Economy of the Nguyễn dynasty until 1884
The economy of the nineteenth-century period of the Nguyễn dynasty was primarily agricultural. Ninety-five percent of the national economy depended on agriculture.[1] Fragile Mining and handicraft were the only industry sectors in the country before the 1870s. International trade and business were heavily restricted by the Confucian-minded bureaucratic state. Contact with the outside world and modernisation efforts were kept constraining.
Agriculture
Rice was the most important grain. Rich peasant
Dikes and canals were rebuilt and checked every year to protect the crops from Vietnam's extremely harsh climates, with constant floods and typhoons that could destroy them. Beside the main crops rice, sweet potatoes, vegetables and beans,[4] Vietnamese agricultural products were considerable abundant: salt, sugar, tea, silks, cotton, tobaccos, poultry, meat, fishes, bird nests, and various spices.[5][6] Annually, rice productions were shipped to Hue from northern and southern deltas.[7] When the French seized the river gate of the north in late 1873, the amount of rice transported to the capital had been dropped, prompted Tu Duc to negotiate and accept French's terms.[8] Coffee tree during early 19th century was almost exclusively planted within the royal garden and other small gardens in Saigon, and just a few hundred pounds of coffee beans were produced each year.[9] By the late of the century, Đồn điền (military settlement) in the highlands were transformed into coffee and rubber plantations by French investors. In Southern Vietnam, total cultivating lands amounted to 1.546 million acres and rice occupied 1.305 million acres. European migrants were given 300 acres of land for free and 752 by sale.[10]
Natural disasters such as typhoons, drought, floods and famines were frequent.[6] Severe famines struck north-central Vietnam in 1823–24, the Red River Delta in 1827, central Vietnam in 1835 and 1840, northern Vietnam in 1841. Dams and river dikes were neglected by the court by 1870s.[11] Cholera epidemics affected national-wide famines occurred in 1806, 1820, late 1840s and 1860–70s.[12] Locusts plagued provinces of Son Tay and Bac Ninh in 1854.[11] 200,000 people died during the plague of 1820, and around 800,000–1,000,000 perished in the cholera outbreak of 1847–1849.[13]
Industry
The Red River Delta and its adjacent mountains were rich in minerals.[14] From 1802 to 1858, over 124 mines of gold, silver, copper, zinc, iron, lead, sulfur, and coal in northern Vietnam were operated.[15][16][17]
The handicraft industry on the other hand was mostly dominated by families, but there were also free workers such as carpenters and bricklayers, which organized into a small company or factory, manufactured porcelains, glasses, metal items domestically. The head of each worker's organization was a skillful worker (thợ cả) who represented them, deciding wages and work. In towns and cities, Vietnamese labours and artisans associated themselves with companies (ty) and wards (phường), which functioned as a labour union. Every year, the workers met once or twice to elect a leader and perform rites to the company's founders.[18]
19th-century Vietnamese labour forces were never thrived to the phase of industrialization, due to the harsh constraining of the court, low productivity, the strong-affected aspects of traditional village agricultural economy, and the difficulty in competing with ethnic Chinese owned-companies who dominated Vietnamese commerce.[19] In a report, within the month of June 1826, Saigon blacksmiths produced 80 tons of pig iron, 10 tons of cast iron, and 16 tons of crucible steel.[20]
French investors reconstructed the infrastructures in Saigon and Cholon. Tramline connecting two cities and the first railway connecting Saigon-My Tho was opened in 1881.[21]
Commerce
Ships were the backbone of the Vietnamese economy, goods had to be transported by sea and river rather than land routes due to the country's terrain disadvantage. A Vietnamese cargo ship that arrived in Macau in 1837 was reported: "weighing 400 tons, being 90 feet long and 20 feet wide."[22] In 1845 and 1846, five royal cargo ships with a total tonnage of 2,400 tons arrived Singapore, according to a British report.[23][24] The Singapore Chronicle recorded that on each Vietnamese ship, there were 80 sailors and 10 officers, under two captains who control the ship and the cargo.[22]
Like in other countries in Southeast Asia, the Vietnamese commerce economy was dominated by
The main exports of the Kingdom of Vietnam came from agricultural products such as rice, salt, sugar, silks.
References
Footnotes
- ^ Chapuis (2000), p. 88.
- ^ Popkin (1979), p. 98.
- ^ Woodside (1988), p. 139.
- ^ Popkin (1979), p. 90.
- ^ a b Richardson (1880), p. 159.
- ^ a b Staunton (1884), p. 35.
- ^ Kiernan (2019), p. 280.
- ^ Staunton (1884), p. 40.
- ^ White (1824), p. 252.
- ^ Norman (1886), p. 130.
- ^ a b Kiernan (2019), p. 290.
- ^ Peters (2018), p. 49.
- ^ Goscha (2016), p. 60.
- ^ Keane (1896), p. 245.
- ^ Woodside (1988), p. 138.
- ^ Bradley (2016), p. 30.
- ^ Bradley (2016), p. 78.
- ^ Woodside (1988), p. 31.
- ^ Woodside (1988), p. 32–33.
- ^ Kiernan (2019), p. 281.
- ^ Norman (1886), p. 129.
- ^ a b Li (2004c), p. 121.
- ^ Li (1994), p. 212.
- ^ Li (2002), p. 145.
- ^ Woodside (1988), p. 272.
- ^ Choi (2004b), p. 87.
- ^ Choi (2004b), p. 93.
- ^ Li (1994), p. 209.
- ^ Woodside (1988), p. 264.
- ^ Li (2002), p. 143.
- ^ Li (2002), p. 147.
- ^ Li (2002), p. 146.
- ^ Goscha (2016), p. 80.
- ^ Johnston (1881), p. 328.
- ^ Toda (1882), p. 41.
- ^ Li (1994), p. 213.
Sources
- Bradley, Camp Davis (2016). Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0-295-74205-2.
- Chapuis, Oscar (2000). The Last Emperors of Vietnam: from Tu Duc to Bao Dai. Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-31170-6.
- Choi, Byung Wook (2004a), Southern Vietnam Under the Reign of Minh Mạng (1820-1841): Central Policies and Local Response, SEAP Publications, ISBN 978-1-501-71952-3
- ——— (2004b), "The Nguyen dynasty's policy toward Chinese on the Water Frontier in the first half of the Nineteenth Century", in Nola, Cooke (ed.), The Water Frontier, Singapore University Press, pp. 85–99
- ISBN 978-0-46509-436-3.
- Keane, A. H. (1896). Stanford's Compendium of Geography and Travel: Asia - Vol II: Southern and Western Asia. E. Stanford.
- ISBN 978-0-19005-379-6.
- Johnston, A. K. (1880). A School Physical and Descriptive Geography. Oxford University.
- ——— (1881). A Physical, Historical, Political, & Descriptive Geography. E. Stanford.
- Li, Tana (1994), "Rice Trade in the 18th and 19th Century Mekong Delta and Its Implication", in Aphornsuvan, Thanet (ed.), An International Seminar on Thailand and her neighbours: Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, Thammasat University Press, pp. 198–213
- ——— (2002), Việt Nam học kỷ yếu Hội thảo quốc tế lần thứ nhất, Thế giới Publishing, pp. 141–150
- ——— (2004a), "The Water Frontier: In Introduction", in Nola, Cooke (ed.), The Water Frontier, Singapore University Press, pp. 1–20, ISBN 978-0-74253-082-9
- ——— (2004b), "The late 18th and early 19th-century Mekong Delta in the Regional Trade System", in Nola, Cooke (ed.), The Water Frontier, Singapore University Press, pp. 71–84
- ——— (2004c), "Ships and ship building in the Mekong delta, 1750–1840", in Nola, Cooke (ed.), The Water Frontier, Singapore University Press, pp. 119–135
- ——— (2018) [1998]. Nguyen Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Cornell University Press.
- Norman, Charles Boswell (1886). Colonial France. W. H. Allen.
- ISBN 978-0-520-03954-4
- Peters, Erica J. (2012). Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam: Food and Drink in the Long Nineteenth Century. AltaMira Press. ISBN 978-0-759-12075-4.
- Peters, Erica J. (2018), Power struggles and Social Positioning: Culinary Appropriation and Anxiety in Colonial Vietnam, Springer, ISBN 978-9-81130-743-0
- Richardson, John (1880). A smaller manual of modern geography. Physical and political. John Murray.
- Staunton, Sidney A. (1884). The War in Tong-king:Why the French are in Tong-king, and what They are Doing There. Cupples, Upham.
- Thompson, C. Michele (2015), Vietnamese Traditional Medicine: A Social History, University of Hawaii Press, ISBN 978-9-9-71698-355
- Toda, Ed (1882). Annam and its minor currency. Noronha & Sons.
- White, John (1824). A Voyage to Cochinchina. Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green.
- Woodside, Alexander (1988) [1971]. Vietnam and the Chinese model: a comparative study of Vietnamese and Chinese government in the first half of the nineteenth century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-93721-X.