Cultivating Subjects: Opium and rule in post-colonial Vietnam

Abstract

AbstractSwidden cultivators in the Southeast Asian highlands may work far from lowland centres, but certain crops attract powerful interests. During the First Indochina War (1946–54), French and Vietnamese political actors climbed the hills in pursuit of the Black River region's opium production and trade. Even after combat formally ended, opium contests continued into an independent Vietnam, intersecting with larger struggles over ethnic difference, state resource claims, and market organization. Using upland cultivators to examine post-colonial statemaking, this article tells a new story about opium's tangled relationship with socialist rule in Vietnam. Drawing on French and Vietnamese archival records, it traces the operation of successive opium regimes through war and into restive peace. Based on evidence of opium tax and purchase operations conducted by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) from 1951 to 1960, it argues that regulating the commodity sensitized cultivators to their long, fraught relations with state power. Far from passive, cultivating subjects animated revolutionary ideals, engaged smuggling networks, negotiated resource rights, and mounted an oppositional social movement. Peaking in 1957, the movement and subsequent crackdown illustrate tensions embedded in post-colonial relations of exchange and rule.