Rubber and the Making of Vietnam

Reviewed by: Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History by Michitake Aso Micheline Lessard Aso, Michitake – Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 426 p. Few scholars would contest the economic, social, and political significance of rubber plantations in colonial and postcolonial Việt Nam. The rubber “boom” of the early twentieth century and the concomitant land appropriation necessary for the development of what can be termed “industrial plantations” in Cochinchina and Cambodia transformed the landscapes of Vietnamese geography, demography, [End Page 694] and ecology. In Rubber and the Making of Vietnam, Michitake Aso provides an analysis that is both broad in scope and meticulously detailed. The book is divided into three thematic sections while also following a clear chronological arc. Building on a published body of work examining the interplay between science, governance, and commerce, Aso proposes “an ecological perspective to explain how rubber refashioned human societies, economies, and politics” (p. 3). The first chapter explains how the establishment of rubber plantations in French Indochina entailed the scientific study, and later the management, of milieus such as forests and plains. This process was more often than not driven by economic prerogatives with little concern for existent local “ecologies.” The second chapter examines the linkages between the various constituencies, such as planters, economic interest groups, and the colonial apparatus, that together, deliberately or not, set in place the infrastructure essential to mass rubber production in Indochina. In Chapters 3 and 4, Aso delves into the quest to “manage” disease, such as malaria. These two are the most informative chapters of Rubber and the Making of Vietnam as they juxtapose the advances in medical treatments for tropical diseases—such as the use of quinine to treat malaria—with the insalubrious conditions in which plantation labourers lived and worked. As the rubber industry developed and as the number of migrant workers increased, there developed further conditions that provoked disease and contagion despite colonial administrative regulations on health and safety on plantations, which were seldom fully applied. In fact, that which Aso describes concurs with a colonial phenomenon whereby, in the words of Andrew Wells, “the colonial state was either deployed directly or devolved its authority to private employers.” (“Imperial Hegemony and Colonial Labour,” Rethinking Marxism, vol. 19, no. 2 [2007], p. 191) The next three chapters focus on the post-1945 period and demonstrate in detail how plantations, within the contexts of independence, fragmentation, and war, became contested terrain between various protagonists: French forces attempting to retake the territory after 1945; Việt Minh troops; the Army of the Republic of Việt Nam; and the American military. The political and economic complexities of post-1945 Việt Nam were manifest on the plantations as they offered economic potential to French planters, to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and to Việt Minh forces. They allowed the quick movement of troops and villagers. But they could not provide the coverage of the jungles. When referring to the First Indochina war, Aso states that the war “shaped the environment on and around the plantations” and that “the Plantation environment in turn shaped the war,” (p. 169) thereby summing up the push and pull of forces set in motion at the outset of the development of the rubber industry in Việt Nam. The chapters that deal with the pre-1945 period are more accessible than the later chapters. But that is likely because the post-1945 period is much more complex given the greater number of protagonists and political, military, and economic interests. Reading Rubber and the Making of Vietnam is at once daunting and rewarding. While such breadth of scope and such depth of detail have the potential to be overwhelming, Aso’s book reveals two great qualities that prevent it from being so. The first is his outstanding, meticulous research. Aso has mined the fonds of [End Page 695] national archives in France, Việt Nam, Cambodia, and the United States as well as organizational, private, and institutional archives. The range of published primary sources and the secondary sources are also more than impressive. The level of research

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