This paper examines the relationship between rubber plantations and changes in everyday technologies in rural Indochina. It also explores the effects that improvement projects had on the countryside in which those who were targeted by these programmes lived. Speeches given at the opening of the Bến Cát agricultural school in Thủ Dầu Một province in 1918, for example, show that this school was designed both to train Vietnamese assistants to work on large agricultural exploitations and to improve native agricultural practices. Officials used journals, such as the bilingual French-Vietnamese Cochinchine Agricole that appeared between 1927 and 1930, to popularize latex-producing science and techniques. Though their motivations often differed from those of officials, the Vietnamese elite, ranging from those in the anti-colonial Duy Tân Hội (Modernisation Society) to French-trained physicians, scientists, and engineers also often sought to address the problems of rural southern Vietnam through improvements in everyday agricultural technologies. This paper suggests that plantation agriculture, which structured the everyday meanings of rubber in Vietnam, along with the failures of native improvement, began to weaken the support of Vietnamese elite for the colonial regime during the 1930s. Uneasy compromises and contradictions meant that neither economic profit nor social improvement alone existed in the rubber-producing industry.

The question of the specific role played by Japan in the process that led to the independence for the three nations of former French Indochina – Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia – has been seldom studied by historians. The central position of the Pacific War for American and Japanese specialists, the crucial importance of the Indochina War for French researcher, and the language barriers are the main reasons for this lack of interest.
Nevertheless, if Japan did not create the independence movements in Vietnam, nor even the conditions that led the Vietnamese to seek independence, its role was essential. Its occupation of the Western colonies in Southeast Asia not only destroyed the domination system of the Western countries, it also annihilated their prestige and gave confidence to the local populations in their ability to conquer their independence and access to modernity.
If the case of Vietnam is particular, since French colonial apparatus was left untouched until 1945, the victory against French forces in September 1940, the presence of Japanese military on Vietnamese soil and the Japanese cultural propaganda towards Vietnamese population played an important role in eroding French might. If Japanese occupation does not explain everything, it was the real starting point of the process that led Vietnam to independence.
Japan began to put pressure on French Indochina from 1938, when the front of the Sino-Japanese War moved southward. Because Chiang Kai-shek refused to give up, Japan decided to blockade China. After Canton felt the 21 archOctober 1938, the main route that linked China to the outside world was the “French Indochina route”, a railway route that was linking the Indochinese harbor of Haiphong to the Chinese city Yunnan, Kunming. Under Japanese pressure, French government accepted officially to forbid the transit of goods from Indochina to China, but accepted in fact its continuation since it wanted to help China to resist Japanese move in the direction of Indochinese border.
France opposed Japanese pressure until German victories in Europe, from May 1940, disrupted the situation in Southeast Asia. France, isolated because of its separate armistice with Germany, could not defend Indochina anymore since British alliance was necessary against any external threat. Suffering a rebuff from the United Sates, the Governor General, Georges Catroux, had to close the Chinese border and to accept a Japanese control mission in Indochina, under general Nishihara Issaku. Catroux was replaced by the admiral Jean Decoux who, despite strong words, had accept Japanese demands. Despite several treaties and agreements, Japanese forces attacked French army in Indochina the 23 September and defeated them easily. This coup, often seen, till nowadays, as a local initiative, was in fact directed from Tokyo.
Japanese army got the right to station troops in the North of Indochina, to use air fields and to remove troops from Southern China through Indochinese territory. From this time, France will have to yield to every Japanese demand : the integration of Indochinese economy to Japanese empire sphere, the lost of two territories to Thailand, the occupation of the rest of its territory and, finally, a Japanese dominion over Indochina after the Pacific War broke out. Japan had decided, from July 1940, to enforce the new policy of Southward expansion, accepting the risk of going to war with the English speaking powers. The occupation of Indochina was a part of this policy and it played an essential role in the deterioration of the relations with the United States.
Japan needed French Indochina territory to attack British colonies. This is why Vietnam played a crucial role during the first campaign of the Pacific War, especially against British Malaya – which was attacked before Pearl Harbor. After the first phase of the war, Indochina lost its strategic position, but still provided rice and raw material. Despite its anti western propaganda, Japan decided to let France continuing its domination on Indochina. This situation was not an anomaly, but a rational choice based on the fact that the best and cheapest way to administrate Indochina was to leave the task to French authorities.
During most of the Pacific War, Indochina was under a dual domination, French and Japanese. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shigemitsu Mamoru, preached for the elimination of French presence. Despite the suppression of the Vichy regime and its replacement by an enemy of Japan – the Free France –, this is only the 9 March 1945, seven months later, that Japanese army attacked. The threat of an American landing and the will of Japanese army to secure a continental road from Southeast Asia to Korea led to the decision to put an end to French administration.
By making the three nations of Indochina proclaiming their independence and by annihilating French armed forces, Japan created a watershed. Japan, being seen as a defeated country, was not successful in administrating the country, lacking time and support. The Vietminh was able to fill the void left by French administration and to get the support of a large part of the population by acting against Japan. The latter played a last important act, after its surrender the 15 August 1945, by letting the Vietminh taking the power.
What would have happened if Japan had not destroyed French domination? Since independence movements were not in position to overthrow the French colonizers, and Japan had good reasons to consider keeping the status quo, this question is not a petty one. To think of it as an alternate history can be useful in letting us understand that everything was not decided from the start, that France could have left Vietnam differently, that non communist forces could have played a more important role and, last but not least, that the Japanese attack the 9 March 1945 was the decisive defeat that France could never overcome.

The following article explains that the only way to avoid a disaster was to develop the economy and finance of the country. It is made with excerpts from my book “Viet Nam- Political History of the two wars- Independence War (1858–1954) and Ideological War (1945–1975)” prefaced in the English version by Professor Janet Hoskins (USC, LA) and in the French version by Historian Pierre Brocheux.

Western historians have focused on a series of supposed “lost moments” when America could have changed the character of Ho Chi Minh and the post-colonial Vietnamese state. Foremost among these is the “Wilsonian Moment” during the Versailles peace conference in late 1919 and early 1920. Some western historians argue that Ho preferred the American president’s concept of self-determination above all other political philosophies. Only later, after suffering Wilson’s indifference, did French socialists radicalize Ho and he begin his migration to the communist world.

This narrative, however, is contradicted by newly digitized archival and library resources on Ho Chi Minh’s actions in 1919-1920. In fact, Ho never referenced the American president. Instead, he was advocating for Lenin’s concept of political development at this time. This new picture of Ho Chi Minh’s activities not only demonstrates that Woodrow Wilson did not factor into his political vision and challenges notions that the metropole and Europeans were a unidirectional force of radicalization. Indeed, Ho Chi Minh was himself an agent of radicalization, pushing French socialists to join Vladimir Lenin’s Third International as the Versailles conference closed.

With the republication of the novel Congaï, Mistress of Indochine, DatAsia Press continues its mission to make available important but forgotten works of English literature on French colonial Indochina for an Anglophone readership. The new edition comes almost a century after the novel was first published in 1927. Congaï is one of the first literary accounts of French Indochina in the English language and possibly the first by an American author. During the 1920s, Harry Hervey (1900–1951), a homosexual writer-traveler who later worked in Hollywood, visited French Indochina with his young lover. Hervey’s search for a lost Khmer temple did not pan out, but his travels yielded Congaï, a tale of romance between a succession of French colonists and a native woman, as well as a travelogue called King Cobra (published soon after Congaï and republished by DatAsia Press in 2013).

Congaï’s republication for an Anglophone readership is particularly welcome in a period when the revival of colonial literature on French Indochina has been undertaken almost exclusively in the French language, in particular by the French publishers Kailash and L’Harmattan. The inaugural American literary text on the region is crucial in the examination of the genealogy of Indochinese myths and phantasmagoria within the American imaginary. A later generation of writers like Graham Greene, in his novel 'The Quiet American' (1955), picked up and developed these myths, bearing witness to Indochina’s struggle and liberation (one of the articles in the appendices establishes the intertextual links between the two authors, Hervey and Greene). Hervey’s novel shows the ways in which Indochinese exoticism has always been reinvented, even contradicted, cross-culturally among Western writers, be they French or American. Exoticism, despite its apparently misogynistic, Eurocentric, and racist overtones, here takes a form that is dynamic and critical, offering the possibility for resistance, if not radical change of perspective, from within its own discourse.
The narrative focuses on the life of a concubine of several French male colonisers known in the colonial nomenclature as the 'congaï'. Thi-Linh's story parallels Indochina’s development from the relatively peaceful colonial era of the early twentieth century to the First World War, during which France called on its colonial subjects, Indochinese included, to perform their patriotic duty. The novel further encompasses the rise of Vietnamese resistance between the World Wars and foreshadows an increasing American influence in the region.

‘Je suis quelqu’un qui ne sera jamais revenu dans son pays natal’, Duras stated in 1987, so simultaneously defining herself in relation to the place of her birth and as eternally displaced from it. Born as the child of impoverished colons in the colonial outpost of French Indochina in 1914, Duras left the country of her birth and childhood at the age of eighteen, never to return. Although Duras never physically returned to her ‘pulverised’ pays natal, her literary works attest to a repeated figurative return to the Indochina of her childhood, as originary source of creative inspiration and as the professed key to her writerly imaginary. This study analyses Duras’s first and long-overlooked propagandist work, L’Empire français, as intertextual precursor to her later, ‘Indochinese’ literary works, Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950), L’Amant (1984) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991). My study thus examines how tropes, stereotypes and motifs of colonial discourse, originally employed in L’Empire français’s eulogistic and propagandist portrayal of ‘la plus belle des colonies françaises’, are borrowed and adapted in Duras’s later, polyvalent, literary representations of Indochina. Duras’s repeated textual returns to colonial Indochina and its people, over a period of more than fifty years and spanning both colonial and post-colonial eras, propaganda and fiction, offer particularly fertile ground for the exploration of the nature, uses and permutations of colonial discourse, and of representations of the East, as evidenced in the works of one author. The intertextual, comparative approach adopted problematises critical assertions of a reductive opposition between the monolithic, racist discourse of colonialism, on the one hand, and the multi-faceted hybridity of post-colonial texts, on the other.

Among today's diasporic authors of Vietnamese origins, Thanh-Van Tran-Nhut and her younger sister Kim 1 emerged as true pioneers in the historical crime fiction genre when they made their literary debut in 1999 with Le temple de la grue écarlate. The novel featured a character inspired by their own great-grandfather, the mandarin Tân, a young and talented magistrate of Dai-Viet-the official name of Vietnam in the 17 th century. With eight novels currently to her name (the first two of which were signed by both sisters), Tran-Nhut has carved a comfortable niche for herself in the popular crime fiction market in France. She has obtained two awards-the Prix du Lion Noir 2008 for her sixth book, Les travers du docteur Porc (2007), and the Prix Thierry Jonquet for her eighth novel, Les corbeaux de la mi-automne (2011). Several of her books have been translated into Italian, Russian, Spanish, German and Japanese. What started as a game, a play of words and imagination, fictional events and characters, quickly became a lifechanging passion. The young Vietnamese-born French author was so enthusiastic about her writing that she abandoned her engineering career, travelling the world to gather material and publishing at the rate of one title every two years. This was a radical choice that (unlike Kim) she was prepared to make as early as 2004, after her fourth novel, even if she was not yet able to live by her pen: 'Mais je n'ai pas d'hésitation: si j'avais à 1 In this paper, I refer to Thanh-Van Tran-Nhut as Tran-Nhut and to her younger sister Kim Tran-Nhut as Kim.

The Indochina War was the one that France led from 1945 to 1954 in Laos, Cambodia and Việt Nam, the three countries that formed "Indochina" when it still dominated them.  The three countries had fallen into the hands of France as it advanced in the conquest of their territories in 1858 - with the attack of Đà Nẳng (Việt Nam) which it called Tourane-to the creation of the Indochinese Union by the decrees of 17 and 20 October 1887. It was then composed of Việt Nam-divided into three kỳ (regions or countries, kỳ meaning flag), Cochinchina in the south, Annam in the centre and Tonkin in the north - and Cambodia and was administered by a Governor-General of Indochina (GGI). Cochinchina was a colony ruled by a governor while the other three parties were protectorates each managed by a "superior resident". The Laotian protectorate established in 1893 and the 1300 km2 Kouang Tcheou Wan (or Guangzhouwan) 广州湾 territory in South China with a 99-year lease signed in 1898 were later added to this Indochinese Union.

Poniższy artykuł poświęcony jest okresowi obejmującemu mniej więcej pierwszych 12 miesięcy Wietnamu Południowego po zakończeniu I wojny Indochińskiej. W okresie tym, państwo to przeszło drogę od marionetkowego tworu stworzonego przez Francuzów do niezależnego (choć nie samodzielnego) bytu państwowego pod stosunkowo silną władzą premiera Ngo Dinh Diema. Ten pierwszy rok dał podstawy do dalszej ewolucji, której efektem było pozbycie się ze sceny politycznej dotychczasowej nominalnej głowy państwa, Bao Daia, oraz zmiana Państwa Wietnam w Republikę Wietnamu pod rządami prezydenta Ngo Dinh Diema.

After Kwang Chow Wan was leased to France in November 1899 after the resistance of locals and diplomatic negotiation lasting more than one year, its urban construction mostly represented in Fort-Bayard since 1910s, a small but elegant city on the western shores of Kwang Chow Wan and the commercial city Tchékam, over a dozen kilometers from southern Fort-Bayard, the administrative center and military base. However, in earlier times, the French focused on building Matché, the earliest administrative center on the bay’s eastern shore.

Those of us with an interest in the history of Vietnam should count ourselves lucky. In the space of just four years, three senior historians of Southeast Asia have produced comprehensive studies of Vietnam's history. After long decades where available surveys all traced their origins to the Cold War, readers are now spoiled for choice with three highly detailed studies based on decades of research by some of the most renowned scholars in their fields: Ben Kiernan's Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present, Christopher Goscha's Vietnam: A New History, and Keith Taylor's A History of the Vietnamese. Their appearance in such rapid succession reflects many things: the authors' personal and professional trajectories, the continued interest of publics and publishers for books on Vietnamese history, and important changes in the field of Vietnamese Studies since the 1990s. Placing these three works in conversation affords an opportunity to reflect on the state of the field of Vietnamese Studies and our evolving understanding of its colonial period. It also allows us to explore how these three works offer us important new perspectives not just on the period of colonial rule in Vietnam, but also on the complex relationship of colonialism to the nation's precolonial past and postcolonial future.

This is the first English translation of “Sur l’Indochine,” which was published in the February 1946 issue of Les Temps Modernes. While situated in a particular context and treating a specific issue, this essay offers one of the first sustained phenomenological reflections on interculturality and decolonization.

Piastre pour l’Indochine, bons de caisses pour les Antilles et la Réunion, francs du Togo et du Cameroun sous mandat ou encore franc tunisien… La diversité des pièces et de l’iconographie monétaire diffusées par la métropole dans son empire colonial sous la IIIe République interroge les caractéristiques de la souveraineté française dans les différents territoires.

Au cœur de l’État colonial, la monnaie révèle une relation politique, administrative et financière complexe et parfois conflictuelle entre Paris et les administrateurs coloniaux. Les acteurs institutionnels (ministères des Finances et des Colonies, gouverneurs coloniaux, Banque de France, banques coloniales et Monnaie de Paris) discutent les contours d’une souveraineté française en construction dans un empire en expansion.

À travers l’enjeu de la répartition des bénéfices qu’elle procure, la monnaie métallique dévoile la souveraineté métropolitaine, à laquelle se confronte celle des territoires protégés comme la Tunisie, où la souveraineté du Bey est préservée.

En empruntant à l’histoire économique et monétaire ainsi qu’à l’histoire de l’État et à l’histoire des empires coloniaux, mais aussi à la numismatique, cet ouvrage dessine des souverainetés aux frontières incertaines, négociées au sein de l’État

It is a cherished belief among Thai people that their country was never colonized. Yet politicians, scholars, and other media figures chronically inveigh against Western colonialism and the imperialist theft of Thai territory. Thai historians insist that the country adapted to the Western-dominated world order more successfully than other Southeast Asian kingdoms and celebrate their proud history of independence. But many Thai leaders view the West as a threat and portray Thailand as a victim. Clearly Thailand's relationship with the West is ambivalent.

The Lost Territories explores this conundrum by examining two important and contrasting strands of Thai historiography: the well-known Royal-Nationalist ideology, which celebrates Thailand's long history of uninterrupted independence; and what the author terms "National Humiliation discourse," its mirror image. Shane Strate examines the origins and consequences of National Humiliation discourse, showing how the modern Thai state has used the idea of national humiliation to sponsor a form of anti-Western nationalism. Unlike triumphalist Royal-Nationalist narratives, National Humiliation history depicts Thailand as a victim of Western imperialist bullying. Focusing on key themes such as extraterritoriality, trade imbalances, and territorial loss, National Humiliation history maintains that the West impeded Thailand's development even while professing its support and cooperation. Although the state remains the hero in this narrative, it is a tragic heroism defined by suffering and foreign oppression.

Many have heard of the Geneva Accords of 21 July 1954 which put an end, for the Vietnamese, to the war of independence they had waged since 1858 against the French colonizers, and for the French, to the Indochina War, which began in 1945 to recover the Indochina lost to the Japanese on March 9, 1945.
Few, however, know the true content.
The following text, which presents this conference, is an excerpt from my book "Vietnam - The Political History of the Two Wars - War of Independence (1858-1954) and Ideological War or North-South (1945-1975)",  prefaced by the historian Pierre Brocheux and published by Editions Nombre 7 in 2020 in France.

Born of an Annamite mother and French father, Thi-Linh—a creature of fragile beauty and savage instinct—embodies the dreams, ambitions and future of Indochina, where two disparate races struggled to become one.

This expanded modern edition features a provocative foreword by renowned travel writer Pico Iyer; biographer Harlan Greene’s author profile, “Through a Woman’s Eyes: Congai, Heroines & Harry Hervey”; supplemental articles and a bibliography of Hervey’s complete works.

Olov Janse was an archaeologist with a remarkable life. From his birth in Sweden 1892 to his death in the United States 1985, he travelled several times across the world and was present in some of the most important episodes of 20th century world history. His works and networks connected museums and political institutions in Sweden, France, Vietnam and the United States: from the Swedish History Museum, the Museum of Far Easter Antiquities, the French Musée d’antiquites nationales, the Cernuchi museum, and the French research institute EFEO in Hanoi, to UNESCO, the Harvard Peabody Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the U.S. Department of State. He left behind artefacts and documents in museum collections and archives across the world. But his name is largely unknown, and his most important contributions – the connection of people and ideas between continents and contexts – have remained invisible in historical accounts of all these institutions. He was, in every sense, an archaeologist in-between..

In 1875 three women of the palace and a male palace servant were executed on the order of King Norodom of Cambodia. One of the women, a lesser queen who had borne two of the king’s children, was beheaded with a sword for having entered into a sexual liaison with the man; the other two women were shot for acting as go-betweens for the couple. The French saw these executions as evidence of the despotism and backwardness of the Cambodian monarchy. Emancipating the women of the Cambodian royal ‘harem’ became a key objective of the French colonial project and assisted in legitimising their presence in the kingdom. Yet for Norodom, his actions were fitting retribution for an act he perceived as treason. The French did not realize that sexual fidelity on the part of the women of the palace symbolised the political loyalty of their families. This paper explores the institution of ‘women of the palace’ from both angles and how the French perception of the ‘harem’ as a place of immorality is the one that has endured in the minds of Cambodians. In reality, however, the women of the palace were inhabitants of a realm at once mundane and celestial; far from mere sexual playthings, their roles enabled the king to move between the worlds he represented and maintain diplomatic relations with the lands he ruled.

"Fondée à deux reprises par les autorités coloniales, en 1906 puis en 1917, l’Université indochinoise a fait de Hanoi un pôle de l’enseignement supérieur colonial. Sa spécificité au sein de l’empire colonial français repose sur sa fréquentation par les populations locales. Ainsi, elle se démarque d’autres institutions coloniales d’abord fréquentées par des Français, comme ce fut le cas en Algérie. Il est donc paradoxal que l’historiographie française l’ait davantage boudée que ses consoeurs impériales."

On March 24, 1945, as he was preparing to take power in France, General de Gaulle proclaimed his intention to restore the authority of France in Indochina, and the creation of an “Indochinese Federationˮ, replacing the old “Union Indochineseˮof 1887, still composed of five entities (Cochinchina, Tonkin, Annam, Laos and Cambodia). This “Indochinese Federationˮ would form part of the “French Union” (a word found by Paul Mus)  composed of France and its territories, colonies and associated States.
On December 14, 1945, he received in Paris Prince Vĩnh San i.e. the former Emperor Duy Tân (1907-1916) . He had the idea of carrying out his restoration in Indochina in association with France within the frame of the Indochina Federation and the French Union.

Lời giới thiệu cho cuốn Những Điều Chưa Biết Về Thuốc Phiện, BAVH 25 (23), 1938 của Bác Sĩ L. Gaide và Bác Sĩ L. Neuberger

Foreword for a re-print of the essay "Le visage inconnu de l'opium", Bulletin des Amis du Vieux Hue 25(3), 1938, by Dr. L. Gaide and Dr. L. Neuberger

In the late nineteenth century, the French colonial government legalized prostitution in French-controlled areas of Tonkin. Although the colonial state tolerated prostitution, state regulations forced sex workers to register with the state and limited sex workers’ profits, mobility, and freedom. Consequently, a black market for clandestine unregistered prostitution developed, enabling workers to evade state restrictions. This article asserts
that during the inter-war years ) unregistered sex workers used Ả Đào music houses as fronts for clandestine prostitution. The colonial state attempted to curb illegal activities in various ways, but clandestine prostitutes
easily evaded the state. By the late colonial era, Ả Đào music’s association with prostitution had damaged its reputation.

Born in Cambodia in 1887, George GROSLIER redefined the art, architecture, history and literature of his beloved birthplace. In "The Road of the Strong", Groslier gives readers a candid and intimate look at life in early 20th century colonial French Indochina.

This special edition in its first English translation includes an insightful foreword by Professor Henri Copin, publisher's notes, supplemental materials, the original French text, and a 75-page feature article by Tom Kramer: “Colonial Battambang Today—Revisiting George Groslier’s Setting for The Road of the Strong.”

Việt Nam – The christians repression at the time of the Nguyễn dynasty

Nguyễn Ngọc Châu


One of the reasons advanced by the "Tây" (men from the West) to justify their attack on Đà Nẳng in 1858, was the protection of the Christians who suffered in Đại Nam from the repression of their emperor Tự Đức. In his note of January 1857 addressed to Emperor Napoleon III, father Huc, a missionary known for his expeditions to China and Tibet, insisted: "The population, gentle, hardworking, very accessible to the propaganda of the Christian faith, groans under the most abominable tyranny. It would welcome us as liberators and benefactors. It would take little time to make it entirely Catholic and devoted to France. "
Many speak of this repression of Christians but few explain the reasons. These are presented in my book “Viet Nam – L’histoire politique des deux guerres 1858-1954 et 1945-1975” (Viet Nam - The political history of the two wars 1858-1954 and 1945-1975), Nguyễn Ngọc Châu, Éditions Nombre 7, second edition 2020, Paris, prefaced by the historian Pierre Brocheux, through the following text.

From the US perspective, the Vietnam War is often thought of in a bubble that fails to understand the bigger picture.... that this began as a Vietnamese struggle for independence against an imperialistic and corrupt French colonialist regime. The Viet Minh were the precursor to the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army that continued the struggle after the defeat of France. Interestingly, this history includes an alliance with the United States during World War II, in an effort to defeat the Japanese, but inflated Cold War concerns became the priority and the history of the Vietnamese struggle is overlooked. This paper seeks to rectify the misconceptions of the Vietnamese struggle that predated the American Vietnam War in order to better understand why the Vietnam War happened, particularly why the North Vietnamese continued the fight as a quest for freedom, independence, and unity more so than a struggle to expand Communism.

Vietnamese historian Hue-Tam Ho Tai notes that only recently has the role of anarchism in the Vietnamese Revolution attracted scholarly analysis, “despite anarchism’s unmistakable influence on the revolution’s early phase." This sketch hopes to bridge that gap by pointing researchers towards key players in the early Vietnamese anarchist movement. It is drawn from excerpts from my forthcoming book In the Shadow of a Hurricane: Global Anarchist Ideological and Organisational Lineages.

Hội đồng Quản hạt là cơ quan tư vấn cho chính quyền thuộc địa ở Nam kì. Từ ngày thành lập, cơ quan này bao gồm các thành viên người Pháp và người Việt tuy nhiên ưu thế bao giờ cũng nằm trong tay nhóm dân biểu Pháp. Đến những thập niên 1920, 1930, trí thức người Việt ở Nam kì dần có tiếng nói và tổ chức nhiều cuộc vận động cải cách Hội đồng Quản hạt. Năm 1922, số lượng cử tri đoàn và dân biểu người Việt được nâng lên nhưng họ không được giữ chức Nghị trưởng Hội đồng Quản hạt. Để xóa bỏ điều bất bình đẳng này, đến cuối thập niên 1930, Bùi Quang Chiêu và nhóm dân biểu người Việt đã mở cuộc vận động để người Việt có thể giữ được chức Nghị trưởng Hội đồng Quản hạt. Đây là những nỗ lực thay đổi vị thế chính trị của người Việt trong chế độ thuộc địa ở Nam kì.

Edward Lansdale and the Saigon Military Mission: Counterinsurgency and Nation Building in South Vietnam, 1954-1956
Brendan Kelly
Abstract: The work of David Galula has served as a basis for modern US counterinsurgency doctrine. Galula’s writings were first promoted during the 1960s by an American counterinsurgency expert, Edward Geary Lansdale. Though Lansdale was instrumental in promoting the ideas of Galula, he was also critical of them as Lansdale’s ideas about counterinsurgency differed from Galula’s.
This thesis studies Edward Lansdale’s activities in South Vietnam from 1954-56 in order to demonstrate Lansdale’s ideas in action. This thesis draws on diplomatic and clandestine archival sources to examine the interplay between population centric counterinsurgency operations and competent manoeuvring in complex sectarian political environments.
The thesis demonstrates that Edward Lansdale was an early pioneer of counterinsurgency and nation building. It does so by examining the political and military difficulties encountered by South Vietnamese premier Ngo Dinh Diem and analysing how Lansdale not only helped Diem survive his first two years in office, but also copper fastened the American commitment to South Vietnam.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, James McCarthy and the Royal Survey Department mapped much of Siam and its dependencies, producing the first accurate Western maps of the kingdom.  McCarthy’s surveying and mapping also played an important role in Siam’s struggle to maintain independence under the pressure of British and French colonialism.

When Geneva Agreements dividing Vietnam were reached in the early morning hours of 21 July 1954, the Article 14(d) of those accords was considered to be a minor, technical one. It guaranteed free movement of people between opposite sides' zones, so they could move to the half of Vietnam they preferred. The authorities in both the South and the North didn't expect more than several tens of thousands of people. Instead, the South was fl ooded with a vast wave of refugees, numbering in hundreds of thousands. Geneva Conference also established the International Commission for Supervision and Control, composed of India, Canada and Poland, to oversee the implementation of the Geneva Accords in Indochina. One of its most important tasks was to supervise the aforementioned free movement of people. In this article, I would like to show how internal diff erences between the countries making the ICSC aff ected the supervision of Article 14(d), particularly in respect of activities of communist side, which actively tried to prevent people from leaving North Vietnam.