in the countryside. For example, the administrator of Thủ Dầu Một noted that the local ceramics industry was producing bowls for rubber collecting. From Report of Admininstrateur de Thudaumot, ANOM FM Guernut 87; see p. 13 for carts, p. 17 for ceramics, p. 19 for forges that made knives, probably for tapping. And while, overall, he reported that Vietnamese agricultural techniques remained archaic, he said some Vietnamese rubber growers were using modern, European-style carts. ‘Canton de Binh-thanh-Thuong, Village de An-Tây-Thôn’, 12 November 1937, from ‘Les propriétaires’, signed Saigon, 21 December 1937, Bellesame (or Belisaire?), l'administrateur chargé des travaux relatifs à l'enquête. See ‘Que le caoutchouc soit planté comme auparavant’ and ‘Vœu contre la restriction du caoutchouc’, p. 4, and also ‘Voœux présentés par les habitants du village de An-Tay-Thon le 11–11-37’, p. 4. ‘Autoriser les planteurs à replanter à replanter [sic] les arbres à caoutchouc.’ In their wish list, they said that the 1934 international agreement restricting rubber production was limiting access to rubber planting at a time when more and more Vietnamese desired to plant.

7 Christophe Bonneuil has provided a detailed study of the many tools and techniques associated with rubber plantations, from rubber knifes, fertilizer, and trees to questions of whether to weed or not to weed. See Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Mettre en ordre et discipliner les tropiques: les sciences du végétal dans l'empire français, 1870–1940’, PhD thesis, Université Paris VII-Denis Diderot, 1997, Chapter 5. This paper employs the term ‘sociotechnology’ in order to express the idea that changes in technology cannot be understood without examining the society in which it is embedded. See Bijker, Wiebe E., Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Edgerton, David, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Latour, Bruno, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. For work applying Science and Technology Studies (STS) to agriculture in Southeast Asia, see, for example, Biggs, David, ‘Breaking from the Colonial Mold: Water Engineering and the Failure of Nation-Building in the Plain of Reeds, Vietnam’, Technology and Culture, 49, 2008, pp. 599–623CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Moon, Suzanne, Technology and Ethical Idealism: A History of Development in the Netherlands East Indies (Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2007)Google Scholar provides an exemplary analysis of the competing ways in which Indonesian nationalists and different interests in the agricultural department defined and understood technology. See also Goss, Andrew M., The Floracrats: State-Sponsored Science and the Failure of the Enlightenment in Indonesia (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

8 Michel de Certeau discusses the consumption and production of culture in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

9 The first tool has involved reading the sources of French colonizers and Vietnamese elite against the grain. The second has shown both promise and peril. Anthropologists, for example, have recently pointed out the problematic aspects of reading a culture through its material goods and the tendency of colonial official to use collections of objects to advance their interests. Thomas, Nicholas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar and Clifford, James, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. The third tool has received attention during the ‘rational peasant’ debates. See Popkin, Samuel L., The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979)Google Scholar and Scott, James C., The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976)Google Scholar. For reviews of this debate, see Brocheux, Pierre, ‘Moral Economy or Political Economy? The Peasants are Always Rational’, Journal of Asian Studies, 42 (4), 1983, pp. 791–803CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Montesano, Michael J., ‘War Comes to Long An: The Classic We Hardly Know?’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 6 (1), 2011, pp. 87–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Murray, Martin J., ‘“White Gold” or “White Blood”?: The Rubber Plantations of Colonial Indochina, 1910–40’, in Daniel, E. Valentine, Bernstein, Henry and Brass, Tom (eds), Plantations, Proletarians, and Peasants in Colonial Asia (London: Frank Cass, 1992), p. 59Google Scholar, where Murray termed plantations ‘European operations par excellence’. Some plantation owners did realize that it was in their best interests to provide minimal levels of care for their workers.

11 The word ‘native’ was a term used at the time but has since become problematic. For a similar reason, quotation marks should be assumed whenever the word ‘coolie’ is used. ‘Improvement’ is also in quotes because it is a concept that is examined in this paper.

12 Conklin, Alice L., A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Goss, Andrew M., ‘Decent Colonialism? Pure Science and Colonial Ideology in the Netherlands East Indies, 1910–1929’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 40 (1), 2009, pp. 187–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Li, The Will to Improve; and Hodge, Joseph Morgan, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. This desire has been called many things, including the ‘civilizing mission’, ‘the white man's burden’, etc.

13 By focusing on the colonial period, I am not trying to imply that technological change in the Vietnamese countryside was new to French colonization, as the Nguyen dynasty was keenly aware of military and medical advances. See Anh, Nguyễn Thế, ‘Traditional Vietnam's Incorporation of External Cultural and Technical Contributions: Ambivalence and Ambiguity’, Southeast Asian Studies, 40 (4), 2003, pp. 444–58Google Scholar; Thompson, C. Michele, ‘Mission to Macau: Smallpox, Vaccinia, and the Nguyen Dynasty’, Portuguese Studies Review, 9 (1, 2), 2001, pp. 194–231Google Scholar. During the colonial period, however, farmers were being encouraged to consume technology in novel ways. See Woodside, Alexander, ‘Decolonization and Agricultural Reform in Northern Vietnam’, Asian Survey, 10 (8), 1970, pp. 705–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Co, Nam, ‘Su bien doi cua huong thon tu xua den nay’, Nam Phong, N. 76 (June), 1923, pp. 327–28Google Scholar, as cited in Duong, Pham Cao, Vietnamese Peasants under French Domination, 1861–1945 (Berkeley, California: Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, 1985), pp. 143–46Google Scholar. By the early 1930s, there were specific attempts to improve rural drinking water sources.

15 In addition to the examples discussed above, the government passed laws intended to promote smallholders. For example, see Goucoch circulaire du 1 déc. 1925; GGI arrêté du 19 sept. 1926. These two laws were cited for planters in ‘Pour les jeunes planteurs d'hévéas’, Cochinchine agricole, 1, 1927, pp. 5–8. This journal was published in Saigon and can be found in the Bibliothèque nationale.

16 See Bonneuil, ‘Mettre en ordre’, p. 286bis: of 575 native-owned operations, 520 were 0 to 40 ha; 43 were 40 to 100 ha; 12 were 100 to 500 ha; and no operation was larger.

17 Ibid, p. 289. The original reads: ‘Ce sont les européens qui se sont lancés les premiers dans cette culture, dont ils restent les maîtres par la suite. L’élite économique vietnamienne entreprit de s'affirmer face aux entreprises chinoises et françaises, mais ce mouvement, assez timide, ne toucha presque pas l'hévéaculture.’ In terms of numbers, fewer than ten European-owned plantations (and conglomerates) produced the majority of rubber, with these mega-plantations employing by far the greatest number of workers from Tonkin and Annam. It is from these estates, too, that the most infamous instances of abuse emerged and which have continued to define the picture of social conditions in the region during colonialism.

18 See Cochinchine réponses à l'enquête no. 1 sur l'alimentation (classement par provinces), ANOM Fonds Ministériel, Guernut 87, from now on ANOM FM Guernut 87. This table was constructed using the Report of Admininstrateur de Thudaumot. A modest expansion of cultivated land took place between 1930 and 1936, from 40,750 to 44,663 hectares. The yield in tons, however, more than doubled during the same time period, from 6,500 tons to 15,600 tons. The majority of this happened because of European-controlled production. Out of the surface planted in hévéa, one-third was planted in grafted trees and two-thirds in non-grafted trees (though the actual number of trees was closer to 50–50). The fact that Europeans owned almost all of the land planted with grafted trees meant that their land yielded a much higher amount of latex per hectare. Ibid, p. 35: 127,146 ha total; 15,535 ha grafted and 29,138 ha non-grafted, with 6,373,000 grafted trees and 7,161,000 trees non-grafted, for 13,534,000 total.

19 Bonneuil, ‘Mettre en ordre’, p. 289. For the estates, Bonneuil also points to a difference between those that used herds of cattle to keep the grounds clean and those that used manual labour to weed the grounds. A major distinction was made between sandy grey earth composed of well-drained alluvial soil and the clayey red earth formed by the breakdown of volcanic rock. The former was generally considered the less fertile of the two.

20 From Report of Admininstrateur de Thudaumot, from Bên Cát, Ong Yem, Lai Khê area, R. Caty, Director de l'Ecole d'agriculture de Bencat and Le-Do-Ky, Agent technique principal, ANOM FM Guernut 87, p. 7. While it is difficult to prove that these planters did not exist, anecdotal evidence suggests that this was the case. For example, the head of the Bến Cát agricultural school and its head technician, Le-Do-Ky, reported the results of their survey of the Bến Cát area. This report to the Guernut Commission, which included the budgets of three families—one rich, one well-off, and one poor—made no mention of income from rubber growing. In fact, one of the wishes expressed in the report was to have agents go around and introduce farmers to new agricultural techniques, further indication that few people knew how to grow rubber in this rubber heartland. Instead, peasant farmers grew mostly tobacco, fruit, and rice.

21 See Syndicat des Planteurs de Caoutchouc de l'Indochine, Annuaire du syndicat des planteurs de caoutchouc de l'Indochine (Saigon: Maison Photo Nadal, 1931). As mentioned above, the records of the Guernut Commission contain vœux (wishes) for an expansion of Vietnamese ownership of rubber plantations, as well as detailed records of rich Vietnamese landowners, with rubber production as part of their income. Most officials responded that the 1934 accord signed by France, Britain, the Netherlands, and other rubber-producing countries and colonies, allowed only a certain amount of production per year and the French companies were already fulfilling their share of this production. Therefore, some officials argued, by international law, there was no room for an expansion of Vietnamese latex production.

22 By contrast, the ‘coolies’ working on his plantations were likely to earn a little less than 150$ ($ = piaster) per year, based on standard wage rates for the area (a tiny amount even if housing and some rice was provided). A landowner could be called well off with a gross income of 3,400$. Report of Admininstrateur de Thudaumot, Circonscriptions de Chef-lieu et de Bên Cát, Thudaumot, 26 April 1938, Lê van Truyện, ANOM FM Guernut 87, p. 19.

23 See Ibid, Annual budget of rich local planter, p. 18. A more modest, and more typical, example of a Vietnamese rubber grower also comes from the province of Gia dinh, close to the population centre of Saigon. The family of Vo-van-Vê, the head of a canton, owned 30 hectares on which he produced five tons of rubber, which brought in 5,000$. In his rubber growing, he incurred the following costs: plantation maintenance, 1,000$; labour and harrowing, 100$; taxes and land tax, 500$; lighting and heating, 100$; cattle, 200$; fertilizer, 100$; acid, crates and transport, 600$; etc. From these numbers, it is clear that this family did most of their own growing with the help of a few workers, most likely about ten at any one time. Madame Nguyễn Đức Nhuân, owner of Phụ nữ Tân văn, and Nguyễn van Cua, the Vietnamese publisher with a contract from the colonial government and thus incredibly wealthy, both owned plantations in Bien Hoa. This may go some way to explaining why the mainstream media wrote so little about plantation conditions, leaving it to the anti-colonial and independent smaller press to expose conditions on the plantations.

24 Quote from Maspéro, ‘Une œuvre indispensable enfin réalisée’, Courrier Saigonnais, 4, 5 August 1918. The original reads: ‘Nos voisins en Extrême-Orient, Anglais et Hollandais, ont depuis plusieurs années instauré chez eux l'enseignement agricole et lui ont donné, à l’épreuve des résultats acquis, un développement qu'ils ne prévoyaient pas eux-mêmes au début.’

25 See Conklin, Mission to Civilize.

26 Rapport sur l'Enseignement, Fontaine, Hanoi 1 août 1904, p. 9, Section ‘Colleges Indigenes’, ANOM. The original reads: ‘Il a paru utile d'essayer par la diffusion des notions scientifiques et par l'usage des méthodes expérimentables de modifier le cerveau et la mentalité de l'Indigène en développant chez lui dans la plus large mesure ses facultés intellectuelles. C'est un essai qu'il fallait tenter.’ Bureaus included Travaux Publics, le Cadastre, les Postes et Télégraphes, les Douanes et Régies le Commerce et l'Industrie.

27 de Gantès, Gilles and Nguyen, Phuong Ngoc (eds), Vietnam Le Moment Moderniste (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As a result, the French government closed down a number of Vietnamese-run schools and eventually instituted sweeping reforms in the education system.

28 Conklin, Mission to Civilize. See also Sarraut, Albert, La Mise En Valeur Des Colonies Françaises (Paris: Impr. Charles Colin Payot et Cie, 1923)Google Scholar.

29 For imperial Britain, see Hodge, Triumph of the Expert.

30 The French, as one historian quipped, have a tendency to implement social, political, and economic programmes by setting up schools. Artz, Frederick, The Development of Technical Education in France, 1500–1850 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1966), pp. 220–30Google Scholar. The French placed schools such as Bến Cát in an educational hierarchy formed in France itself. Agricultural schools first appeared in France in the mid-nineteenth century in response to a perceived gap between French agricultural practices and those of neighbouring countries, such as Prussia and England. A hierarchy then developed over the next several decades, beginning with the successors of the first privately run farm-schools and culminating in the Ecole nationale d'agricultures and the Ecole Superior d'agricultures set up at the beginning of the twentieth century. While colonial educational policy concerning the teaching of culture and history in Indochina has been the focus of past studies, less attention has been paid to agricultural education. See Ha, Marie-Paule, ‘From “Nos Ancêtres, Les Gaulois” To “Leur Culture Ancestrale”: Symbolic Violence and the Politics of Colonial Schooling in Indochina’, French Colonial History, 3, 2003, pp. 101–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gail Paradise Kelly, ‘Franco-Vietnamese Schools, 1918 to 1938’, PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1975; Van Thao, Trinh, L’école française en Indochine (Paris: Karthala, 1995)Google Scholar; Bezançon, Pascale, Une colonisation éducatrice: l'expérience Indochinoise, 1860–1945 (Paris: Harmattan, 2002)Google Scholar. For an early summary of agricultural schools, see Pham, Vietnamese Peasants, pp. 15–19.

31 Tania Li defines trusteeship as ‘the intent which is expressed, by one source of agency, to develop the capacities of another’: see The Will to Improve, pp. 4–5. Li convincingly argues that government officials, from the Dutch East Indies to the New Order, repeatedly invoked this term to intervene, often violently, in Indonesian lives. For trusteeship in Vietnam, see Bradley, Mark, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000)Google Scholar.

32 Background on Bến Cát is from C. de Laprade, Simples renseignements sur l'arrondissement de Thudaumot, 1898.

33 ‘Inauguration de l’école d'agriculture de Bencat, Speech by Morange, Directeur des services agricole et commerciaux’, Courrier Saigonnais, 6 August 1918. The original reads: ‘Le rôle principal de l'Ecole sera donc de former des auxiliaires pour les plantations européennes et les exploitations indigènes.’

34 Context for Thủ Dầu Một from BSEI, 1910–1911, ‘Monographie de Thudaumot’. According to the article, the experimental field site had existed for 18 years. The other major department of the school was forestry, reflecting another economically important activity in the region. The best location for gaining practical experience with rice was in the Mekong Delta. NAVN2, Goucoch, SL 3851 Instruction publique. Enseignement professionnel. Ecole d'agriculture de Bên Cát (Thủ Dầu Một). Dossier de principe, 1911–1924.

35 For complaints of low enrolment, see Lettre, Directeur de Service d'Education à GGI, Hanoi, 5 déc. 1923, ANOM Agefom 243/325.

36 This was an enrolment of mediators rather than the elite. See Moon, Technology and Ethical Idealism, pp. 54–69. Moon also shows that the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies were confronted with many of the same choices as the French, such as whether to emphasize science and technology or social and fiscal policies in agrarian reform, and whether to work through elites or directly with farmers to enact changes. Ibid, pp. 35–41.

37 Only two were employed on plantations. Of the others, 29 were working for the agricultural department; 13 for the forestry department; 14 as farmers; and one was classed as ‘miscellaneous’. Pham writes that Bên Cát closed due to low attendance before subsequently reopening. Pham, Vietnamese Peasants, p. 18. Apparently the plantations found that the students were better trained as secretaries than as agricultural agents.

38 This activity was stressed in French-run general education in colonial Vietnam. Gail Kelly has argued that this emphasis on manual labour was meant to keep the Vietnamese suppressed, although it has been pointed out elsewhere that general education in France (at least from the end of the nineteenth century) also extolled the virtues of manual labour, suggesting at least some overlap between pedagogy in Vietnam and France. Kelly, ‘Franco-Vietnamese Schools’, and Ha, ‘Nos Ancêtres, Les Gaulois’, pp. 109–10.

39 Création l'Ecole pratique d'Agriculture Bên Cát (Thủ Dầu Một) d'une section d'ouvriers spécalistes agricoles en faveur des pupilles Société protection l'enfance Indochine, 1923–24, NAVN1, GGI 7492.

40 Association des planteurs de caoutchouc de l'Indochine, Bulletin de l'association des planteurs de caoutchouc de l'Indochine, 1918–1942, throughout.

41 Editors, ‘Son but’, Cochinchine agricole, 1, 1927, pp. 2–3.

42 ‘Pour les jeunes planteurs d'hévéas’, Cochinchine agricole, 3, 1927, pp. 4–5. In issue no. 6, there is a reprint of Morange's 1910 report against planting in between hévéa trees, recommending fertilizer with azotes, or nitrogen, and planting of legumes, which helped with this problem as well.

43 Goss, ‘Decent Colonialism?’

44 Les Scandales de l'Agriculture en Indochine (1932), ANOM. For more on Henry, see Académie des sciences d'outre-mer, Hommes et destins: dictionnaire biographique d'outre-mer (Paris: Académie des sciences d'outre-mer, 1975). Alexander Yersin, by contrast, was singled out as a model of a colonial scientist. While it is questionable if Yersin, already a hero in Indochina, was any more practical than Henry, the nature of the charge shows that conducting pure science could be seen as a liability. While in Indochina there did exist ‘le Conseil des recherches scientifiques en Indochine’, Bonneuil and Petitjean show that there was not a centralized office to coordinate ‘pure’ colonial scientific research in France until 1937 at the earliest. Christophe Bonneuil and Patrick Petitjean, ‘Les chemins de la création de l'ORSTOM, du front populaire à la libération en passant par Vichy, 1936–1945’, in Patrick Petitjean (ed.) Les sciences coloniales: figures et institutions (Paris: L'Institut français de recherche scientifique pour le développement en coopération, 1996). In Technology and Ethical Idealism, Moon shows that similar complaints had been lodged against Michelor Treubs, the renowned plant scientist and one-time Head of the Department of Agriculture in the Dutch East Indies. The parallels suggest that in both colonies, the relationship between theory and practice remained problematic.

45 M. Nguyên Tân Biên, Instituteur de 7è classe à Giadinh, à l’école primaire de Phu-Hoà-Dông, ANOM FM Guernut 87. Nguyên, who described in detail the rubber-growing season and gave a rough breakdown of the different activities by gender, wrote of this desire: ‘L'introduction des cultures nouvelles suivant les méthodes européennes est à souhaiter pour montrer à la population les sciences de l'agriculture française. Jusqu'ici on cultive la terre selon les préceptes laissées par les ancêtres sans chercher à comprendre le comment et le pourquoi. On cultive pour ainsi dire pour ne pas mourir de faim.’

46 Citing numerous texts, ranging from Buddhist prayer texts to racy detective novels, Shawn McHale makes the convincing case that the Vietnamese were thinking about more than just revolution and nation: McHale, Shawn Frederick, Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and Philippe Peycam, ‘Intellectuals and Political Commitment in Vietnam: The Emergence of a Public Sphere in Colonial Saigon (1916–1928)’, PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1999. Part of this outpouring included journals and pamphlets introducing Vietnamese readers to popular scientific ideas. The venues for this popularization ranged from periodicals that addressed a non-specialized audience, such as Phụ nữ Tân văn, to periodicals devoted exclusively to science, such as Khoa học tạp chí.

47 Anh, Nguyễn Thế, ‘The Vietnamese Confucian Literati and the Problem of Nation-Building in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Oh, Myung-Seok and Kim, Hyung-Jun (eds), Religion, Ethnicity and Modernity in Southeast Asia (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 1998), pp. 231–50, 840Google Scholar. For an idea of why Japan might have been seen as a useful model, see Walker, Brett L., ‘Meiji Modernization, Scientific Agriculture, and the Destruction of Japan's Hokkaido Wolf’, Environmental History 9 (2), 2004, pp. 248–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 For instance, Phan Văn Trường wrote in 1913 about the usefulness of the script in ‘the teaching of the masses by popularising, through the means of works in quôc ngu, useful literary and scientific knowledge’. The original reads: ‘Il s'agit de travailler à l'instruction de la masse par la vulgarisation au moyen d'ouvrages en quôc ngu, des connaissances utiles, scientifiques et littéraires.’ Extraits de la brochure intitulée La Fraternité, association d'Indochinois. Notes pour nos compatriotes (‘Brotherhood, Association of Indochinese’) (Paris: Vigot frères, 1913). In Brocheux, Pierre, ‘1908: Le Chassé-Croisé G. Chiếu-P. Văn Trường’, in de Gantès, Gilles and Nguyen, Phuong Ngoc (eds), Vietnam: Le Moment Moderniste (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 2009), p. 208Google Scholar. But while Trường appreciated the potential of the script, it still needed ‘to be endowed with a technical and scientific vocabulary’. For an example from the late 1930s, see Ngôn, Trần Hàng, ‘Tiếng Annam và khoa học phổ thông, hay là: đầu năm nhìn con đường đi’, Khoa học phổ thông, 73, 1937, pp. 3–5Google Scholar, which discusses the problem of translating technical terms.

49 Alexander Woodside characterizes this association as ‘not a proletarian organization, but rather an expanded, semi-modernized mutual aid society for the Vietnamese small business and service classes’. The association, as Woodside points out, served to link the countryside and the city and thus its journal can be seen as a way of popularizing science outside of the urban centres. The editor of the journal, Nguyễn Huy Hợi, was a small businessman who owned a shop dealing in bicycles and other modes of transport. Woodside, Alexander, ‘The Development of Social Organizations in Vietnamese Cities in the Late Colonial Period’, Pacific Affairs, 44 (1), 1971, pp. 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One article, ‘Mấy điều mới phát-minh về nghề nông pho’, pp. 31–33, was written by Nguyễn Thượng Huyền. Another article, called ‘Nông-phố học’, pp. 569–73, was written by Đõ-Văn-Minh, a teachers’ training college student.

50 The journal's editor was Trần Văn Đôn. After beginning his career as a minor bureaucrat, he received his medical degree in France, partly as a result of his contributions to the war effort during the First World War. After submitting his thesis in 1920, he returned to Saigon to work as a medical doctor and he started a political party. Other contributors included those who, like Trần, had received scientific training in France and returned to Vietnam to live and work. While by no means radical, this growing group of Vietnamese with advanced scientific degrees from France, and often French citizenship, began to expect equal treatment with the French in the colony, who were often educationally, socially, and economically their inferiors. The articles in this journal, which was published in Saigon, were of a general scientific nature, not directed specifically at farmers and covered a broad range of topics, including malaria.

51 The journal was directed by Lâm Văn Vảng, a chemical engineer involved in agriculture. A few articles were translations from French authors, but most were written by Vietnamese agricultural engineers and other scientists. From the mundane agricultural topics covered, it would appear that the intended audience included rural farmers. But the journal also published more philosophical pieces, such as ‘What is farming?’, with quotes from J. J. Rousseau on the importance of labour for human life. As opposed to the earlier journals with more wide-ranging topics, by the 1930s readership appeared to have grown to the point where a more specialized journal such as Khoa học phổ thông could survive.

52 Ca, Nguyễn Hao, ‘Agriculture française – Agriculture annamite’, Khoa học phổ thông, 73, 1937, p. 37Google Scholar.

53 Report of Admininstrateur de Thudaumot, M. Wolf, chef de la province, 1936, délégation de Honquan, ANOM FM Guernut 87, p. 5. There was one possible source of everyday knowledge of rubber: the former plantation workers and their children. For instance, according to one local official, most of inhabitants of Thanh Son village, Tan-Minh canton, deep in red-earth territory, were former ‘coolies’ on the surrounding plantations. Yet, instead of owning their own trees, the men in this village of 197 people continued to work for plantations for a salary of 0$35 per day without food. M. Nguyên Tân Biên, Instituteur de 7è classe à Giadinh, à l’école primaire de Phu-Hoà-Dông, ANOM FM Guernut 87, gives an example from Gia dinh of the income of a poor family: Coolie on plantation, with family 0$05 [sic 0$50] a day working for 25 days a month or 300 days a year = 150$; wife, tapper at 0$20/day for 360 days or 72$ and a child of 13 years, buffalo boy, 13$, or a total of 235$/year.

54 Huỳnh Lứa, Sơn Đài Hồ, Quang Toại Trần, Xuân Thọ Hà, and Khoa Trung Nguyễn (eds), Lịch Sử Phong Trào Công Nhân Cao Su Việt Nam, 1906–2001, 2nd edition (Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Lao Động, 2003), p. 56. The original reads: ‘Cao su xanh tốt chốn này/Mõi cây bón một xác người công nhân.’ When people in Vietnam talk about rubber, their first reaction is often to recite poems similar to the one above that emphasize the hard lives of rubber plantation workers under the French. Whatever their merits as historical evidence, such poems have been able to survive almost uncontested, in part because for most Vietnamese rubber growing was associated with estates.

55 Nguyễn Văn Thinh and Đổ-Hửu-Thình, Cahier des vœux et exposés de motifs présentés a la commission d'enquête coloniale (Saigon: Imp. du Théatre, 1937). The authors argued for the need to continue to employ ‘services agricoles, instituts de recherchés agronomiques, offices et laboratoires’ to develop colonial products, including: ‘plantes alimentaire (riz, maïs, manioc cannes à sucre, soja, etc. . .), produits oléagineux (coprah, arachides, abrasin), produits à multiples usages industriels comme le caoutchouc, produits à grande consommation comme le thé, etc. . . Ces études seront conduites en vue des possibilités de notre sol et des débouches éventuels pour être vulgarisées par la suite et passer dans le domaine des réalisations pratiques’, p. 22. The political awareness expressed in this 1930s statement, while not anti-Western, echoes the earlier goal of elite movements to strengthen the nation.

56 See Marr, David G., Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Tai, Hue-Tam Ho, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

57 En Indo-Chine: Creation d'une école speciale d'agriculture et de sylviculture, ANOM, Agefom 243/325, p. 1. The original reads: ‘marque une étape nouvelle sur la route où progresse la jeunesse instruite d'Indo-Chine’. See also L’école spéciale d'agriculture et de sylviculture Jules Brévié, organisation et programme (Hanoi: IDEO, 1938); Arrêté du 15 août 1938 modifié par ceux du 21 oct. 1938 et 23 jan. 1939. Ecole spéciale d'Agriculture et de Sylviculture de l'Indochine (ESASI) was to offer training in agriculture and forestry equal to that available in France. During the first year of the programme, courses covered physics, chemistry, natural sciences such as biology, etc. in order to bring students up to the equivalent level of the baccalaureate, or high school diploma. During the next year, students took theoretical courses in agriculture and forestry, with teachers drawn from the Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute (IRAF), university professors, and the Pasteur Institute. Students gained practical experience and decided, according to ability and taste, whether to specialize in agriculture or forestry. During the final year, students underwent professional training by interning in the laboratories and experimental stations of the Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute, the Indochinese Bureau of Rice (OIR), or the agricultural cooperatives. Students who made it to the end of this process would earn the title of Indochinese agricultural engineer or Indochinese forestry engineer. Cambodians and Laotians who were admitted to the course but did not meet all the educational requirements would be offered supplementary courses. All student expenses were covered by the general budget.

58 En Indo-Chine: Creation d'une école speciale d'agriculture et de sylviculture, Agefom 243/325.

59 La Verité, Agence indochinois, August 1938, Autour de la création de l’école spéciale d'agriculture et de sylviculture en Indochine, V. Dai, Agefom 243/325. The original reads: ‘Nos gouvernants n'ignorent pas que plus un indigène est pénétré de la culture occidentale, moins le fossé qui sépare les Annamites des Français est grand. Elever le niveau intellectuel du peuple annamite, voilà le meilleur moyen d'aider les Français et les Indigènes qui vivent côte à côte à mieux se comprendre et s'aimer.’ See also his 1938 series of articles in L'Effort indochinois. This weekly journal published in Hanoi between 1936 and 1941 was managed by Vu Dinh Dy.

60 As Moon so poetically points out in the case of Indonesia, ‘Small might be beautiful; at times, however, it has also been colonial’ in Technology and Ethical Idealism, p. 150. For trains in Indochina, see David Wilson Del Testa, ‘Paint the Trains Red: Labour, Nationalism, and the Railroads in French Colonial Indochina, 1898–1945’, PhD thesis, University of California, 2001.

61 In 2009, after a morning spent digging through musty library shelves at Lai Khê, I was chatting with researchers over a cup of tea when a husband and wife, who had travelled from the central highlands where they had just bought some prime rubber-growing land, came in seeking advice about rubber growing.