King Norodom's revenue farming system in later nineteenth-century Cambodia and his Chinese revenue farmers (1860-1891)

From the later 1860s to 1891, King Norodom reorganised the Cambodian fiscal system along increasingly central lines, transforming almost all existing taxes and duties into royal revenue farms, including rights previously not vested in the throne. Norodom succeeded by exploiting weaknesses in the early French protectorate regime, and because diasporic Chinese invested their capital and labour in operating his fiscal system. If some Chinese businessmen accrued great wealth from these activities, the Chinese community of Cambodia generally paid a high price by forfeiting their age-old easy relations with ordinary Khmer people for whom they increasingly became the ugly public face of the royal revenue farming system

Colonial political myth and the problem of the other: French and Vietnamese in the protectorate of Annam

This thesis explores French colonial perceptions of Vietnamese- cultural identity derived from the fusion of collective projections of European Self and Asian Other with the French fallacy of Vietnam as "little China". Colonialism mythologised these perceptions to meet the personal needs of French officials (and others) to feel securely in control of their alien Asian environment. Myths of Self and Other appeared early in colonial Cochinchina, and persisted in their initial form until the twentieth century when political disturbances like the 1908 anti-tax movement in the Protectorate of Annam (Central Vietnam) exposed certain shortcomings. In Annam, the subsequent need to neutralise anxieties about the arcane power of "Annamite tradition" prompted members of the Hue-based Amis du Vieux Hue to update existing colonial myths during the later 1910s. Their revision resulted in the definitive versions of two politically significant colonial myths that defined Vietnamese (and French colonial) identity _for the rest of the colonial period. They are called in this thesis the myths of "old, traditional Annam", and of the union of French genius and Annamite soul. So successful were they that their arguments continued to shape French (and western) understanding of Vietnam and the Vietnamese long into the post-colonial era. These myths, and the legitimating "little China" model they rested on, seemed to most observers to be objectively verifiable by recourse to colonial studies of Vietnamese history, society and customs. But, as this thesis argues, that influential body of understanding owed far less to Vietnam than to the needs and assumptions of an imported European discourse, in which unconscious collective projections of French Self and Vietnamese Other played the dominant role. The thesis examines that discourse, and the myths and projections at its heart. It begins by sketching in outline the main political trends in the century before French invasion as a framework for assessing the accuracy of Chinese model interpretations of Vietnam at the time. It then moves to colonial Annam, where it considers the concrete circumstances in which the compensatory development of political myths of Self and Other occurred. It then concludes with historical examples of collective projection and political myth, first analysing the colonial model of a Sinic monarchy, and then French images of their colonial selves, and of the Vietnamese Other

Strange brew: Global, regional and local factors behind the 1690 prohibition of Christian practice in Nguyen Cochinchina

In 1690, the previously sympathetic Nguyen ruler of Cochinchina (located in south-central modern Vietnam) prohibited Christian religious practice in his state. Uniquely in the history of Catholicism in early modern Vietnam, however, the ban did not lead to a persecution of believers. The following article, based extensively on archival materials from the Missions-Étrangères of Paris, historicises this event and the steps leading up to it in 1688-89. It argues that to understand what was happening on the ground in Cochinchina, and why, we need to analyse the way global and regional factors intersected with local, and even personal, ones to cause a prohibition of Christian practice in early 1690, an event for which internal Catholic dissention was almost entirely responsible

Early Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese Catholics and Others in the Pages of the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi

Western secular historiography has conventionally viewed the history of Catholicism in Vietnam through a political optic, a perspective which has distorted the early nineteenth-century religious situation in both Vietnam and France. This article discusses how Vietnamese understood Catholicism at the popular level and what attracted people to the religion, as well as introducing an important European Catholic fund-raising society whose interventions into Vietnam long predated any serious French political designs on the country