‘Collaboration Strategy’ and the French Pacification of Tonkin, 1885–1897

Decolonization has had a significant impact upon the way that historians explain the process of Europe’s late nineteenth-century imperial expansion. Assumptions about superior technology now appear insufficient in themselves to account for the ability of relatively small armies to gain control over sizeable territory and populations in Africa and Asia. Although, as has recently been argued, advances in weaponry and medicine enabled Europeans to operate in tropical climates against less sophisticated opposition with devastating effect, differences in technology cannot explain the ability of less well-endowed national resistance movements to defeat colonial armies in the mid-twentieth century.1 Since 1945 various wars of national liberation have demonstrated that advanced technology, an impressive commitment of manpower, and an enormous expenditure of money cannot guarantee military success against a nationalist resistance in a colonial setting. If anything, this discrepancy in technological advantage between colonialist powers and anti-western resistance movements was as great or greater in the post-World War II era than in the late nineteenth century. Historians thus must seek additional explanations for the rapid advance of European conquest during the heyday of imperialism.