France's Asian empire never produced the tidal wave of human circulation of the British Indian Ocean, but it was an important yet critically understudied engine of migration. Les migrations impériales au Vietnam, edited by Eric Guerassimoff, Andrew Hardy, Nguyen Phuong Ngoc, and Emmanuel Poisson, presents the initial efforts of a research collaboration between several French and Vietnamese scholarly institutions. Its goal is to explore the relationship between empire and the migration of laborers to, from, and through what it calls “Vietnam,” even if its contributors all understand the signal importance of not projecting postcolonial nation forms backward onto Indochina's juridically distinct and socioeconomically diverse regions. To date, the history of Indochina has barely intersected with migration studies; this volume's stimulating essays demonstrate the possibilities of this research agenda.
This volume is explicitly focused on the political, economic, and bureaucratic dimensions of labor migration. “Most of the workers studied here left home voluntarily,” Hardy writes in the introduction, but “few departed spontaneously, few made their own arrangements for the move. They joined organised migration programmes, and the way those programmes were organised are revealing of the economics of empire and the politics of empire. They inform us of the interaction of public and private economic interests, and the relations of ordinary workers with the respective authorities, French as the dominant imperial power, Vietnamese and Chinese” (p. 21). Essays on labor migration to Cochinchinese rubber plantations (Trần Xuân Trí) and nickel mines in New Caledonia (Yann Bencivengo, Sarah Mohamed-Gaillard, and Johann Grémont), and on the recruitment of Fujianese to work in Indochina (Eric Guerassimoff), all underscore the foundational importance of private industry and capital and their intermediaries—recruiters, agencies, consuls, and interpreters (the last explored by Olga Alexeeva)—in driving many forms of labor migration. French imperial officials, of course, were not simple bystanders or facilitators, mobilizing more than 100,000 people from Indochina during the world wars (the modalities and demographics of this mobilization are Liêm-Khê Luguerne's focus). And Hardy's study of a Nguyễn dynasty settler colonial initiative in the An Khê plateau, which took place during the French conquest of the Nguyễn dynasty from the 1860s to the 1880s, offers a potent reminder of the parallels and continuities between these two empires.
“At this point,” the volume disclaims, “the migrants as individuals have only a fugitive presence . . . the migrants’ lives, labour and workplaces” (p. 22) will only concern this scholarly collaborative in later projects. Here the volume sells itself a little short, for evocative aspects of social history do emerge in its pages. This is most visible in its biographical approach to crucial intermediaries: Nguyễn officials tasked with the fraught task of building their empire's presence in a border area, a French immigration agent in Fuzhou, and a retired colonial officer scrambling to recruit interpreters for French-employed Chinese war laborers. Several of the essays also evoke some milieus of migration (steamships, plantations, mines) in informative ways. The volume's final section offers fruitful guidance for future research on the social history of labor migration, the next step of this institutional collaboration. Olivia Pelletier surveys materials held at the French Archives nationales d'outre-mer for the study of laborers from Indochina in France, while Isabelle Merle and Christophe Dervieux offer methodological obervations on the potentials and limitations of French administrative documents for the social history of migration in New Caledonia. Nguyen Phuong Ngoc's essay, finally, uses a close reading of a novel about a Franco-Indochinese marriage stemming from the Great War to explore the value of vernacular sources for the history of migration to and from colonial Indochina. Indeed, it is vernacular sources (including on-site ethnographic research like Hardy's in An Khê) that will likely offer the greatest possibility to illuminate how “long distance migration removed workers from . . . social obligations and fostered adaptation to new regimes and rhythms of work,” as well as how “the return of workers meant the arrival of newly learned habits of industrialised modernity in their home communities with deep cultural, economic and political impacts” (p. 21).
Migration is a notoriously diffuse and slippery analytical category, and this volume does bear some traces of that. “The migrants here studied here were imperial subjects and they were labouring subjects,” Hardy writes in the introduction: “they made their journeys for work” (p. 20). Some important forms of labor migration in and from colonial-era Vietnam are unrepresented. On the Vietnamese side, they include the many who migrated from rural areas to the colony's growing cities, migrant laborers in Tonkin's important mining sector (currently researched by Thuy Linh Nguyen), and various forms of Vietnamese labor in France outside the world wars (steamship workers, domestics, exposition workers, lacquerers, and others). They also include forms of non-Vietnamese labor in colonial Vietnam, such as Saigon's important Chettiar community (researched by Natasha Pairaudeau), as well as North and West African soldiers during the First Indochina War. This is less a critique than an observation, especially since some of these subjects have not been closely researched: they offer an opportunity for this initiative to further develop their tapestry of the era's labor regimes as the project develops.
This will involve refining the boundaries of what counts as “labor” migration; two of the essays suggest this is a work in progress. The movement of Vietnamese officials within the precolonial imperial bureaucracy (Emmanuel Poisson's essay) may well be thought of as a form of labor migration, but its inclusion underscores the absence of similar topics more relevant for a colonial-era project: these include the dozens of Nguyễn dynasty imperial officials who received some administrative practicums in France (which Christiane Rageau has written about), as well as the thousands of Vietnamese administrative subalterns in the French bureaucracy in Cambodia and Laos. Nguyen Phi Vân's excellent essay also seems a bit out of place, since the hundreds of thousands who left north for south during the partition of Vietnam were most obviously political and religious refugees (most were Catholic); some likely did migrate south for work or economic opportunities, but the essay does not explore that realm of their experience.
The somewhat hazy parameters of this project's operative category raises questions about whether it should consider other forms of migration as well. Were Vietnamese pursuing an education in colonial-era France for professional and financial reasons, or Vietnamese writers trying to publish their novels or sell their artworks in France, engaged in a form of labor migration? This exciting research initiative will offer welcome opportunities to consider such questions as it evolves.
