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European Decolonization 1918-1981

I will have seminar about the ‘French retreat from Empire in the twentieth Century’ on Monday. Therefore i read a bit about Frech decolonization in Indo- China. Indo-China (Vietnam) is located in Southeast Asia. It was part of French colonial Empire and during that time Vietnam was divided into three different territories :- Tonkin(in North), Annam(in the Centre) and Cochina(in the South).



In 1939 the total population of French Indo-China was 23 million. The two great concentrations pf population lay in the Tonkin-Annam plains and on the east side of Cochin. However, this two region experience different agricultural and social patterns. Tonkin was a land of peasant smallholders with over 90 percent of farmers owning less than 1.8 hectares. Most of the Tonkinese move to less densely populated Cochin, where plantation employment was available. It was this movement that later led to resentment througout Indo-China on the eve of the Second World War due to ineffective Frecnh authorities in managing them.

However, in Cochin , the peasant held large farms than the Tonkinese. But 45 percent of their rice acreage being in the hands of French , Chinese and Amnamite planters. Viewed from a French rubber plantation, the colonial achievement in Indo-China was indeed remarkable, making Indo-China into the third largest world exporter of rice and rubber.

The capital city is Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). The French transformed the landscape to the west and south of Saigon by undertaking monumental earthworks and canal construction,using corvee labour until the 1890s. The peasants have to adopt the policy of landlordism in which in the end led to landlessness. By 1930, 2.5 per cent of landholders owned 45 percent of the cultivated land, while only one peasant household in four possessed any land at all.