How Local Economic Intermediaries Shaped Elite Conflict and the Turn to Anticolonialism in French Indochina and French West Africa

Austin Vo, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

By design, elites benefit from power arrangements, so how and why does the dominant political strategy among elites become reformist in some contexts and radical in others? This study uses a paired comparison to show why Vietnamese elite political strategy became increasingly radical after World War I to foreclose opportunities for collaboration with colonial authority, whereas Senegalese elite political strategy entailed cooperation with colonial commerce as more serious challenges to French authority were constrained. Analyzing materials from four colonial archives across Vietnam, Senegal, and France, I find that longstanding local economic intermediaries originating from a precolonial era held central positions in trade networks to influence intra-elite alliances and cleavages. These intermediaries emerged as powerful trans-local actors during capitalist expansion in the nineteenth century and retained autonomy from both indigenous and colonial states. Despite the similar structural positions these intermediaries held in relational networks, I find they shaped elite configurations divergently in each case. By focusing on local dynamics through a third “other” actor endogenous to colonial political processes and situated outside of the colonizer-colonized dyad, this study provides a model of local intra-elite triadic dynamics rooted in transformations of the global economy.

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 Presented in Session 217. Red Flags and Colonial Frontiers: Ideology, Insurgency, and the Politics of Revolution