As one of the world’s most important commodities, rubber has helped to shape the world in which we live today. It has also, as Aso shows, played a key role in making modern Vietnam. Ambitious in scope and extensively researched, Aso’s book is based on French, English, and Vietnamese-language archival and published sources, as well as oral histories conducted with former rubber plantation managers and workers.
The book is organized in two parts, one tracing the birth and early development of the rubber industry in the colonial period, and the other examining the struggles that occurred after 1945 as competing states fought to gain control over the revenue, people, and spaces of South Vietnam’s plantations. The first part of the book is organized thematically, exploring how the colonial-era rubber industry shaped, and was shaped by, plant biology, tropical medicine, and tropical ecology. The second part of the book adopts a...