Authors
Anh Sy Huy Le
Publication date
2017/10/1
Source
Journal of Vietnamese Studies
Volume
12
Issue
4
Pages
104-108
Publisher
University of California Press
Description
Anglo-American scholarship on forced migration and illicit trade networks in colonial Southeast Asia has proliferated in the last few decades. This historiography, however, remains largely silent on the topic of human trade and its connections to colonial governance, especially in French Indochina. Micheline Lessard’s Human Trafficking in Colonial Vietnam is the first fulllength monograph to provide a comprehensive historical account of the cross-border trafficking of Vietnamese women and children to China during the French colonial period. In this well-argued work, Lessard uses a wide array of primary sources—colonial newspapers, Catholic missionary accounts, administrative reports and correspondence, memos, telegrams, and speeches—to successfully reconstruct the turbulent and complex histories of human displacement, Sino-Vietnamese borderland economies, French