ABSTRACT
The expansion of rubber production in colonial Indochina after 1910 can be understood through the changing patterns in the capitalist world economy. However, the plantation system which evolved in colonial Indochina, including the methods of labour procurement, the closed compounds, the rigorous work regime and harsh disciplining of labourers, the forms of payment as compensation for expenditure of labour, and the strategies designed to speed-up and stretch-out labour-time, was embedded within an historically-specific context, and hence can only be explained by reference to the localised socio-economic conditions in which metropolitan capital and indigenous labour confronted each other.
