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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: mitchaso@gmail.com
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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.

Information

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

Even here, in Indochina, the necessity to bring to the natives the aid of European science for regulating and increasing the yield has imposed itself for a long time on the mind of those who were interested in the development of an essentially agricultural country.Footnote 1

Introduction

This paper proposes to study rural life and technological change in French colonial Vietnam during the colonial period by revisiting cultural productions of French colonial officials and Vietnamese elites. In particular, this paper studies the efforts (and ultimate failure) to create smallholder rubber producers in eastern Cochinchina (or southeastern Vietnam) during the colonial period (and afterwards). Past studies of rubber production have largely assumed that there was little attempt to introduce rubber-producing technology to the Indochinese countryside. While it is true that efforts to introduce this technology were inconsistent and often haphazard, this paper argues that there was interest on the part of officials and the elite in encouraging smallholder production. It was believed that these producers (or consumers of rubber-producing technology) could play a part in more ambitious projects aimed at creating indigenous capitalists. Such entrepreneurs would feed medium- and large-scale (mostly European but also some Vietnamese) enterprises with materials for export (and profits). The rural indigenous capitalists would also be largely self-governing and demand little of the colonial state. This paper argues that although few farmers adopted rubber-producing technology, it was not because the French and Vietnamese elite did not try to introduce it.

The absence of smallholder producers, despite the desire of some French officials and Vietnamese elite to spread the cultivation of rubber, must be explained. The first reason for the failure of the will to improve came about in part because of the strength of the planters’ association.Footnote 2 This enabled the planters to effectively lobby the government for crucial support, including loans during the 1930 rubber crisis. Furthermore, the association helped planters take advantage of technological improvements—such as grafted trees and clones—and make use of these advances with capital.Footnote 3 For poorer planters, Vietnamese in particular, the technical innovations involved in grafting were a barrier to entry. While such advances did not shield estates from fluctuations in the price of rubber on the world market, they did address some of the weaknesses of estate production.

Second, there were limitations inherent in the practices of the programmer, or those who attempted to take concrete improvement measures. To begin with, programmers had to identify problems to be solved. From the perspective of colonial officials in Indochina, these problems included resettling the Red River Delta's ‘surplus’ population, expanding the use of the ‘under-populated’ uplands, and reforming ‘traditional’ farming techniques. The first two of these problems were better solved with estate rubber than with smallholder production and officials often encouraged industrial developments that were not useful for smallholders.Footnote 4 Officials used soil sciences, climatology, demographics, and allied natural and social sciences to help define technical approaches to diffuse problems such as disease, agricultural backwardness, and poverty. These solutions were more available and of more use to larger scale planters connected to colonial networks, including rich, Francophone Vietnamese. Time and again officials failed to meet objectives of ‘native improvement’ in part because ‘the bounding and characterization of an “intelligible field” appropriate for intervention anticipates the kinds of intervention that experts had to offer’.Footnote 5 In other words, imaging technical solutions for complex situations helped colonial officials to act, even as it severely circumscribed the scope of their solutions. Despite continued interest in smallholder production, hévéa never became an everyday agricultural technology for the majority of Vietnamese smallholders.Footnote 6

The term ‘everyday’ has rarely been used to analyse rubber production technology and its effects on Vietnamese society.Footnote 7 ‘Everyday’ was a subjective term; and for a technology to be labelled everyday, it needed to meet the following three criteria: the technology was ubiquitous and used every day; it had traditionally been used in the past; and its use was uncontroversial (i.e. it faded into the background, with its existence no longer meriting explicit comment). If a technology failed to meet any one of these criteria, then its status as everyday was open to challenge.

Recent work on colonial situations has tended to focus on the consumption, rather than production, of culture.Footnote 8 This has been the case for studies of Vietnamese farmers and their use of the agricultural technologies made available to them by French colonization. In general, peasant life has been difficult to reconstruct as rural residents left little written material. In the main, scholars have attempted to gain a sense of farmers’ thoughts concerning agricultural technologies through three types of sources: first, the writings of others about farmers; second, farmers’ material culture; and third, farmers’ actions as recorded by statistics and similar methods. Each of these tools has received considerable scholarly attention and, while they have been separated for clarity in this paper, they are complementary rather than mutually exclusive ways of knowing the past.Footnote 9

This paper is divided into three parts. The first part reviews the data for the lack of smallholders. Looking for a desire on the part of the rubber industry to better rural conditions may seem perverse, given the fact that estates, or large plantations, have often been taken as a paradigmatic case of the excesses of capitalism in French Indochina.Footnote 10 Yet estates represented only one possible way to make rubber and the introduction of latex-secreting hévéa brasiliensis does fit, even if uncomfortably, within programmes of ‘native improvement’.Footnote 11 Both colonial officials and Vietnamese intellectuals each envisioned possible uses of rubber to better the lives of Vietnamese peasants. In order to understand the tension between a colonial desire to improve living standards and the drive for profit, this paper tests a theoretical framework developed in recent scholarship that has taken seriously the desire of many colonizers to better the lives of the colonized.Footnote 12

The second part of this paper analyses the discourse in Cochinchina that formed around attempts to improve native lives by popularizing agricultural sciences and technologies through education and journals. Administrators claimed that they were simultaneously acting in the interest of native improvement and creating an environment conducive to capitalist profits.

The third part of this paper examines the goals of Vietnamese elite. They, too, evinced interest in changing rural conditions and, while they largely agreed with colonial officials about the necessity of agricultural improvements, they wrote at times of national strengthening.Footnote 13

The absence of smallholder rubber production

With peasants, everything remained as it was fifty years ago, a time when nothing was known about Western civilisation. Always the same stagnant pools from which people got drinking water, the same hovels built in mud or on dirty areas.Footnote 14

The rural stagnation described in this 1923 Nam Phong article was not uniform throughout the countryside, as shown by the formation of agricultural cooperatives, the rapid increases in industrial crops such as cotton, and other such innovations. The rate and character of change provide insights into the meanings of everyday agricultural technologies. In the case of rubber, estates helped define the everyday. This paper first examines the patterns of hévéa's spread in light of the improvement measures introduced by colonial officials and Vietnamese intellectuals discussed below. The political economy of the improvement measures played a key role in retarding the uptake of rubber production among non-French smallholders. And, in a time of intense regional and class divisions in Vietnamese society, the introduction of new rubber-producing technology only served to widen these fissures and not bridge them.

By the late 1930s, the attempt to encourage Vietnamese smallholder production of rubber had clearly failed.Footnote 15 Although it appeared as if quite a few Vietnamese grew hévéa—over 50 per cent of rubber operations were ‘native’ owned in 1937—they accounted for less than 10 per cent of the cultivated surface area.Footnote 16 As Bonneuil concludes, ‘it was the Europeans who undertook the first [efforts] in this culture [of rubber] and who subsequently remained the masters. The Vietnamese economic elite started to assert themselves with regards to Chinese and French businesses, but this rather tentative movement had almost no effect on hévéaculture.’Footnote 17 The 1937 Guernut Commission investigation, and other reports on rubber, point to official anxiety about an absence of smallholders, a situation that only worsened during the 1930s. Indeed, numbers from the province of Thủ Dầu Một, which encompassed about one-third of the hévéa-growing land in all of Indochina, show the great divide that had opened up between European and Vietnamese land ownership and production (see Table 1).

TABLE 1

Latex production from hévéa in Thủ Dầu Một in 1936.

Source: Footnote 18

Further breaking down the native planter category shows an even greater disparity in production. Bonneuil usefully divides hévéa exploitations into four types: the smallest plots of land, smaller than five hectares, on which rubber was grown to supplement the family income derived from other agricultural crops; a small plantation that was managed by a Vietnamese cai (caporal, corporal) and a few workers, and owned by local notables, rich Vietnamese, or what the French called ‘Sunday planters’; medium plantations that were either owned by a full-time European planter or managed by a salaried European; and the estates, consisting of more than 1,000 hectares, located far from urban centres on ‘red earth’ and run by companies based in Saigon and Paris.Footnote 19

Planters of the first type had to be relatively close to urban areas if they were to continue to exist. They did not have the resources to carry out large clearing operations, they more than likely used previously built roads to gain access to markets, they were closer to urban health facilities, and they did not have to deal with the explosion of malaria that followed land clearing in the regions far from traditionally settled towns and villages. Their overhead costs were few: the trees, a cutting knife, a container, and their individual labour. This group, however, did not exist in any appreciable numbers.Footnote 20

Vietnamese hévéa growers from the second group were more visible and their holdings were often listed in the Annuaire, a record of rubber-producing operations in Indochina.Footnote 21 The records of Guernut provide further information on how the richest owners of hévéa trees might have lived and material evidence of this wealth can still be found near the Biên Hòa city centre (see Figure 1). The head of Bến Cát lists the income and expenses of an extremely wealthy rubber planter. The 46-year-old planter lived with his wife, six children, one son-in-law, two nephews, a chauffeur, and three servants. He earned a total income of 75,400$ (piasters), including 72,000$ from rubber, 1,000$ from renting rice fields, and 2,400$ from renting rooms.Footnote 22 Among the many expenses incurred by his 500-hectare plantation, 24,000$ was spent on labour, which meant hiring about 160 ‘coolies’ (probably fewer when it is taken into account that the cai and the managers of the plantation earned a higher salary). For the province of Thủ Dầu Một, this one grower's land and income comprised about one-fifth of the total recorded for local growers.Footnote 23 It is now time to examine French officials' discourse of improvement.

Figure 1.

House of a former Vietnamese rubber planter in Biên Hòa.

Source: Photo in author's collection.

Plantation rubber production and attempts to modify ‘native mentality’

Our neighbours in the Far East, the English and the Dutch, have since several years established in their colonies agricultural instruction and it has yielded, by the test of accepted results, a development that they themselves had not predicted in the beginning.Footnote 24

As for other colonial powers at the turn of the twentieth century, education was a key component of the French empire's civilizing mission.Footnote 25 A 1904 report discussing the opening of a collège (a term used to describe any higher level of training), which was designed to train Vietnamese assistants for government employment, sheds light on educational aims in Indochina. This collège, noted the author, would have a physics room and a chemistry laboratory in order to meet the requirements of a scientific education. ‘It appeared useful,’ the author continued, ‘to try, by the diffusion of elementary scientific knowledge and by the usage of experimental methods, to modify the brain and the mentality of the native in developing among him to a greater degree his intellectual powers.’Footnote 26 Such an education encouraged an inquisitive, questioning mind, at least in theory.

French authorities began to take a serious look at educational reorganization in the wake of anti-colonial uprisings that took place in 1908 and were connected to schoolteachers in northern and central Vietnam.Footnote 27 The direction that these educational reforms took was later altered in the wake of the First World War. Partly as a result of this conflict, attempts to alter ‘native mentality’ increasingly gave way to the aim of increasing export agriculture as the leaders of French colonization adopted a programme of mise-en-valeur and a politics of association.Footnote 28 Imperial powers such as Britain, France, and the Netherlands adopted a colonial policy that spoke of native development as much as of imperial gain.Footnote 29

Although a strong school system remained low on the priority list of a tight-fisted colonial government, the farm-school of Bến Cát was established by decree in 1917 and charged with two tasks: to train assistants and technicians to help run the Indochinese agricultural economy; and to transform ‘timeless’ Vietnamese farming practices, thus improving native welfare.Footnote 30 This section examines efforts such as Bến Cát in relation to the concept of trusteeship, which at the time referred to the attempt of one society to develop the abilities of another.Footnote 31

Early in August 1918, the Courrier Saigonnais reported on the official ceremony that inaugurated a new agricultural school a few kilometres north of the rural population centre of Bến Cát in Thủ Dầu Một province (now Bình Dương). In attendance were top regional government officials, including the Governor of Cochinchina, Georges Maspéro (1872–1942), regional leaders of industry such as the president of the association of rubber planters, members of the local Vietnamese elite, and teachers. Termed ‘grand in its simplicity’, the official ceremony consisted of several people, some still sleepy from the 40-kilometre trip northeast from Saigon on Colonial Route 13, standing around in an empty field in the middle of nowhere in the cool morning mist of the summer day. Yet, despite the sense that this gathering was a rather modest, and long delayed, beginning to the project of providing agricultural education in Indochina, its significance should not be dismissed.Footnote 32

One of the French goals expressed in the speeches given that day was the need to train the Vietnamese to assist with the running of the colonial economy. Morange, the Head of Agricultural and Commercial Services, for example, emphasized the expansion of rubber and rice production, and the need for Vietnamese personnel to manage the growing numbers of labourers on the rubber plantations in the surrounding countryside. He went straight to the heart of the matter when he said ‘the principal role of the school will be to train assistants for the European plantations and native farms’.Footnote 33 This sentence captured the belief that the role of education in Indochina was to create technicians who could assist engineers and managers trained in France. Because these assistants lived locally, they would be much cheaper to employ, as their salaries would be lower and they would not need to be housed and fed in a European manner. The hope of those who established the school was that these assistants would work on either European-owned plantations (including rubber, coffee, tea, and rice) or on Vietnamese-owned rice growing lands, thus helping to improve agricultural techniques, and, the government hoped, yield.

Another French goal articulated that day in August was the need to change the agricultural techniques of Vietnamese farmers. Reflecting a view common among French and Vietnamese elites, Maspéro depicted these farming techniques as ‘timeless’, as he spoke of primitive ploughing instruments, poor seed selection, non-controlled cattle genetic crossings, non-grafted fruit trees, lack of fertilizer, lack of crop rotation, and reliance on the spirits to deal with problems in silk-production. Illustrating his opinion rather harshly, Maspéro claimed that a Vietnamese family from the ‘time of heroes’ would, upon rising from the dead, have no problem recognizing current agricultural practices. As a consequence, Maspéro concluded, the riches of the land were left undeveloped and the task of improvement, taken up by science and capital, was all the harder. Notably, the speech focused on rice and not rubber. ‘Traditional’ crops such as rice, and even newly introduced fruits, were what Vietnamese farmers should grow—not rubber.

As administrators and the Council Colonial had been calling since at least 1911 for the creation of a school such as Bến Cát, why was it finally established in 1918? In addition to the imperatives of mise-en-valeur and programmes such as Albert Sarraut's ‘Pháp Việt Đề Huề’ (meaning Franco-Vietnamese collaboration) at the end of the First World War, an important immediate stimulus was the expansion of regional rubber production. The area's agriculture had long consisted of a mixture of fruits for the Saigon market, rice, and forest products, with no dominant crop. Furthermore, the Ong Yêm experimental field site had existed in the area for a number of years and had grown rubber, coffee, tea, pineapples, and other plants. However, after the establishment of the first commercially successful latex-producing operation in 1909–10, and a steady (if modest) rate of growth, by 1917 rubber was clearly the most important regional product. Of course, students of the school were to be taught both rice and hévéa growing techniques but the administrators hoped that many students would go on to work in the latex industry.Footnote 34

While attendance at Bến Cát appears to have remained fairly steady during the early years of its existence, the number of students was far smaller than administrators had hoped for. In both 1918 and 1925, close to 30 students (apparently all male) enrolled at the school. Despite some interest in improving agricultural techniques among elite Vietnamese, there was little enthusiasm for sending (male) children to this new agricultural institution.Footnote 35 As for children from poor families, even with the assistance of government scholarships, they were rarely prepared to attend higher levels of education. It is most likely that the school drew the majority of its students from the limited pool of small local property owners.Footnote 36 Of the 59 graduates during this time, almost none went to work for the rubber plantations, one of the main reasons for establishing the school.Footnote 37

Most French explanations for the lack of Vietnamese interest in agricultural education assumed a cultural aversion to manual labour.Footnote 38 This so-called aversion, however, was less a reason than an assumption made by the French to explain why the Vietnamese did not go along with French schemes. Many elite were reluctant to send their children to these schools as they realized that they would receive a limited education there. Aware of the French educational hierarchy, the elite understood that for their offspring to gain success in the colonial society, they needed to attend educational centres in Montpellier and Paris that trained agricultural engineers and not schools such as Bến Cát that were the equivalent of provincial farm-schools. Not only did the education offered at Bến Cát provide limited career prospects, but a penitentiary for wayward children and orphans that ran a similar farm-school opened nearby in the 1920s. It would not be surprising if the two schools became closely associated, if not synonymous, in the minds of the Vietnamese living in Saigon.Footnote 39

There were other colonial government ventures that specifically focused on helping Vietnamese farmers to grow hévéa, but only a few. For a French-speaking potential planter, there were a plethora of sources. The Bulletin du syndicat des planteurs de caoutchouc de l'Indochine, for example, which ran from 1911 to 1940, was a monthly journal on hévéa growing, tapping techniques, and other industry-related information.Footnote 40 Yet, in general, there was little information on hévéa growing published in Vietnamese. One of the only sources with information on hévéa growing was a bilingual journal called La Cochinchine Agricole: Bulletin mensuel de renseignements et d'informations, à l'usage des colons et planteurs français et annamites. It was funded by the Chambre d'Agriculture de la Cochinchine and ran from 1927 to 1930.

The purpose of the journal was similar to that of government-run agricultural schools such as Bến Cát. First, the journal aimed at promoting the ‘circulation of ideas’, both to introduce new planters to the field of agriculture and keep veterans abreast of the latest techniques. By learning from the ‘science and experience of others’, beginning planters could cut down the amount of time and money they wasted in the learning process and veteran planters could work out problems in their own agricultural activities. The journal stated that agricultural activity was growing quickly and aiding planters would help both individuals and the state grow rich. The journal claimed to be for both French and Vietnamese planters, but the extent to which this is true is difficult to say, even though the journal retained its dual language format throughout its existence.Footnote 41

The start of the journal followed not long after a major boom in latex production beginning around 1926. Thus, one of the first articles was entitled ‘Pour les jeunes planteurs d'hévéas’. This six-part series covered the basics of starting a plantation, including how to choose soil and seeds, how to select proper land for ‘coolie’ housing, and how to combat the effects of malaria on productivity. The advice given by the journal on growing reflected the dominant paradigms of the day. For example, planters were told that if they did not have access to fertilizer, they could use the burn-beating method (slash-and-burn or écobuage) to produce fertile soil. While this technique was not universally accepted, the largest Indochinese plantations, following the example of Ceylon and the Federated Malay States, had been using this method, especially for red earth land.Footnote 42

The articles were aimed at fairly well-off young planters who would own and manage their own plantations. In this article, for instance, planting calculations were made for a landowner with 50 hectares, which was within the range of a well-off Vietnamese plantation, though too large for a poorer farmer without hired help. The information, too, was mostly concerned with management skills rather than technical details. There was little of use, such as diagrams of instruments, tapping techniques, etc. for a farmer growing only a few trees on their plots. And, after this initial series of articles, information on rubber was limited to monthly statistics, price information, and advertisements for skilled labour seeking employment on plantations. When the economic crisis began in 1930, the journal folded.

The 1930s also witnessed much social unrest across Southeast Asia. Goss has convincingly shown that Dutch officials in the Dutch East Indies turned to pure science in an attempt to deal with this unrest and, more importantly, appeared to be doing so decently in international opinion.Footnote 43 Unlike the Dutch, French officials continued to rely on estates to address native improvement (as shown in Figure 2). A scandal among colonial officials showed the weakness of pure science in Indochina. Some time in 1932, an anonymous pamphlet came out attacking Yves Henry, the Head of the Department of Agriculture, Forestry, and Commerce. While the main thrust of the publication, associated with the Presse Indochinoise, was that Henry had been using the Department as his personal research laboratory in order to advance his career, the charges contained in Les Scandales raised broader questions about the proper role of the Department. Henry, who had won international prizes for his work in rural economics, was accused of having fine theories but of not taking any practical measures to advance agricultural production.Footnote 44 Administrators were not the only ones who spoke of improving the lives of peasants. This paper will now compare the ways in which the programmes for improvement issued by Vietnamese intellectuals differed and were similar to those just discussed.

Figure 2.

1937 Almanac, Rubber plantation in Indochina.

Source: 1937 Almanach des Postes et des Télégraphes, from Joconde at <http://www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/joconde/fr/pres.htm>, [accessed 4 October 2011]. (Original held at the Musée national des Arts et Traditions Populaires.)

Plantation rubber production and efforts to make agricultural practices scientific

The introduction of new cultures following the European methods is wished for in order to show the population the French agricultural sciences. Up to now, one cultivates the earth according to the principles left by the ancestors, without searching for how and why. Thus, one cultivates in order not to die of hunger.Footnote 45

As with colonial officials, several generations of elite Vietnamese, such as the instructor quoted above, were motivated to popularize agricultural technologies.Footnote 46 By the beginning of the twentieth century, for Confucian-trained literati, whose knowledge of the ancient texts was beginning to be seen as irrelevant, science offered a powerful means to participate in broader communities. Armed with scientific knowledge, literati could join in anti-colonial struggles such as those carried out by the Modernisation Society, Duy Tân Hội, whose purpose was to support the use of science and technology to combat Western imperialism.Footnote 47 This agenda, which loaded scientific popularization with the weight of saving the nation, did not spend much time on agriculture. In these early efforts to popularize scientific knowledge, emphasis was placed instead on translating terms and concepts from French into quốc ngữ, the written script of the vernacular language, a task that continued into the late 1930s.Footnote 48

After the French crackdown on Vietnamese-run educational institutions such as the Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục, those seeking to strengthen Vietnam by popularizing science were pushed to pursue publishing activities. These journals offered an inroad into the countryside for intellectuals looking to connect with the people. In these venues, the Vietnamese elite often wholeheartedly embraced the goal of using scientific knowledge to improve farming techniques. Yet, one of the most successful efforts to spread science to the countryside through journals came not from the intelligentsia but from a publication that discussed farming and was aimed at small businessmen. Though Hữu Thanh (The Voice of Friendship, 1921–1924), the journal of the Hội Bắc Kỳ Công Thương Đồng nghiệp (Association of the Industrial and Commercial Employees of Tonkin), with about 2,000 members in 1923, dealt most often with business-related topics, there were also discussions of experimentation and education relevant to agriculture.Footnote 49

In the 1920s and 1930s, a less overtly anti-colonial (though still politically active) generation of French-trained engineers, scientists, and physicians began to publish in Vietnamese on agricultural technologies. One journal that discussed agricultural improvements was Khoa học tạp chí (Revue de vulgarisation scientifique, the equivalent of Popular Science), which appeared briefly in Saigon between 1923 and 1926.Footnote 50 A few years later, a journal called Khoa học phổ thông, which ran from 1934 to 1958, offered practical and specific advice dealing with topics such as fruit and coffee plant grafts, agricultural credit cooperatives, and tobacco production.Footnote 51

Although these journals tended to focus more on food crops than on rubber, which indicates that knowledge of the former was seen as more relevant to Vietnamese farmers, they highlight general themes in thinking about agriculture practices. Nguyen Hao Ca, for instance, expressed an appreciation for local techniques, writing that while French agriculture was scientific, Vietnamese agriculture was empirical (empirique) and based on centuries of observation. Citing the Vietnamese use of red ants to protect fruit trees as an example, Ca argued that while French and Vietnamese methods often arrived at the same solution, the former were usually more costly and the latter were often more adapted to local conditions. The solution was a happy marriage between the two, a stance compatible with the politics of association.Footnote 52

To sum up, while many Vietnamese and French shared a common project of improving agricultural practices in Indochina, their overall aims were quite different. The French viewed investments in agricultural science as a way to increase economic productivity and thus government revenue. Crops such as rice and rubber, which provided export earnings and raw materials, received the lion's share of research money. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese viewed investments in science as strengthening the nation. This was true of almost every writer, from anti-colonial to pro-French. It was a competitive world and the only way the nation was going to survive was through the appropriation of science and technology, particularly in the countryside. Yet neither officials nor intellectuals provided much in the way of information about rubber that was useful to Vietnamese farmers.Footnote 53

Failure of rubber plantations as agents of change in everyday technologies

Rubber grows well in this place,

Every tree is fertilised with the body of a worker.Footnote 54

This ca dao, or folk poem, captures one of the accepted stories of the colonial period: the hard lives of rubber estate workers. By the 1930s, critics clearly recognized the failures of the colonial system to deliver on its promises of improvement. For example, an important part of the Indochinese Democratic Party's 1937 platform, as expressed to the Commission of Colonial Inquiry (Guernut), was the improved physical health of the race, stemming from hygiene education and a more fully realized medical assistance. In addition, the authors discussed the importance of scientific research into the improvement of agricultural products, including those for export such as rice, rubber, and maize, the results of which should be publicized.Footnote 55

Just how limited the French response to Vietnamese political assertiveness could be was shown in December 1938, when top government officials met at the Botanical Garden of Hanoi to inaugurate the latest version of the Higher Indochinese College of Agriculture and Forestry (ESASI). The French had recognized the need to offer educational and career opportunities to the elite youth of Vietnamese society, as many of them were becoming disillusioned and susceptible to subversive ideologies such as communism and other anti-colonial rhetoric.Footnote 56 The wet chill of the Red River Delta winter's day could not dampen the high hopes officials had for the project. According to Louis Réteaud, Head of the Department of Agriculture, Breeding, and Forestry, the school ‘marks a new stage on the road of progress of the educated youth of Indochina’.Footnote 57 And, as the speech of Nguyen-Kim-Oanh, given in beautiful French, revealed, young women were slowly gaining places among the advanced students.Footnote 58

Reaction among at least some Vietnamese, however, was guarded. In 1938, Vủ Đình Đại a former student, argued that the French needed to provide opportunities for College graduates. He spoke of the frustration of many Vietnamese students who, having learned French, found themselves without jobs. In the spirit of cooperation promoted by the Popular Front government, Đại pointed to the closing cultural gap between the Vietnamese and French: ‘Our rulers are not unaware that the more a native enters into western culture, the smaller is the gap that separates Annamites and French. Raise the intellectual level of the Annamese people; and there you have it, the best way to help the French and the natives, who live side by side, to understand and love each other.’Footnote 59 While the consequences of a lack of understanding were not spelled out, the failure of the French government to institute meaningful reforms was captured in this cartoon from L'Effort indochinois (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Godart running away.

Source: L'Effort indochinois; photo in author's collection.

Conclusion

This paper has focused on a few of the conscious efforts to introduce new techniques to the countryside and to evaluate why these efforts were not effective. In particular, this paper has shown that for many French officials, technical education was designed to create a limited number of assistants for the scientists and engineers trained in France to help run the colonial economy. Schools were also meant to inculcate a ‘scientific’ way of thinking in Vietnamese agricultural workers, but not to give them the means of production. In addition, education was seen as one way to spread new methods for cultivating certain crops among Vietnamese farmers, and not others. In particular, many interests in French colonial Vietnam worked against the potential spread of rubber-producing knowledge and technologies.

In this paper smallholder rubber production is viewed as having had the potential for becoming ‘everyday’. Yet, during the colonial period, rubber estates, along with other typically ‘big’ technologies, such as railways, most often defined the everyday (which can still be the case, see Figure 4).Footnote 60 In contrast with rice, rubber-producing technology was neither actively taken up by Vietnamese farmers nor was it subject to much exchange between farmers and researchers. Today, in networks connecting rubber production and the successors to Bến Cát, such exchanges seem to take place. Sitting very near the location of this school is the agricultural research station at Lai Khê (Ong Yêm).Footnote 61 Partially destroyed during the fighting of the 1960s, these research buildings now house the surviving records of the station, and it is the site of ongoing agricultural research using advanced biological techniques. Lai Khê also serves as a rural extension centre and occasionally agricultural entrepreneurs arrive to find out from experts how to plant hévéa.

Figure 4.

‘All for the cause of industrialization and modernization. Rich people, Strong country, Just, Democratic, and Civilized society.’

Source: Photo in author's collection.

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.

Figure 0

TABLE 1 Latex production from hévéa in Thủ Dầu Một in 1936.

Figure 1

Figure 1. House of a former Vietnamese rubber planter in Biên Hòa.Source: Photo in author's collection.

Figure 2

Figure 2. 1937 Almanac, Rubber plantation in Indochina.Source: 1937 Almanach des Postes et des Télégraphes, from Joconde at <http://www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/joconde/fr/pres.htm>, [accessed 4 October 2011]. (Original held at the Musée national des Arts et Traditions Populaires.)

Figure 3

Figure 3. Godart running away.Source: L'Effort indochinois; photo in author's collection.

Figure 4

Figure 4. ‘All for the cause of industrialization and modernization. Rich people, Strong country, Just, Democratic, and Civilized society.’Source: Photo in author's collection.