Cultivating Cotton in the Red Earth of Kampong Cham: Self-Sufficiency, Alternative Modernities and Wartime Refugees in Cold War Cambodia, 1955–1970

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that Cambodia’s postcolonial cotton ‘push’ was integral to its ultra nationalist vision of modernity and how Cambodia sought to survive within an increasingly acerbic Cold War landscape. In turn, Cambodia’s attention to its cotton and textile industry transformed its foreign policy, student study abroad destinations, state labour apparatuses and humanitarian aid programmes. Norodom Sihanouk’s Sangkum Party used the cotton industry to increase its national legitimacy and visibility, which was intended to help Cambodia gain traction in the Cold War ‘living standards race’. This history sounds innocuous enough except that the Party sustained its cotton push by drawing its labour pool in part from refugees and other marginalised communities. That these refugees were forced to work in Kampong Cham and Battambang cotton fields contradicts the rhetoric of the Buddhist–Socialist politics promulgated by the Sangkum Party. Consequently, the history of Sangkum cotton is at once a history of Cambodia’s early postcolonial period, the American War in Vietnam, and the internationalisation of the Cold War during the ‘Decade of Development’ in the 1960s.