Christina Firpo contributes a welcome addition to the scholarship on the mixed-race children of empire in The Uprooted: Race, Children, and Imperialism in French Indochina, 1890–1980. She exhumed from the depths of seven archives in four countries documents detailing the lives of four thousand m étis, fatherless mixed-race children born in French Indochina, with a focus on those in Vietnam. Although their numbers were small—Firpo estimates that over ten thousand métis children passed through protection society wards in French Indochina—they were disproportionately powerful because of their symbolic potential. The French colonial administration and later the independent governments of Vietnam suspected métis' political loyalties. They alternately considered métis either a threat to the stability of the state or an asset, depending on the broader political context. Firpo traces this theme over the course of a century.

The Uprooted’s six substantive chapters follow the history of the m étis protection societies operating in French Indochina from their establishment in the 1890s under civilian management until the 1980s, a full quarter of a century after the French empire in Indochina ended. Firpo convincingly evidences the shocking policy of systematic forced removal of mixed-race children from their Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian mothers who had little recourse, legally or otherwise, to maintaining guardianship of their children. The term m étis signals the illegitimate status of the children, whose French fathers did not legally recognize them and who therefore were not automatically granted status as French citizens. It also suggests that m étis were typically born to local women and lower-class sojourning imperial soldiers. By contrast, French law incorporated as French citizens mixed-race children whose French fathers legally acknowledged them. The class differences subtly aroused suspicions about their political loyalty and national belonging. In this vein, it would have been worthwhile for Firpo to address explicitly the slippage between the legal and the social categories of mixed-race individuals born under the sign of empire.

Firpo engagingly begins each chapter with a short vignette about a specific m étis child's experience that is representative of a general shift in protection society policy. Initially, the protection societies considered metis impoverished outcasts who might rebel against French rule. However, the post-WWI natal crisis in France drove protection society administrators to reconsider métis as an opportunity to boost the dwindling French population. During the Depression, World War II, and the wars of independence fought in Vietnam, the fundamental ambiguity of the political loyalty of the métis population animated French colonial anxiety and policy. Eurasians (and other French imperial mixes, such as French African-Asian) might offer hope as the future of a French implantation in an embattled Indochina, or they may rebel against the French by siding with Vietnamese nationalists. Chapter 4 on World War II and chapter 5 on the French war in Indochina richly exemplify the embattled symbolism of the métis population as deployed by the DRV and the French. The chapters also provide a scintillating but brief comparison of the impact of various wars on Eurasian populations in French Indochina, British Southeast Asia, and the Netherlands East Indies. The book ends by tracing métis after the demise of the French empire when some children were “uprooted” to France, while others remained in Vietnam.

The Uprooted offers an essential critique of the allegedly benevolent intention of protection societies to provide better lives for métis. Instead, Firpo reveals how they unscrupulously snatched métis away from native mothers, who were universally denigrated as immoral by both French and native society. No one, by contrast, is concerned with the culpability of the absconded fathers. Although, with a few exceptions, we learn little about what happens to the children after they are institutionalized—What happens to them in the orphanages? How did the protection societies attempt to create a sense of belonging or identity among the children brought under their protection? How long did they stay on average in these institutions?—these omissions do not detract from the overarching contribution of the narrative. Firpo successfully reveals the impact of a graduated racial and class hierarchy on French Indochina's mixed-race populations, whose symbolic potential was deployed for political purposes that rarely benefited them.