French colonizers and coal mining in Vietnam, 1873-1939

Abstract

Critically engaging with the existing literature, this dissertation investigates the attitudes and practices of French public and private officials involved in the making of colonial Vietnam's coal industry between 1873 and 1939. It demonstrates that they were predominantly shaped by the officials’ instrumental rationality operating under structural constraints and imperatives, within a colonial and capitalist system, and confronting Vietnamese and Chinese officials, “bandits”, subcontractors, and workers. Meanwhile, it shows that their attitudes and practices were shaped to a lesser extent by their moral ideas, which played a minor role in all domains, their emotions, which had a significant role only in times of crisis, and their representations, which were driving forces in the conquest phase but less so afterwards. More specifically, this thesis examines the history of colonial Vietnam’s coal industry through a series of case studies in colonial, social, labor, medical, and environmental history. It makes the argument that Tonkin was conquered by France in 1883, notably, because of French representations of its coal resources as plentiful, easy to exploit, legitimate to appropriate, and necessary for the French Navy, but under threat of being seized by China or Great Britain. It assesses the importance of Sinophilia and Sinophobia in the recruitment of Vietnam’s collieries. The dissertation argues that French colonizers relied on a largely shared moral economy of domination, exploitation, and justice to justify before their own eyes their colonial and capitalist practices and interests. It furthermore demonstrates that workers’ informal resistance to exploitation and complete dispossession, rather than organized anticolonial or working-class resistance, was the main form of resistance in colonial Vietnam’s coal industry until the 1930s. This thesis exposes the (self)contradictory character of French colonial biopolitics, which was ambitious and conceived as instrumental to the mise en valeur in theoretical and ministerial texts, but not enforced by local French public officials and colliery managers willing to prioritize the mise en valeur over workers’ lives. Finally, it uncovers the centrality of biopolitical and environmental tensions of empire in the making of Vietnam’s coal industry. The dissertation concludes on the possibility to simultaneously move beyond the orthodox Marxist’ deterministic and reductionist tendencies without giving the primacy to ideas, representations, or emotions as driving forces of (colonial) history; and to move beyond the Manichean conceptual oppositions such as between agency and structure, indicating future avenues for successfully transcending these analytical distinctions.