Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017. x, 263 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-6688-4.
Based on extensive research in French and Vietnamese archives, an exhaustive reading of contemporary French and Vietnamese journalistic and polemical accounts, and informed by modern scholarship on technological innovation and its social and political impacts, Imperial Intoxication is a major contribution to our understanding of French colonialism, Vietnamese responses to it, and of the relationships between politics and culture in the colonial period and beyond.
The monopolistic character of alcohol production and distribution in French Indochina, necessitated by the fact that its scientific and industrial methods efficiently produced massive quantities of a beverage that almost no one wanted to buy, necessitated an enforcement regime, the Département des Douanes et Régies (Department of Customs and Monopolies), that was the largest and costliest branch of the colonial administration. The Département, responsible for enforcing monopolies on the “trois bêtes de somme” (three beasts of burden, i.e., alcohol, opium, and salt), devoted the bulk of its personnel and expenses to the ultimately unsuccessful protection of Indochina’s alcohol regime, becoming the most common and most irksome point of contact between the administration and the colonized. Yet, despite the enormous profits realized by A.F. Fontaine’s Société des distilleries de l’Indochine (SFDIC), the company that produced the loathsome libation, the alcohol regime in Tonkin and Upper Annam contributed, once enforcement expenses are deducted, but 2.5 percent of Indochina’s federal budget, according to one estimate for 1931. To explain the origins, longevity, and repercussions of this counterproductive institution, Sasges places French Indochina’s alcohol monopoly in its local, global, and colonial contexts.
Locally, the Nguyễn Dynasty (1802–1945) had employed ethnic Chinese tax farmers to organize and enforce monopolies on the provision of products such as alcohol and opium, and French colonialists, ensconced in Cochinchina from c. 1862, found it expedient to exploit existing networks to collect desperately needed revenue. The colonial regime’s expansion into central and northern Vietnam during the latter part of the nineteenth century took place in the context of unprecedented international advancements in scientific knowledge, improvements in industrial methods of production, and the rise of the fiscal state. French scientists were in the forefront of advances in bacteriology, and European entrepreneurs quickly exploited their findings, resulting in the patenting of the Amylo Process, in which saccharification, fermentation, and distillation occurred under optimal conditions of heat, pressure, and isolation. Combined with the invention of the continuous column still in 1830, the modern distillery could operate continuously, producing enormous quantities of nearly pure ethanol efficiently, reliably, and safely. The only drawback was that the resulting liquid was so thoroughly purified of its original ingredients—glutinous rice, herbs, spices, and naturally occurring yeasts in the Indochinese case—that it retained little of the flavor and aroma that local consumers craved. These technologies nonetheless exerted an irresistible attraction over colonial entrepreneurs and administrators. In Sasges’ words, “Continuous column stills were the most advanced technology available; producing more alcohol at lower cost, they were by definition better than pot stills. Fontaine had to use them, even if it meant that no one wanted to buy the liquor they produced” (41). As there was no easy technological answer to the problem of taste, the solution would be a political one, “the creation of a monopolistic alcohol regime where the state literally arrested Fontaine’s competitors—conveniently labeled contrabanders—and forced consumers to purchase his liquor whether they wanted to or not” (42). The rise of the modern fiscal state, dedicated to raising funds via direct and indirect taxation, supplemented by bond offerings, on the assumption that investment would facilitate economic growth and social progress, provided global context and practical models—among them, the Russian state’s alcohol monopoly—for French Indochina’s expansion of direct and indirect taxation, including, by the turn of the century, state-controlled monopolies that excluded Chinese intermediaries and Vietnamese competitors. Colonial and French domestic opinion suspected that official corruption was behind the favor that successive colonial ministers and governors general showed to Fontaine’s SFDIC as the anointed agent of the regime’s monopolistic policies. Sasges pursues this question as far as the documentation allows, showing how connections among the SFDIC, the Bank of Indochina, and colonial officials, who, in office or after retirement, sat on the SFDIC’s board of directors, enriched all concerned, arguing persuasively if not irrefutably that bribery was part of SFDIC’s arsenal of influence.
In Indochina, the regions most directly impacted by the alcohol monopoly, Tonkin, northern Annam, and Cochinchina, with the lowlands suffering more than the highlands, saw enforcement tactics that ran counter to Vietnamese conceptions of morality and village autonomy, provoking widespread resistance to the regime’s officials. Sasges references the literature on the moral economy and everyday acts of resistance to explain the reactions of villagers to the perceived injustice of the searches of villages and prosecution of alleged offenders, showing how the alcohol monopoly’s miniscule fiscal contribution to the Government of Indochina came at the price of untold human suffering and widespread rejection of the colonial regime’s legitimacy. The monopoly would also cost the colonial state dearly when it belatedly attempted to influence Indochina’s emergent public sphere. Sasges shows how a wide range of Vietnamese opinion united in its opposition to the alcohol monopoly, and how prominently the SFDIC figured in the colony’s Vietnamese- and French-language press’ editorials, articles, and cartoons. “These interventions,” the author argues, “made use of the monopoly’s glaring abuses and inequities to engage in a powerful critique of colonial rule, calling attention to the gulf that existed between the regime’s Republican ideals and its more sordid realities” (197).
Imperial Intoxication places its subject in a variety of historical contexts and draws upon diverse scholarly literatures to provide multiple frameworks of interpretation; scholars of diverse fields and interests will read it with pleasure and profit.
Mark W. McLeod
University of Delaware, Newark, USA