Papers

• Between American technology and Vietnamese labor: The French Coal Company of Tonkin (SFCT) during the first Indochina War Thuy Linh Nguyen Mount Saint Mary College

  World War II and the following First Indochina War had a devastating impact on French coal mining companies in Vietnam. Aerial bombing by the allied powers at the end of the Second World War followed by a wave of pillage and vandalism paralyzed French mining operations. Coal export plunged due to the shutdown of international markets and a sharp rise in freight cost. Wars and political turbulence also led to the mass exodus of Vietnamese workers, thus causing a permanent closure of many French coal mining enterprises.

• Extraction and Exhaustion: Accelerations of life in French colonial tin and nickel mines Oliver Tappe Heidelberg University

  In order to exploit the mineral resources of scarcely populated Laos and Nouvelle-Calédonie, the French authorities resorted to Vietnamese labour along racialized discourses of the “industrious Annamite”. The so-called “coolies” found themselves in hostile lands, forced into new labour regimes and a radically transformed rhythm and pace of life. Besides, indigenous communities living in the mining areas experienced livelihood change and social disruptions as well. In the valley of the Nam Phathaen in central Laos as well as on the remote Pacific islands: Emerging industrial mining and related infrastructures radically altered the sociocultural configurations and life rhythms of both indigenous and migrant communities.

• New Technologies, Old Divisions: Automobile Accidents and Modern Times in Late-Colonial Vietnam Erich DeWald Leeds Beckett University

  ‘Car culture’ came to Vietnam in the early twentieth century, as it did everywhere else in the world, and over the course of the century usage of automobiles sporadically but steadily increased. Long before that, though, the ‘car system’ had taken hold. Like some other modern technologies, the automobile requires infrastructure to accommodate them and ideologies to explain it. These had taken hold in Vietnam in the 1910s, within and between urban centres where elites and transportation were centred. As a technology of mobility, the car and its system further encouraged the movement of goods and people between places at speed. Going faster, collapsing distance, people in cars in Vietnam began to perceive space and time differently, as scholars have observed for users of transport technology elsewhere such as the railway and the bicycle. Many, most people, interacted with automobiles only as users of public vehicles, or to service the vehicles of the elite. Those who advocated most for the expansion of roads, though, for new laws and ‘rules of the road’, for the expansion of the car system, were elites and private owners. These Vietnamese enthusiasts certainly did promote a Vietnamese version of the ‘culture of the road’, that western notion that ‘freedom’, speed and distance can transform the self, society and the nation for the better.

  In late-colonial Vietnam, though, these technophiles literally and ideologically encountered the realities of colonial society on the road, with often deadly effect for other users of the road—and members of society. This paper will examine the politics and policies that established the automobile in Vietnamese society in the early twentieth century. It will then consider how violent encounters on the road—‘accidents’—help clarify the material, cultural and political inequalities of late-colonial Vietnamese society, divided and dividing by class, race and gender. Finally this paper will consider how debates and reforms around the expansion of roads and cars in Vietnam also reveal something wider about the global history of the automobile, its relentless spread and the politics of compromise and inequality that form its foundation.

Abstract

Keywords

• Capitalism
• Colonialism
• History
• Social Change
• Technology