From the turn of the twentieth century until shortly before the Second World War, private business collaborated with the colonial government in Indochina in the formative development of colonial agricultural science. This article focuses on that development with a particular eye to how research was conducted and influenced by the changing politics of French colonization, what was chosen as worthy of research, and how agricultural science projects were defined, structured, and funded.
In Colonisation ambiguë, a sweeping overview of the history of French colonialism in Indochina, Daniel Hémery suggests in passing that the transformation of Vietnam's environment with the aid of science involved “a transfer, limited but real, of the technical systems and scientific knowledge of industrial societies, essential to the functioning of the colonial economy (Brocheux and Hémery 2001:130).” 2 At first glance, a history of the rubber industry in Vietnam seems to conform well to Hémery's description. Starting from a few hundred metric tons of forest-gathered rubber at the beginning of the twentieth century, production eventually surpassed 60,000 metric tons, with almost all of the rubber coming from large plantations. By the late 1930s, rubber had become a fixture in the agricultural sector of the economy, second only to rice in terms of export earnings. This growth caused one sympathetic observer to conclude that the rubber industry, after “a difficult childhood and a turbulent youth, will enter into, at last, a period of maturity and equilibrium” (Bouvier 1947: 275, 295). 3
