ABSTRACT
In 1950, as the anticolonial war against the French reached its peak, the province chief of Baria, Le Thanh Tuong, published a brief history of the province. Colonial rule in Baria would generate new forms of material production and class formation which fused the traditional and the modern. The fishing industry indicated a well-developed precolonial economy. Political development was another, in which patriotism as a sentiment of cultural and ethnic identity had been fused with Leninism as a modern form of struggle. Descended from pioneers and 'vagabonds', the villagers of Baria nevertheless exhibited the same attachment to place characteristic of Vietnamese peasant culture. The colonial conquest broke in upon this village society with some violence in Baria. With the conquest, the French immediately set about establishing the sinews of a colonial economy. The fishing and salt industries marked Baria as having a more diversified economy than the Mekong delta provinces, which were largely devoted to agriculture.
