ABSTRACT
The colonial State project in Laos involved three distinct but interrelated processes. These are control of the labor process, the development of infrastructure and fiscal and money control. Thus the opening up of the country by river, road and rail was to further simplify the integration of Laos into an Indochina-wide economy. In Laos, where the preconditions for capitalism were non-existent, the colonial State created them in the mining sphere almost exclusively. The quality of education offered in colonial Laos appears as the other side of the coin of the manpower crisis. The proportion of public expenditure on education in Laos was always weak relative to the other countries of the Indochinese Union. The author-economist Pierre Deloncle likened Laos to Sudan in French West Africa, colonies of low population density isolated from the sea, the Mekong, as with the Niger, limited in its navigation possibilities by rapids.
