French Indochina and the Germans (c. 1860-1914)

Abstract

The paper will illuminate the long-term presence of German merchants and shipmasters’ families in the history of French Indochina from c. 1860 (when France seized Cochinchina with Saigon from Vietnam) to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 (when Germans were expelled from French colonies). It will delve into the German residents’ transnational connections inside the colony with French colonial administrators and private actors such as Chinese merchants, and examine their entanglements with other European diaspora communities on the South China Sea. Three main topics will be proposed: first, the background to the appointment of the first Prussian merchant-consul in Saigon (1866) symbolising an increasing presence of German traders in the colony, and the rather unknown episode of the Franco-German War (1870-71) when Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, offered Bismarck the annexation of Cochinchina instead of Alsace-Lorraine; second, transnational interactions and entanglements of Speidel & Company (established in 1864), the most prominent German firm in Indochina, with headquarters in Paris, dominating, until 1914, large parts of export and import trades of the French colony, and operating its own rice mills; third, the situation of German shipping and shipmasters’ families in Haiphong, the major port of northern Vietnam, where the manager of Speidel & Co. was appointed Ger-man consul (1913), something that not only reflected the strong performance of German business in Indochina but also generally highlighted increasing major disparities between France’s and Germany’s speeds of industrialisation. Finally, the paper will discuss the questions whether there was an informal German empire in French Indochina based on cooperation and competition between multinational actors, and whether, in the period of estranged Franco-German relations, France’s position in Indochina and her oft-quoted sphere-of-interest in South China was affected by great politics, and likewise by German actors on the spot.