Scaling the Commanding Heights: The colonial conglomerates and the changing political economy of French Indochina

Abstract

AbstractBy the late 1800s the colonial state's increasing capacity to regulate, finance, and tax had begun to open up new opportunities for locally based French enterprises in Indochina. Chinese syndicates that had previously dominated the economy found themselves deprived of existing revenue streams and denied access to new ones. The result was an ‘Indochinese moment’ when a handful of colonial conglomerates used profits from state contracts, monopolies, and subsidies as a base for growth and diversification after 1900. Yet scaling the commanding heights of the economy was not easy, and was only achieved thanks to sustained and powerful state intervention. Moreover, one of the effects of the economic crisis after 1928 was the end of this Indochinese moment and a shift in initiative to a new partnership that linked an increasingly technocratic state with the financiers and experts of the Bank of Indochina. This article investigates this complex interaction of state power, technology, and capital flows with local Chinese, French, and indigenous Indochinese actors, using one particular conglomerate, the Fontaine group, as a case study to shed light on the mechanisms that linked an interventionist state to capitalist enterprise and ultimately to the remaking of the Indochinese economy.