UC Berkeley

This dissertation reconstructs the formation of a colonized elite and the anti-Chinese commercial nationalist movement they launched in turn of the century Cochinchina. The movement began in 1901 with the newspaper Talking Business Over Tea [Nông cổ mín đàm] and culminated in Gilbert Trần Chánh Chiếu's Enlightened Renewal Movement [Minh Tân] of 1907–1909. The movement united an elite bloc of Confucian gentry based chiefly in the Orchard Heartlands [Miệt Vườn] region of the Mekong Delta with Saigon bureaucrats in a program of commercial and industrial investment aimed at displacing immigrant Asian merchants from the colonial economy. The movement’s program was accommodationist toward French rule, not anti-colonial. It became the dominant form of southern Vietnamese nationalism and the direct ancestor of the interwar Constitutionalist Party. However, the movement proved unable to overcome the factional divisions inhering in its constituencies, and it unraveled when rival elites used the colonial police to settle scores.This dissertation revises orthodox scholarship on colonial Cochinchina in two ways. First, I dispute orthodox scholarship’s claims that the French conquest of Cochinchina was unique among the Indochinese territories by requiring the wholesale fashioning of a new elite. Although an important Catholic collaborator elite did develop from the conquest, I find that an old rural elite had largely accommodated to colonial society by the close of the nineteenth century. In so doing, I reveal the hitherto unrecognized class factions that dominated colonial Cochinchina. Second, I dispute orthodox scholarship’s claims that the Enlightened Renewal Movement was a surreptitious revolutionary movement that developed fake businesses as front organizations for student travel to Japan. Instead, I argue the business movement was central, and student travel was ancillary. I consequently argue that local political economic transformations were more important than exilic revolutionaries for the period’s upsurge of Vietnamese nationalism. In developing this argument, I undertake a sustained criticism of the orthodox historiography, showing it to be what I have termed Police Historiography