"Territorial Waters" examines aquatic colonialism in French Indochina from 1920 to1940 through four regional case studies: Annam's fish sauce industry, the Tonle Sap Lake fishery in Cambodia, the Bassac fishing banks off the Mekong Delta in Cochinchina, and the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos in the South China Sea, showing how this process was dependent on the scientific knowledge that French experts and local actors co-produced for the state at the Indochinese Oceanographic Institute.

In each region, French colonial officials relied on oceanographers and fisheries biologists to interpret ecologies for administrators; the French also found cooperation, negotiation, and resistance from local fishing communities and nationalists interested in remaking those same aquatic worlds.
                                                         David J. McCaskey PhD Candidate, UCR Department of History