Content area
Full Text
Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954. By Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Hardcover: 490pp.
This is a useful if curiously old-fashioned survey of the establishment, operation and eventual demise of the colonial empire in what came to be called French Indochina, the political entity made up of modern Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. It is presented by its authors as an effort to apply contemporary analysis to events that took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at a time when there are still "nostalgias" that distort understanding of the past. In doing so, they argue, it is important to recognize that the period of colonialism was beset by ambiguities, such as "the appropriation by the colonized of the innovations imposed by colonization" (p. xv). Those who do not follow contemporary French domestic politics will fail to realize that the authors are referring to a debate that has been ongoing in France for more than a decade over, essentially, how to judge France's past colonial record, not just in Indochina but in all its former colonial possessions. Against widely-held contemporary attitudes that are fundamentally critical of the colonial endeavour, there has been an effort by conservative forces in French political life to argue that despite the wrongs there is much to admire in France's colonial past.
It is perhaps a case of stating the obvious, given both the nationality of the authors and the subject of the book, to note that this is a very French study with a...