Paint the trains red: Labor, nationalism, and the railroads in French colonial Indochina, 1898--1945

The social and political space and pedagogical environment intentionally created by the French around the Hanoi-to-Saigon (or Transindochinois) railroad between 1898--1945 encouraged the appearance of militant railroad workers whose loyalty was vigorously sought by a variety of competing nationalist movements. This thesis counters a dominant interpretive framework that privileges social elites and elite discourse---and ignores working-class participation---in the formation of anti-colonial nationalism in colonial Indochina. The powerful influence of a new public sphere, a modern national identity, and new popular labor movements created a political milieu in which Vietnamese non-elites could participate in anti-colonial movements. Both French colonial officials and Vietnamese nationalists positively valorized the construction of railroads in Indochina, the former seeing them as a vehicle for strengthening positive collaboration between the colonizers and local peoples, and the latter seeing railroads as a technology to help the Vietnamese free themselves from the French. The construction of railroads in Indochina encouraged several trends, including the integration of markets, urbanization, and the formation of new Vietnamese elites, but the transformations they encouraged occurred rapidly and may have actually sparked rural unrest and peasant militancy. The discussion of railroads in colonial Indochina in reports, newspapers, and novels served as a barometer of French and Vietnamese attitudes towards colonialism, with the French gradually withdrawing from the railroads and the colonial project and the Vietnamese increasingly making railroads a Vietnamese space. Vietnamese railroad workers, who the French intended to serve as representatives of a new kind of cooperative attitude they hoped the railroads would encourage, gradually formed a common identity and worked closely with the French until the French ceased to treat the railroad workers as special participants in the colonial project. After the Nghe-Tinh Soviets period of 1930--1931, in which the French brutally oppressed a communist-led peasant insurrection, the railroad workers, who had maintained close ties with the peasantry, gradually became vociferous opponents of the French and colonialism. Railroad workers participated in politically-oriented strikes beginning in 1936--1937. By the start of World War II, the railroads of French colonial Indochina had become a battleground rather than a meeting place of the French and the Vietnamese, and from the railroads emerged smoke of the Vietnamese communist movement's greatest leaders (including Le Duan, Tran Van Tra, and Chu Huy Man).