The French colonies within the world-ecology (1830-1962): the case of fossil fuels, forests and tropical plantations in Algeria and Vietnam

Abstract

Colonial empires played a significant role in the history of the capitalocene through their appropriation and exploitation of nature, cheap labor and cheap energies in the extra-European world. In this way, colonial empires contributed to the creation of a world-ecology characterized by unequal economic and ecological exchanges at the global scale. This article, drawing on Jason Moore’s conceptual framework, archival sources and the historical literature, takes as case studies the contribution to modern world-ecology of the two main colonies of the French colonial empire, Algeria and Vietnam, with their respective fossil, forest and agricultural resources. In the first part, the comparative analysis of fossil fuel productions in colonial Algeria and Vietnam aims to test the world-ecology hypothesis of a colonial production of energy characterized as systematically cheap and exported to western capitalist centers. In the second part, the joint history of Vietnam’s rubber plantations and of Algeria’s settler agriculture seeks to determine to what extent colonizers succeeded in producing cheap tropical goods for western countries. Finally, in the third part, the combined study of the colonial exploitation of Vietnam and Algeria’s forest resources intends to assess to what extent French colonial environmentalism interfered with the production of cheap wood exported to the world-ecology.

The first section of the article establishes that in the case of Algeria, the colonial production of fossil energy was not always cheap. In the case of coal, exploited in Kenadsa between 1917 and 1962, it was neither cheap nor exported to western capitalist centers due to its remote location, its high extraction and transportation costs, and its rebellious and scarce workforce, making it uncompetitive with cheaper British coals. In the case of oil and gas resources, although their exploitation from 1956 was profitable for private companies, and exported mainly to France until the 1970’s, their price was higher than the Middle East’s hydrocarbons. Moreover, their State-assisted development was undertaken due to strategic considerations (‘energy security’ and the possibility of paying oil in francs rather than in dollars) and despite the costs it implied – and not because it was cheap. This demonstrates that although peripheries of the capitalist world-ecology tend to produce cheap energy for the western centers, this is not always the case and can even by the opposite. The second section of the article shows that although Vietnamese coal was cheap and profitable to exploit for some – but not all – colonial companies, it was mainly exported to Asian countries. This indicates that cheap energy produced in colonies and based on unequal ecological exchange did not always benefit exclusively western capitalist centers. The third section of the article shows that French colonizers failed to create capitalist natures producing cheap tropical goods for western countries, only succeeding to cultivate similar agricultural goods (like wine) to those produced by western centers. This manifests that colonial agricultural productions can sometimes, despite the cheapness of the colonial workforce in both cases, be neither cheap nor environmentally complementary to those of western centers. However, colonial agriculture in Algeria did manage to bolster French settler colonialism economically, although it was costly for the metropolis through underproduction crises. The fourth section, by contrast, exhibits the successes of colonial scientists to acclimate hevea brasilianis to Vietnam and that of companies, with the assistance of the colonial administration, to produce cheap tropical raw materials for western industries. However, rubber plantations in Vietnam favored the spread of malaria amongst workers, a socio-ecological contradiction that was not too costly for plantations at first but that eventually led Vietnamese workers, frustrated by the absence of substantial reforms to better their life conditions, to revolt against plantations during the Indochina War (1946-1954). Hence, the success of French colonizers in Vietnam to create capitalist natures producing cheap tropical goods was far from absolute, with falling profits during the Indochina War due to the destruction of one tenth of rubber plantations. The fifth section of the article reveals that despite the environmentalist rhetoric that France had conquered Algeria to restore the alleged granary of Rome, the cheap appropriation and exploitation of Algerian forests by private colonial companies at the expense of local populations -especially that of cork trees- was not impeded by colonial environmentalism, but rather justified by it. This proves that, even in such a case, colonizers were more concerned with economic considerations than with ideological ones. Similarly, the environmentalist stance of the colonial forestry administration in Vietnam never obstructed the cheap exploitation of local forest resources by private colonial companies, but only justified the colonial appropriation of Vietnam’s forests at the expense of local populations.

The comparative analysis of fossil fuel productions in colonial Algeria and Vietnam allows us to relativize and question the idea that colonial energy productions were systematically cheap and exported to western capitalist centers. Indeed, the importance of geo-strategic considerations can and did push colonial powers, in this case France, to fund at great cost unprofitable and/or uncompetitive energy productions in their colonies. The joint study of colonial Algeria’s settler agriculture and Vietnam’s rubber plantations provides evidence for the unequal capacity of colonizers to create capitalist natures producing cheap tropical goods. This indicates that colonizers were always to a certain extent dependent on local environmental conditions to create capitalist natures, although they did manage to significantly transform these conditions in both cases. This also shows that the development of colonial agricultural productions did not always have the same priorities as settler colonies; the colonial administration mainly aimed at the economic prosperity of settlers, even when their production competed with those of metropolitan farmers, while in non-settler colonies it rather encouraged the production of cheap tropical goods that were not producible in the colonial metropolis. Finally, the comparative history of the exploitation of forest resources in colonial Vietnam and Algeria by private companies shows that colonial environmentalism was not an obstacle to colonial deforestation, but rather justified the dispossession and blaming of local colonized populations. Hence, although the environmental preoccupations of some colonizers, linked with racial anxieties in Algeria and scientific forestry management principles in Vietnam, were sincere and sometimes clashed with the economic interests of private companies, they almost never prevailed over the latter. The world-ecology conceptual framework thus proves to be analytically useful for the study of French colonies and their productions, although it must be given greater nuance and complexity through the multiplication of case studies.