Valuable documents on Vietnamese migrant workers during the French colonial period

'Migration labor in the history of Vietnam under French colonial rule' (original French title: Les migrations impériales au Vietnam: Travail et colonisations dans l'Asie-Pacifique français, XIXe-XXe siècle) translated by Thanh Thu, recently published by Omega+ and Hong Duc Publishing House, describes a "narrow niche" that is rarely discussed in a meticulous and systematic way in Vietnamese history - migration labor or more broadly, the history of migration.

This is the result of a group of authors Eric Guerassimoff, Andrew Hardy, Nguyen Phuong Ngoc, Emmanuel Poisson, Tran Xuan Tri... with 12 elaborate essays initiated in 2018 at the University of Paris (France).

Book cover Migrant labor in the history of Vietnam during the French colonial period

Photo: OMEGA+

Describing the migrant labor subject, focusing on Vietnamese migrants in the imperial space, especially in the complex political context when Vietnam had two regimes of protectorate in Bac Ky and Trung Ky, and colonial Cochinchina, the authors reconstructed the broad context where laborers, for their livelihood as well as for many other motivations, had to endure many difficult situations at home and abroad. Among them, a large number of laborers from the North migrated to the South due to the persistent poverty and pressure of labor recruitment by the empire.

The book is divided into 3 parts: the first part is about the motivations for migration in Vietnam during this period, the second part is about intermediaries in organizing labor migration, and the third part is direct and indirect documents on this topic. The authors also narrow down the period to have a specific and accurate description, which is the years 1860 - 1950. Author Andrew Hardy, who wrote the introduction for the book, emphasized that the number of tens of thousands of Vietnamese working in the imperial environment during the period 1920 - 1930 partly reflects the economic , political and social context of Vietnam at that time.

Throughout the essays, the authors have painstakingly compiled, filtered, compared, and even provided labor contracts, documents, etc. of the Vietnamese and other groups of migrants in the imperial environment of the early 20th century. As Andrew Hardy commented, sketching that broad picture "aims to clarify the history of imperial migration in political terms", thereby providing a reliable source of documents about this historical-political period.

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/tu-lieu-quy-ve-lao-dong-di-cu-viet-nam-thoi-phap-thuoc-185250310225740948.htm