Vietnam's Coal Frontier: Mining, Environment, and Empire

In one of the first energy histories of Southeast Asia, Thuy Linh Nguyen explores the environmental, economic, and social history of large-scale coal mining in French colonial Vietnam. Focusing on the Quảng Yên coal basin in northern Vietnam, known for the world's largest anthracite coal mines, this deeply researched study demonstrates how mining came to dominate the landscape, restructuring the region's environment and upending local communities. Nguyen pays particular attention to the role of various non-state local actors, often underrepresented in grand narratives of modern Vietnam, including Vietnamese and Chinese migrant mine workers, timber traders, loggers, and local ethnic minorities. Breaking away from the metropole-colony paradigm, Nguyen offers a new lens through which to explore the dynamics of colonial rule and the importance of inter-Asian networks, arguing that the colonial energy regime must be understood as a complex, multilayered interaction between empire, capital, labor, water, sea, land, and timber forests.