Dineshram S/O M Sukumar
A0224009R
Professor Claudine Ang Tsu Lyn
YHU2290 History and Culture of SEA
Short Essay
[The Mekong Delta: Ecology, Economy and Revolution, 1860-1960]
A0224009R
YHU2290 Short Essay
In Chapter 1 of The Mekong Delta: Ecology, Economy and Revolution, 1860 – 1960,
Pierre Borcheux traces the development of French settlement in the delta. Of note, he
dedicates a section of the chapter towards exploring the experiences of the French in coopting Vietnamese labor for French projects and land cultivation. Given this focus in
Borcheux’s work, it is worthwhile to question the dynamics of relationships between the
Vietnamese locals and the French settlers. Did the Vietnamese simply accept whatever
structures the French attempted to impose in the Mekong? Harry Benda posits that the
indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia were not merely ‘passive recipients’ (Benda, 1962) of
colonial structures. Instead, he suggests that these foreign colonial elements were subjected
to domestication, and hence exercised a measure of agency. Was this the case in the
Mekong delta? How successful were the French in imposing their social structures in
Vietnam? Exploring the relationships Borcheux brings up in this chapter sheds light into the
extent of agency the Vietnamese retained in their interactions with the French.
The first need for the French was to ascertain the population numbers of the
different Vietnamese villages. Therefore, villages were tasked to maintain a register of
names under ‘fiscal and military’ reasons (Borcheux, 24). However, the administration of
this register was left to the village elders (‘notables’). The notables however, refrained from
executing comprehensive registration exercises, producing unrepresentative population
information. This depicts the notables’ insouciance towards the French methods of social
management amongst the Vietnamese. Furthermore, Borcheux posits that the notables
lightened tax burdens through this practice, showing that this insouciance was overlaid with
a defiance for French approaches to extract from the Vietnamese. In this way, the
1
A0224009R
YHU2290 Short Essay
Vietnamese notables exercised agency to implement French structures of social
management in ways that benefited the Vietnamese, instead of passively receiving such
structures.
Beyond the notables, the Vietnamese workers too demonstrated similar attitudes
towards the French. The French attempt to create stable labor markets in the various
provinces to provide easy access to labor for French projects – roads, bridges and canals -,
shows this. While Borcheux acknowledges that climatic factors were a cause of instability
for the labor markets, it is notable that employer abuse and worker mobility were listed as
reasons as well. These points suggest that it was easy for Vietnamese workers to leave their
French employers and move elsewhere, whenever their working conditions were not up to
their expectations. This reflects the Vietnamese workers’ retention of agency against French
attempts to impose colonial labor structure upon them.
In addition to this, Borcheux notes that the workers, after leaving, could easily
change their identities by purchasing surplus French registration cards from the notables.
This action both subverted the French means of population ordering and gave such
Vietnamese workers French-recognized concealment of their escape. This highlights the
ingenuity of the Vietnamese to leverage the French population ordering structures to retain
their agency in labor arrangements.
However, the escaped workers still had to find employment to continue their
livelihoods. Borcheux writes that these escaped laborers typically went to work for the
French landowners as ‘bonded laborers’ (Borcheux, 26). Initially, this suggests a Vietnamese
2
A0224009R
YHU2290 Short Essay
eventual dependence on French employment during French colonial rule - while the
Vietnamese workers may have escaped the grip of the French colonial administration, they
appear to surrender their agency when encountering the French landowners. However,
despite the implied bond-servitude of these Vietnamese workers, they ultimately remained
bonded to their agency instead. Similar to the colonial administration, the Vietnamese
workers retained their ability to escape. However, in the case of the landowners, the
Vietnamese were able to escape with the ‘money advanced to them’, without repayment
(Borcheux, 26). This shows the agency of the Vietnamese workers to leave their French
employment at whim – regardless if they were employed by the colonial administration or
the landowners. Moreover, their ability to take their wages with them when leaving without
recourse suggests that the French were unable to even control the behavior of their
Vietnamese workers despite subordinating them by controlling wage payment. This
reiterates the limited control the French wielded over the Vietnamese, showing that
Vietnamese agency could still be exercised within the French structure of wage labor.
However, the French colonial administration, towards the early 1900s, started
putting in more robust and stringent structures to secure Vietnamese labor for colonial
projects. Notably, the French understood that freedom of Vietnamese worker movement
was the central problem for them. This freedom of movement allowed them to easily leave
and migrate to another town should they harbor grievances towards their employer. To
manage the internal migration, the French administration introduced the pink agricultural
engage card. The card needed to be stamped before the worker could move around freely,
preventing escapes from employers. This also made it easier to identify escaped Vietnamese
workers. These new measures hence greatly diminished the agency available to a
3
A0224009R
YHU2290 Short Essay
Vietnamese worker compared to before. In addition, the French landowners often did not
buy sufficient pink engage cards for all their Vietnamese workers, effectively holding those
without one as ‘virtual prisoners’ (Borcheux, 28). Thus, it could be argued that in the later
years, the French administration’s more effective movement management policies, and
more shrewd management practices of the French landowners addressed the specific
loopholes exploited by the Vietnamese to retain their agency.
While it is true that in the later years, the Vietnamese laborers lost their agency, one
must consider the approach deployed by the French to achieve this. To achieve this, the
French had to adapt their policies to counter the ingenuity of the Vietnamese people and
structural fluidity they were accustomed to in their society. The act of policy adaptation
acknowledges that the French did not achieve an imposition of French structures into
Vietnamese society. Instead, it had to adapt policies to match the existing social structures
(or lack thereof) in Vietnam, to pursue French objectives.
So, were the Vietnamese ‘passive recipients’ of the French social structures? This
section of Borcheux’s chapter would suggest not. Borcheux’s section articulates how the
Vietnamese initially pushed back French attempts to install features of French social
structure in Vietnam – exercising agency through insouciance, defiance and subversion. In
this way, the Vietnamese retained their local social framework. However, we also see that in
large part, the initial French approaches were not domesticated to Vietnamese society or
experiences, as Benda claimed. Only towards the end, we see a domestication of French
approaches to more effectively manage the Vietnamese people. In so doing, the French
started to achieve a labor order more akin to that of France. These developments in the
4
A0224009R
YHU2290 Short Essay
Mekong support Benda’s position that the indigenous people ‘force’ (Benda, 109) the
colonial elements to domesticize. The Vietnamese preservation of agency during the initial
French attempts at applying French social structures enabled a rejection of these structures.
This therefore forced the French to adapt their approach to managing the Vietnamese. Only
when they did so, did the French see success in applying their social structures on the
Vietnamese. In this light, we see that Benda’s proposed indigenous domestication of
colonial structures holds true. Moreover, Borcheux’s work shows that the driving force
enabling this is the retention of indigenous agency against colonial applications of
structures, which produces the force needed to precipitate this domestication.
5
A0224009R
YHU2290 Short Essay
References
1. Benda, Harry J. "The Structure of Southeast Asian History: Some Preliminary
Observations." Journal of Southeast Asian History 3, no. 1 (1962): 106-38.
2. Brocheux, P. (1995). The Mekong Delta: Ecology, economy, and revolution, 18601960. Madison, WI, USA: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
6
A0224009R
YHU2290 Short Essay
7
A0224009R
YHU2290 Short Essay
8