This chapter presents a novel interpretation of the August General Uprising of 1945, often known as the "August Revolution," its precursors, and its immediate impacts. The dominant interpretation of this "revolution" emphasizes the leading role of the Indochinese Communist Party at the head of the Viet Minh and sees the northern "model" of uprising established in Hanoi as the template for the "revolution" as a whole. The South, and Saigon in particular, ill fit this model. The chapter discusses the precursor to the August Uprisings: the slow collapse of the economy, the Japanese overthrow of the French regime on March 9, 1945, the end of World War II, and the surrender of the Japanese in August 1945. At this point, Instead, multiple actors, including communists (both "Stalinists" and Trotskyists), nationalists, and religious groups like the Cao Dai and the Buddhist Hoa Hao, engaged in parallel but intersecting mobilizations to seize power, which ultimately occurred under the Viet Minh banner. The chapter discusses the rampant violence under no centralized control, the arrival of the British forces temporarily occupying the city under the Allies, the French arrival in September, and the Vietnamese declaration of Resistance War in September 1945.

If the struggle in the South began in order to expel the French, violence ended up transforming the countryside, and ripping Mekong Delta society apart. The delta went through two internal fractures at the beginning of the war. The first, dating from late 1945 and into 1946, split many (but not all) Khmer from Vietnamese. The catalyst of this fracture was France's drive into the delta from late 1945, when it recruited "partisans," and especially ethnic Khmer, to fight Viet Minh forces. The French worsened ethnic antagonisms, leading to extensive violence between these two communities. The second major fracture was catalyzed by the Viet Minh's attempt to subdue rivals for leadership of the "nationalist" movement. Primed during 1945 and 1946, this second fracture occurred in 1947. For the second fracture, the chapter looks at two key turning points: Cao Dai leader Pham Cong Tac's decision to tactically ally with the French, and the Viet Minh killing of Hoa Hao Prophet Huynh Phu So. The violence following these two acts reshaped the South and definitively set the course for the rest of the war.

This chapter first examines a variety of approaches, including that of Frantz Fanon, to exploring violence and race in a colonial context. Rejecting binary approaches, like that of Fanon, this examines the political use and cultural understanding of the concepts like "race" and "ethnicity." Rather than see race in terms of a simple imperial deployment of racist practices and beliefs against the colonized, this chapter also argues for an "appropriation" model of ideas and practices of race and ethnicity to help explain the complexity of race-talk and race practices involving France, the Vietnamese, the Khmer, Africans, and Chinese. The chapter looks at France’s initial concern with white prestige in choosing the soldiers to fight on the side of France before turning to the Vietnamese. It examines pre-existing Vietnamese understandings of race, as articulated in Vietnamese, and their combination with Western discourses of race and racial hierarchies. The chapter digs into particularly troubling texts on race, racial extinction, and cannibalism, and the implication of such texts for understanding the war as a whole. Looks at arguments over purity, hybridity, and race.

In the Mekong Delta, in addition to directly fighting against the communist-led Resistance, the French also allied with semi-autonomous militias against the Resistance, particularly those associated with the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao. A situational logic of alliance and opposition, understood by all participants, shaped the overarching "system." Within this system, both the French and the Resistance competed to co-opt smaller groups, from parastates to local militias, to their side, which in turn tried to establish their autonomy. This chapter looks at these allies, some of which were parastates, their funding, their economic bases, and their interactions. It gives particular attention to those affiliated with the Cao Dai (Pham Cong Tac, Trinh Minh The) and the Hoa Hao militias (Tran Van Soai, Ba Cut). It also examines the complexity of control at local levels, where in some villages, up to three different political actors, including the Vietnamese state, vied for dominance.

By 1953, the communist-led Resistance had been marginalized in much of the Mekong delta. But the cost was high. "Traditional" institutions of the village had, in large swaths of the delta, been destroyed. The Franco-Vietnamese "coalition" had defeated the communist-led Resistance. But who would win the peace? The militia leaders, so skilled in war, were not fluent in the arts of peace. This chapter looks at the endgame of empire, when France was withdrawing from rural areas all over the South, downsizing its military presence, and shifting its support to the State of Vietnam. The end result by 1954, however, was a balkanized southern Vietnam with fragmented sovereignty where militias entrenched themselves in rural fiefdoms. The chapter shows how Ngo Dinh Diem, faced with this divided South, won the battle for post-war control of the South. It pays particular attention to his expulsion to Cambodia of the Cao Dai leader Pham Cong Tac, the co-optation of the Hoa Hao militia leader Tran Van Soai, and the arrest, trial, and execution of the Hao Hao militia leader Ba Cut. The chapter also examines the regional, national, and international legacies of the war.

In August 1945, almost all southerners in Vietnam opposed the French and supported the Viet Minh. By the end of 1947, however, this coalition was in tatters. Mekong Delta politics fractured along ethnic and political lines. This chapter looks at the "priming" phase of this violence in 1945 and 1946. It distinguishes sharply between the development of a political fracturing among Vietnamese groups, on the one hand, and of a second, less-noticed development: the ethnic split between Vietnamese and Khmer. The chapter looks at the intervention of France, including the French military, from October 1945 onwards, emphasizing their weakness and unpreparednesss. It examines the challenges facing the Viet Minh, including its contentious relations with the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao politico-religious groups. Discusses the common use of violence, including killing, against perceived traitors.

As in all other plantation colonies, Indian labor migration to Malaya in the initial phase was primarily short-term and overwhelmingly male. It was clearly a period of “men moving,” a term used by Eric Hobsbawm in his study The Age of Capitalism to describe the nineteenth-century cross-regional bulk movement of men, primarily of the laboring class. This gendered migration to Malaya soon changed. Rising Indian nationalist movements highlighted the skewed gender ratio amongst laborers recruited from India, which they asserted was the cause of “immorality,” including a range of social and moral vices, among Indian coolies overseas. Based on this argument, some nationalists pushed for a complete ban on overseas labor migration from India while others argued for a more balanced gender ratio. Such nationalist voices led planters in Malaya to fear the loss of their regular labor source from India. British planters and administrators, therefore, promoted a gender-based strategy for labor recruitment, not merely to appease nationalists but, more significantly, to ensure a local means of reproducing labor in the future. Consequently, the fears of the planters led to an incentivized migration of coolie women and coolie families. Whilst the primary aim of this policy was to ensure a secure future labor supply, it was officially presented as establishing morality and ideal family life amongst overseas Indian laborers in plantation colonies, thus seeking to deprive nationalists of an emotive mobilizing issue by showing that their concerns were being addressed. Indian women wishing to migrate out of India for a myriad of socioeconomic and cultural reasons often capitalized on such gendered incentivization of coolie migration. Even though many planters throughout Malaya valued coolie women both as laborers and as the source of future labor reproduction, which would decrease the planters’ reliance on imported labor from India, plantation and migration lore has constantly celebrated coolie men and erased the narratives of coolie women.

This chapter investigates why colonial administrators and European planters in British Malaya promoted Indian coolie women's migration to Malaya and simultaneously reveals how coolie women themselves actively engaged with such opportunities. The chapter thus modifies the prevalent view presented in labor and migration histories concerning Indians in colonial Malaya, which presumes that the coolie women only migrated as dependents of migrating coolie men, thus discounting the choice of Indian women to migrate and become coolies.