Michitake Aso's Rubber and the Making of Vietnam begins with the story of Alexandre Yersin, a Swiss-French medical researcher trained in Paris, who in 1895 founded the Pasteur Institute in Nha Trang. Establishing a farm just outside of town, Yersin experimented with cultivating plants that were not endemic to the region, among them the highly successful Amazonian rubber tree Hevea brasiliensis. This scene sets the stage for the major themes explored in Aso's meticulously researched and insightful book, which outlines the role of rubber production in the history of modern Vietnam, linking medicine, agriculture, economic development, and nation building. With a cast of characters that includes Hevea trees, scientists, laborers, planters, government officials, social activists, and malaria-transmitting Anopheles mosquitoes, Aso demonstrates that the rubber plantation existed at the intersection of powerful forces shaping the development of colonial and postcolonial Vietnam.

Positioning rubber plantations as central to the project of modernity in Vietnam, Aso explores how they were the loci of important tensions—between the global and the local, ideas of nature and culture, environments and human bodies, exploitation and development—while simultaneously sites of scientific, industrial, and political dynamism. Aso treats plantations as midlevel places where the global and local meet, and he highlights the role of actors mediating networks that reach across geographic scales, as they translate global ideas into local practices and vice versa. This approach helps explain the book's subtitle, “An Ecological History.” “Ecological” here refers not only to ecosystems understood in their primarily biological sense, but also to a wider, holistic perspective that examines the flows and interrelationships among humans, environments, technologies, and information. The study draws on an abundance of archival materials in English, French, and Vietnamese, including documents representing the voices of laborers and communists, and interviews with current and former plantation workers.

To help secure its access to natural resources in eastern Cochinchina and extend state control over an “unruly” population, the French colonial government first built roads. Later accompanied by airstrips, these transportation infrastructures grew in direct correlation to the world rubber market, as forms of modern mobility such as the automobile, bicycle, and airplane all depended on rubber. Scientific knowledge was used to further rationalize the work of producing rubber, and Aso describes in detail the cross-fertilization that occurred between agronomy, medical science (particularly the study and treatment of malaria), scientific management, and the emerging field of ecology. He also draws attention to exchanges of knowledge with neighboring colonies of other imperial powers, such as British Malaya and the Netherlands Indies. The French saw in science the power to increase efficiency of production and hence profit, while for many Vietnamese, scientific knowledge became a tool for pursuing more nationalistic goals.

During the First and Second Indochina Wars, rubber plantations became the setting of material and symbolic struggles, but their association with modernity and nation building endured. A popular Việt Minh poem about the hardships of plantation work declared, “Every tree is fertilized with the body of a worker” (p. 172), yet these same anticolonial forces sought refuge among the geometric rows protected by canopy where they could sleep, train, and avoid being spotted by aircraft. Aso notes the irony of the fact that as anticolonial violence and sabotage of plantations increased, this raised the costs for rubber producers, unintentionally disadvantaging smallholder Vietnamese farmers compared to the large, mostly French-owned operations. By the end of the Second Indochina War in 1975, the Hanoi government was preparing to take over the southern plantations, but the country was so ravaged by thirty years of war that many did not come back into operation until the late 1980s. By this time, communists had successfully appropriated the image of the plantation into their own vision of a modern, reindustrializing Vietnam.

Rubber and the Making of Vietnam is an ambitious work that describes a complex entanglement of nature and culture. Due to this complexity, it can be difficult to identify larger patterns in the story, as key arguments often get lost in the details. Moreover, there are few significant chronological markers to structure the narrative until the advent of World War II, with the first several chapters each focusing on a different theme in the swirl of ideas, practices, and politics surrounding rubber production. This makes the order of events difficult to follow at times. Helpfully, Aso provides summary paragraphs at the end of each chapter to synthesize and elucidate main ideas. The book charts a history of socio-ecological transformation over the twentieth century in which rubber played a critical role. Like other recent works of environmental history about Vietnam,Footnote ¹ this book also shows that colonial and postcolonial governments’ emphasis on industrial agriculture was part of a wider pattern of attempted control over nature and people at the expense of adaptation to local ecologies. The plantation form has persisted throughout modern Vietnamese history, and one of the book's many strengths is the depth of analysis it brings to how and why that has occurred. Rubber and the Making of Vietnam will be useful to students and scholars of Southeast Asian studies and is particularly noteworthy for its contributions to both environmental history and the history of science in the region.