David J. McCaskey

From: David Biggs via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2025 9:57 PM
To: vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Vsg] Congrats to Dr. David J McCaskey!!!

I am pleased to announce Dr. David J. McCaskey's successful defense of his dissertation with the History Department and in conjunction with the Southeast Asian Studies Program at UC Riverside. Thanks especially to his committee and faculty mentors at Riverside including Hendrik Maier, Dana Simmons, Philipp Lehmann and Christina Schwenkel. 

Dissertation Title and Abstract: 

Territorial Waters: Knowing and Colonizing Aquatic Environments in French Indochina

by

David Jeffrey McCaskey

Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in History

University of California, Riverside, June 2025

Prof. David Biggs, Chairperson

Abstract: This dissertation examines the history of Vietnamese and French colonial oceanography in French Indochina, focusing on how the French colonial administration colonized aquatic spaces in four distinct regions in Vietnam and Cambodia through the work of scientific experts.  This “aquatic colonialism” was dependent on the scientific knowledge that French oceanographers and other Western-trained experts produced as faculty at the Indochinese Oceanographic Institute (Institut océanographique de l’Indochine, or IOI), the first and only marine biological research station in the colony. I analyze the history of the fishing communities in Indochina and collaborative efforts of French and Vietnamese scientists from the 1890s to the 1940s to study and manage aquatic resources in Southeast Asia. I examine here four regional case studies: Annam’s nước mắm (fish sauce) industry and coastal anchovy fishery, the Tonlé Sap Lake freshwater fishing industry of Cambodia, the Bassac fishing banks off the Mekong Delta in Cochinchina, and the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos in the South China Sea.  In each region, French colonial officials relied on experts–oceanographers, biologists, and fisheries specialists–to understand and interpret how these aquatic ecologies functioned; and in each case the French also found resistance from local fishing communities and anti-colonial nationalists interested in those same aquatic ecologies.  

The first two chapters explore “internal” aquatic colonialism within the colony, and the second two explore “pelagic” colonialism in offshore spaces.  The former termrefers to how the French state sought to control inland and inshore fisheries, as well as pre-colonial commercial networks that sold fisheries products and were already deeply entrenched in Indochinese society.  My examples here are the nước mắm that was produced in Annam and sold through Chinese merchant networks in Sài Gòn/ChợLớn, and other urban centers in Indochina, and the dried fish from Cambodia’s Tonlé Sap Lake that was likewise sold by Chinese merchants in Phnom Penh and SàiGòn/Chợ Lớn or exported to Singapore and Hong Kong.  Pelagic colonialism is the process by which the French sought to colonize offshore spaces, like the Bassac fishing banks that lay twenty kilometers off the coast of the Mekong Delta in Cochinchina, or the Paracel and Spratly islands further offshore in the South China Sea.  Though these spaces had also been visited by Indochinese fishing communities, the French were not competing here with precolonial fishing networks but rather with the rising Japanese Empire which also sought to colonize and exploit marine natural resources like fish and guano phosphate.  As internal aquatic colonialism was a conflict by which the French sought to control domestic networks, pelagic colonialism brought the French Empire into conflict with other imperial maritime networks.

David Biggs

Professor of History

Director, Southeast Asia Text, Ritual and Performance Program

UC Riverside