Ecological Crisis and Migration: Environmental Hardships, Harvest Failures, and Out-Migration Pressures in Central Annam (1900-1940)
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Abstract
Based on multi-sited archival research conducted in France and Vietnam, this paper explores how environmental degradation, colonial extraction, and pressure to out-migrate were structurally connected in Central Annam between 1900 and 1940. While historical scholarship on migration has often examined environmental shocks separately from political economy, this study understands natural disasters, drought, and crop failure as part and parcel of French capital accumulation, enabled at a macro-financial level by the Banque de l’Indochine (BIC). By analyzing how cash-taxation and colonial governments’ failure to invest in irrigation infrastructure turned ordinary weather events into chronic environmental catastrophe, this paper argues that consecutive crop failures decimated the Central Annamese peasantry’s social reproduction capacities, turning migration into a mandatory survival strategy rather than an exercise of free will. This research thereby adds to the growing historical literature on environmental migration in mainland Southeast Asia.
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