Inside the Colonial State

Abstract

In April 1921 the French colonial minister, Albert Sarraut, submitted a comprehensive plan for the development of the country’s overseas possessions, a ‘programme generale de mise en valeur des colonies francaises’. It aimed at more than just providing an adequate infrastructure in the colonial economy. Sarraut envisioned improvements in political and social, even intellectual and moral respects that were intimately tied to material advancement, a process that could only take place within the decentralized environment of colonial states or, as he paternalistically put it, ‘etats en devenir’ (Sarraut 1923: 23, 83, 107). Sarraut’s ambitious plan was not immediately executed but he had coined an expression, mise en valeur. The deeper connotation of this expression is not properly rendered by a literal translation of the two nouns involved (‘investment’ and ‘value’). Mise en valeur became synonymous with the highly interventionist colonial policy in French Indochina, a policy aiming at colonial state formation in its most supreme form. This chapter considers FDI in Southeast Asia before the Second World War in its appropriate wider context, that of the colonial state.