How the French empire's use of capitalism continues to blight the lives of Cambodian workers today.
Few industries have changed the landscape of a geographical region as the rubber industry has changed the landscape of Southeast Asia. Huge swathes of Malaysian, Thai and Indonesian land have been converted from tropical jungle to rubber plantations on a large-scale. Not only has this had an impact upon the climate and land cover of the affected areas, it has also significantly affected the ways in which people live their lives and the kind of work that they do.
Less well-known than the Indonesian and Malaysian rubber plantations are those of Cambodia. Yet those plantations have been no less significant in changing the lifestyles of thousands of Cambodians since their inception in the first decades of the twentieth century. The colonization of Cambodia followed as a natural expansion of the French seizing of Vietnam. Cambodia and neighbouring Laos acted not just as useful territorial holdings in their own right but also as a buffer state along the River Mekong. There was still concern in France that Britain would continue to expand its holdings in the region, having already taken India and Burma under control. Would Siam be next? However, the rise in the price of rubber – which has always had a fairly volatile relationship with demand in the outside world – made the concept of establishing plantations in Cambodia, where the terrain was more conducive to such activities, more appealing.
Land concessions were offered to capitalists (i.e. people who had money they wished to invest) to create their own plantations, each one up to 6,000 hectares in extent. The scale of these plantations was hugely beyond anything that had been seen in Cambodia before – all land belonged to the King and, de facto, the small amounts used by Cambodian farmers belonged to them. The plantations used some local labourers but, more commonly, workers were hired from the Vietnamese colonies, where many suffered from poverty and oppression of one sort or another. Conditions in the plantations were not just strange but were also extremely harsh. Hours were long, work was hard, salaries were tiny and punishment frequent. The workers were subjected to a legalistic and capitalist-organized work and lifestyle which was wholly alien to them.
After the French were expelled from Indochina, the succeeding Cambodian governments did not disassemble these plantations, as might have been expected. Instead they continued to operate them and, indeed, they acted as a model for various forms of agribusiness which were used to enrich the governing elite and impoverish the working Cambodians.
