The Legitimate Businessmen's Social Club: Opium, Alcohol, the Cholon Chamber of Commerce, and the Limits of French Rule in Colonial Cochinchina

"The legitimate businessmen’s social club: opium, alcohol, the Cholon Chamber of Commerce, and the limits of French rule in colonial Cochinchina"

This paper explores the links among the vice trades, capital accumulation, and political power in colonial Cochinchina (Southern Vietnam).  French policies that monopolized the production, distribution, and sale of products like opium and alcohol simultaneously provided much-needed revenue for the colonial state at the same time that they facilitated the accumulation of capital by ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs.  The administration of the opium monopoly was quickly won by consortiums of Cantonese Chinese with access to capital from outside Vietnam, links to other monopolies throughout the region, and close ties to colonial administrations.  The alcohol monopoly that was instituted later, however, came to be dominated by the Fujian Chinese entrepreneur Tay Chow Beng.  Alcohol, as a product that was sourced locally and that was much more widely consumed than opium, was the source of financial capital that ultimately proved much harder for the French administration to control.  Tay Chow Beng not only successfully resisted an attempt by the French administration appropriate his monopoly on the sale of alcohol in 1905, but also began to transform his financial capital into political capital with the creation of the Cholon Chamber of Commerce in 1907.  This article traces Tay Chow Beng’s career from the 1880s to his death in 1911.  It explores the close link between the vice trades and capital accumulation, and examines the ways Tay Chow Beng successfully deployed French legal and political forms to frustrate the designs of the colonial administration.  The result is to reveal the complexity and interdependence of the colonial political economy, and the very real limits of French power in colonial Cochinchina.