Pub Date : 2018-06-18DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0006
Michitake Aso
Rubber trees helped structure the violent transition from empire to nation-state during nearly thirty years of conflict on the Indochinese peninsula. Chapter 5 focuses on the struggle over plantations that took place in Vietnam and Cambodia between 1945 and 1954. During the First Indochina War, plantation environments served as a key military battleground. In the fighting that took place immediately after the end of World War II, many plantation workers, encouraged by the anticolonial Việt Minh, attacked the rubber trees as symbols of hated colonial-era abuse. Slogans placing the culpability of worker suffering on trees show how plantation workers often treated the trees themselves as enemies. Despite their colonial origins, plantation environments were important material and symbolic landscapes for those seeking to build postcolonial Vietnamese nations. French planters claimed to struggle heroically against nature, Vietnamese workers saw themselves as struggling against both nature and human exploitation, and anticolonial activists articulated struggles against imperial power structures. Industrial agriculture such as rubber was vital to nation-building projects, and by the early 1950s, Vietnamese planners began to envision a time when plantations would form a part of a national economy.
{"title":"Maintaining Modernity","authors":"Michitake Aso","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Rubber trees helped structure the violent transition from empire to nation-state during nearly thirty years of conflict on the Indochinese peninsula. Chapter 5 focuses on the struggle over plantations that took place in Vietnam and Cambodia between 1945 and 1954. During the First Indochina War, plantation environments served as a key military battleground. In the fighting that took place immediately after the end of World War II, many plantation workers, encouraged by the anticolonial Việt Minh, attacked the rubber trees as symbols of hated colonial-era abuse. Slogans placing the culpability of worker suffering on trees show how plantation workers often treated the trees themselves as enemies. Despite their colonial origins, plantation environments were important material and symbolic landscapes for those seeking to build postcolonial Vietnamese nations. French planters claimed to struggle heroically against nature, Vietnamese workers saw themselves as struggling against both nature and human exploitation, and anticolonial activists articulated struggles against imperial power structures. Industrial agriculture such as rubber was vital to nation-building projects, and by the early 1950s, Vietnamese planners began to envision a time when plantations would form a part of a national economy.","PeriodicalId":337366,"journal":{"name":"Rubber and the Making of Vietnam","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128799869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-18DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0003
Michitake Aso
Plantation regimes encouraged knowledge production about plant and disease ecologies and the relationship among organisms and their environments more generally. More detailed knowledge about newly introduced plant species, plant and human diseases, and their shared environments was a key ingredient of better, more profitable management of rubber plantations. Chapter 2 explores the process by which agronomy came to support the burgeoning rubber industry after rubber arrived in Indochina in 1897. The French colonial government was not the first to encourage agricultural improvement on the Indochinese peninsula, but the qualitative and quantitative investment that it made in these projects set it apart from previous states. Encouraged by the success of their British and Dutch neighbors, French planters envisioned turning biologically and culturally diverse landscapes into neat rows of hevea. Plantation agriculture also played an important role in defining the political and intellectual scope of the science of ecology in Indochina, encouraging agronomists to direct their energies toward transnational businesses and the colonial project. The process of integrating the efforts of scientists, officials, and planters was not always smooth, however, and this chapter highlights the conflicts and tensions generated by a political economy of plantation agriculture.
{"title":"Cultivating Science","authors":"Michitake Aso","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Plantation regimes encouraged knowledge production about plant and disease ecologies and the relationship among organisms and their environments more generally. More detailed knowledge about newly introduced plant species, plant and human diseases, and their shared environments was a key ingredient of better, more profitable management of rubber plantations. Chapter 2 explores the process by which agronomy came to support the burgeoning rubber industry after rubber arrived in Indochina in 1897. The French colonial government was not the first to encourage agricultural improvement on the Indochinese peninsula, but the qualitative and quantitative investment that it made in these projects set it apart from previous states. Encouraged by the success of their British and Dutch neighbors, French planters envisioned turning biologically and culturally diverse landscapes into neat rows of hevea. Plantation agriculture also played an important role in defining the political and intellectual scope of the science of ecology in Indochina, encouraging agronomists to direct their energies toward transnational businesses and the colonial project. The process of integrating the efforts of scientists, officials, and planters was not always smooth, however, and this chapter highlights the conflicts and tensions generated by a political economy of plantation agriculture.","PeriodicalId":337366,"journal":{"name":"Rubber and the Making of Vietnam","volume":"269 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116382597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-18DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0007
Michitake Aso
Planners from the United States and the Republic of Vietnam initially looked to rubber as an important source of income and a way to create Vietnamese smallholders, or individuals who owned modestly sized rubber plots. Chapter 6 considers the attempts to create this class and discusses the fate of rubber plantations in Ngô Đình Diệm’s First Republic of Vietnam, which lasted from 1954 to 1963. It demonstrates the persistence of development ideologies that valued plantations over smallholder production and formal science over informal knowledge and shows the power of modernity during the process of decolonization. This chapter also examines the continuing absence of Vietnamese in the rubber industry. Between 1955 and 1965, rubber benefited from relatively peaceful conditions and Vietnamese smallholders began to take part in more significant numbers in the industry. The costs of production, the arrival of the U.S. military, and the lack of practical support, however, meant that only well-off Vietnamese could benefit from the expanding industry. This selective movement of technology shows the limits of postcolonial development and suggests that the exclusion of most Vietnamese from the industry was a product of both colonial and postcolonial modernity.
{"title":"Decolonizing Plantations","authors":"Michitake Aso","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Planners from the United States and the Republic of Vietnam initially looked to rubber as an important source of income and a way to create Vietnamese smallholders, or individuals who owned modestly sized rubber plots. Chapter 6 considers the attempts to create this class and discusses the fate of rubber plantations in Ngô Đình Diệm’s First Republic of Vietnam, which lasted from 1954 to 1963. It demonstrates the persistence of development ideologies that valued plantations over smallholder production and formal science over informal knowledge and shows the power of modernity during the process of decolonization. This chapter also examines the continuing absence of Vietnamese in the rubber industry. Between 1955 and 1965, rubber benefited from relatively peaceful conditions and Vietnamese smallholders began to take part in more significant numbers in the industry. The costs of production, the arrival of the U.S. military, and the lack of practical support, however, meant that only well-off Vietnamese could benefit from the expanding industry. This selective movement of technology shows the limits of postcolonial development and suggests that the exclusion of most Vietnamese from the industry was a product of both colonial and postcolonial modernity.","PeriodicalId":337366,"journal":{"name":"Rubber and the Making of Vietnam","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128463301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-18DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0008
Michitake Aso
The extreme violence brought to bear on the Vietnamese society and environment by the American war machine during the 1960s meant that measures taken by South Vietnamese leaders ended up sustaining plantation production. Ironically, the communist insurgency also benefited from rubber plantations, which continued to serve as a valuable source of material and recruits. Meanwhile, North Vietnamese rubber experts worked to extend the range of hevea into more northern latitudes so that latex could flow in the socialist world. Chapter 7 extends the history of rubber to 1975 to show the ways that memories of colonialism continued to structure thoughts and behavior regarding rubber, and suggests why human-environment interactions on the plantations of post-1975 socialist Vietnam often resembled those of their colonial predecessors. This chapter focuses on the degree to which colonial discourse as materialized on plantations was subverted by various actors and revisits the historiography of the Vietnam War by adopting the lens of environmental history to show the unexpected consequences of plantation agriculture. Finally, it considers how the post–World War II development of “synthetic” rubber affected the actions of those associated with “natural” rubber plantations.
{"title":"Militarizing Rubber","authors":"Michitake Aso","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"The extreme violence brought to bear on the Vietnamese society and environment by the American war machine during the 1960s meant that measures taken by South Vietnamese leaders ended up sustaining plantation production. Ironically, the communist insurgency also benefited from rubber plantations, which continued to serve as a valuable source of material and recruits. Meanwhile, North Vietnamese rubber experts worked to extend the range of hevea into more northern latitudes so that latex could flow in the socialist world. Chapter 7 extends the history of rubber to 1975 to show the ways that memories of colonialism continued to structure thoughts and behavior regarding rubber, and suggests why human-environment interactions on the plantations of post-1975 socialist Vietnam often resembled those of their colonial predecessors. This chapter focuses on the degree to which colonial discourse as materialized on plantations was subverted by various actors and revisits the historiography of the Vietnam War by adopting the lens of environmental history to show the unexpected consequences of plantation agriculture. Finally, it considers how the post–World War II development of “synthetic” rubber affected the actions of those associated with “natural” rubber plantations.","PeriodicalId":337366,"journal":{"name":"Rubber and the Making of Vietnam","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124535002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-18DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0004
Michitake Aso
After World War I, colonial administrative policy, environmental necessity, and economic logic converged to promote Vietnamese migration to meet plantation demands for labor. Peasants from the Tonkin delta travelled by ship and by road to southern plantations, where they sometimes displaced previous inhabitants. These workers helped carry out the deforestation that created the limpid, sunny streams in which mosquito species associated with malaria in the region bred. Malaria, beriberi, and horrible living conditions resulted in the illness and deaths of thousands of plantation workers. These outbreaks, along with the more famous cases of abuse, provided much fodder for opponents of colonialism, French and Vietnamese alike. Even as medical doctors recognized the poor health of plantation workers, they found it more plausible to blame workers’ moral failings and culture rather than the colonial system. By placing the human suffering of laborers in the context of changing disease environments, chapter 3 further investigates the relationships among science, business, and government. Industry played a key role in creating medical institutions and knowledge in Indochina during the colonial period and, partly because of this role, economic concerns trumped humanitarian impulses.
{"title":"Managing Disease","authors":"Michitake Aso","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"After World War I, colonial administrative policy, environmental necessity, and economic logic converged to promote Vietnamese migration to meet plantation demands for labor. Peasants from the Tonkin delta travelled by ship and by road to southern plantations, where they sometimes displaced previous inhabitants. These workers helped carry out the deforestation that created the limpid, sunny streams in which mosquito species associated with malaria in the region bred. Malaria, beriberi, and horrible living conditions resulted in the illness and deaths of thousands of plantation workers. These outbreaks, along with the more famous cases of abuse, provided much fodder for opponents of colonialism, French and Vietnamese alike. Even as medical doctors recognized the poor health of plantation workers, they found it more plausible to blame workers’ moral failings and culture rather than the colonial system. By placing the human suffering of laborers in the context of changing disease environments, chapter 3 further investigates the relationships among science, business, and government. Industry played a key role in creating medical institutions and knowledge in Indochina during the colonial period and, partly because of this role, economic concerns trumped humanitarian impulses.","PeriodicalId":337366,"journal":{"name":"Rubber and the Making of Vietnam","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116192994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-18DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0005
Michitake Aso
Rubber plantations necessitated extensive medical studies of human biology and diseases. Researchers at the Pasteur Institute carried out numerous studies of mosquitoes and plasmodia, and to a lesser extent other pathogens, among plantation workers. Race served as an important analytic category for these researchers even as anthropologists were beginning to question the coherence of racial categories. Chapter 4 investigates the racialized society that the architects of industrial agriculture imagined they were creating. It also discusses the interactions in Indochina between the burgeoning tropical sciences and government and transnational capital, focusing on human disease environments to examine how “rubber science” was applied to the surrounding countryside. If plantations were microcosms of the global colonial society, they were also laboratories where solutions to colonial problems were worked out. Tropical agronomy, geography, and medicine, linked by an ecological view of climates and soils, helped naturalize racial distinctions for the colonizers. Yet the colonial subjects who were the targets of these projects did not act in ways that race makers expected. While these subjects could not control the discourse of race, they could appropriate it for their own ends, and they attempted to do so before the outbreak of World War II.
{"title":"Turning Tropical","authors":"Michitake Aso","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Rubber plantations necessitated extensive medical studies of human biology and diseases. Researchers at the Pasteur Institute carried out numerous studies of mosquitoes and plasmodia, and to a lesser extent other pathogens, among plantation workers. Race served as an important analytic category for these researchers even as anthropologists were beginning to question the coherence of racial categories. Chapter 4 investigates the racialized society that the architects of industrial agriculture imagined they were creating. It also discusses the interactions in Indochina between the burgeoning tropical sciences and government and transnational capital, focusing on human disease environments to examine how “rubber science” was applied to the surrounding countryside. If plantations were microcosms of the global colonial society, they were also laboratories where solutions to colonial problems were worked out. Tropical agronomy, geography, and medicine, linked by an ecological view of climates and soils, helped naturalize racial distinctions for the colonizers. Yet the colonial subjects who were the targets of these projects did not act in ways that race makers expected. While these subjects could not control the discourse of race, they could appropriate it for their own ends, and they attempted to do so before the outbreak of World War II.","PeriodicalId":337366,"journal":{"name":"Rubber and the Making of Vietnam","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125224736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-18DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0009
Michitake Aso
Industrial plantations have had some of the most significant impacts on the surface of the earth, and while natural rubber is no longer hegemonic, palm oil, soybeans, maize, and coffee production, each with its own nexus of human and nonhuman agents, continue to have major impacts on the environment and human health. The conclusion briefly analyzes post-1975 memories of colonial and national plantations as participants use the memory of rubber production to negotiate their relationship to each other and to the politics of Vietnamese history in the present. Planters’ associations in France recall heroic times, the Communist Party celebrates the heroic contributions of rubber workers to the socialist revolution, and some workers use memories of colonial efficiency to critique present socialist mismanagement. Many Laotian and Cambodian farmers, and their allies, decry Vietnamese “colonialism” that is associated with the expansion of Vietnamese rubber company interests into the territory of neighboring nations, thus calling into question the continuing role of tropical commodities in shaping Southeast Asian lives.
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"Michitake Aso","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Industrial plantations have had some of the most significant impacts on the surface of the earth, and while natural rubber is no longer hegemonic, palm oil, soybeans, maize, and coffee production, each with its own nexus of human and nonhuman agents, continue to have major impacts on the environment and human health. The conclusion briefly analyzes post-1975 memories of colonial and national plantations as participants use the memory of rubber production to negotiate their relationship to each other and to the politics of Vietnamese history in the present. Planters’ associations in France recall heroic times, the Communist Party celebrates the heroic contributions of rubber workers to the socialist revolution, and some workers use memories of colonial efficiency to critique present socialist mismanagement. Many Laotian and Cambodian farmers, and their allies, decry Vietnamese “colonialism” that is associated with the expansion of Vietnamese rubber company interests into the territory of neighboring nations, thus calling into question the continuing role of tropical commodities in shaping Southeast Asian lives.","PeriodicalId":337366,"journal":{"name":"Rubber and the Making of Vietnam","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117150656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-18DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0002
Michitake Aso
Rubber trees motivated the utilization, and construction, of imperial and national networks of knowledge production that linked French Indochina to France and to other colonial territories around the world. This effect placed rubber at the heart of efforts to discipline the tropics. Chapter 1 examines the introduction of hevea brasiliensis to Indochinese environments during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a process that involved laws marking the physical and intellectual boundaries between forests and plantation agriculture. It begins with a discussion of the southeast region of Vietnam and the study of nature in Indochina during the nineteenth century. New understandings of human and nonhuman natures enabled the production of commodities such as rubber, and rubber production for global consumption in turn helped reformulate the coproduction of human and nonhuman natures in local places. The chapter lays down a baseline for evaluating later transformations in environment and health as plantation agriculture replaced biological diverse habitats with much simpler ecologies.
{"title":"Civilizing Latex","authors":"Michitake Aso","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469637150.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Rubber trees motivated the utilization, and construction, of imperial and national networks of knowledge production that linked French Indochina to France and to other colonial territories around the world. This effect placed rubber at the heart of efforts to discipline the tropics. Chapter 1 examines the introduction of hevea brasiliensis to Indochinese environments during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a process that involved laws marking the physical and intellectual boundaries between forests and plantation agriculture. It begins with a discussion of the southeast region of Vietnam and the study of nature in Indochina during the nineteenth century. New understandings of human and nonhuman natures enabled the production of commodities such as rubber, and rubber production for global consumption in turn helped reformulate the coproduction of human and nonhuman natures in local places. The chapter lays down a baseline for evaluating later transformations in environment and health as plantation agriculture replaced biological diverse habitats with much simpler ecologies.","PeriodicalId":337366,"journal":{"name":"Rubber and the Making of Vietnam","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114071420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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