Frontier friction: colonial infrastructures, Chinese (im-)mobility, and the attack on Sam Neua (NE Laos) in 1914

Abstract

ABSTRACT The 1914 uprising of Sam Neua (Houaphan Province, NE Laos) laid bare complex processes of social and economic mobilization in the mountainous hinterlands of French Indochina. As a first prelude to the upcoming anticolonial struggles in the Lao-Vietnamese borderlands, this heterogeneous movement is only little understood in its sociopolitical and cultural dimensions. Though initiated by armed Chinese bands, the participation of different upland ethnic groups suggests that the uprising was also the result of socioeconomic discontent and disquiet among the local population. At the beginning of the twentieth century, colonial interventions in upland Laos unsettled economic and political configurations, and confronted local powerbrokers with both restrictions and new opportunities. Colonial infrastructure development negatively affected Chinese trade and mobility in northern Indochina – a key factor for the escalation in Sam Neua. By means of combining microhistory and historical anthropology, this paper aims to investigate forms of mobility, mimetic encounters, and shifting conceptions of sociopolitical hierarchies in colonial Indochina that have so far received only scant attention.