For perhaps a quarter of a century, from the mid-1930s to the year 1960, the Indochinese Communist Party—later the Workers' Party of Vietnam and now the Vietnamese Communist Party—celebrated the anniversary of its foundation on 6 January each year. The thirtieth anniversary (6 January 1960) was given special prominence in Hanoi and was marked by the publication of an official Party history in Vietnamese, French, English and other languages. Then, quite abruptly in September of the same year, the Party's Third National Congress approved a resolution to the effect that in future the anniversary would be commemorated on 3 February, which thereafter was held to be the ‘correct’ date.

This article uses a biography of banker and economist Paul Bernard to describe the debates that influenced economic policy makers and business circles during the last quarter century of French rule in Indochina. Bernard, from the Great Depression through to his death in 1960, exercised considerable influence on the way French leaders thought about the economy of their Southeast Asian colony and of their overseas territories as a whole. As a financier, he also played a part in its shaping. This article outlines his business activities, especially as managing director of the French and Colonial Finance Company (SFFC), an important colonial finance house, and is to this extent a business history. Bernard, finally, participated in the state planning of the colonial economy during the heyday of French interventionism. From the point of view of his involvement, the article describes the role of the state in colonial economic development. His involvement was both constructive, in the drawing up of Indochina's industrialization plans, and critical, in repeated attacks on what he saw as misguided or irrelevant policy. He did not confine his comments to economic matters, and his criticism of the administration of Indochina may be taken as a running commentary of the final decades of France's colonial engagement in Southeast Asia.

Peace based on a fallacy is not for the living. The living must and shall demand the truth, for such is the way of nations, and such is the way of man.—Seni Pramoj, speaking at the World Court, March 27, 1962 (Pleadings, 564)

On 15 June 1962, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) pronounced judgment on a dispute between Cambodia, formerly a colony of France, and Thailand, formerly called Siam, a neighboring kingdom which had never been formally colonized. The dispute regarded territorial sovereignty over the area of an ancient Brahmanic temple named Preah Vihear (following the Khmer language of Cambodia) or Phra Viharn (following Thai language). The Temple is perched high on a spur of the Dangrek mountain chain which roughly forms the boundary between both countries. North of the Dangrek lies the Khorat Plateau of Northeast Thailand, while to the south the Temple affords a magnificent view of the forested Cambodian plain below. The judgment was peculiar in that it relied upon absence to startling effect. Applying the principle qui tacet consentire videtur si loqui debuisset ac potuisset (Judgment, 23) [He who keeps silent is held to consent if he must and can speak—ibid., 96], ICJ held that Thailand's failure to protest the inaccuracy of a map purporting to reflect the watershed line between the two states, and thus by the Treaty of 1904 the international boundary between them, constituted tacit acceptance of the map line as the line established by treaty.

By writing about the late eighteenth-century revolution which led to the East India Company rule, members of a largely Muslim pre-colonial administrative elite in eastern India sought take control over their own history. They explained the society and ancien régime of India, as well as themselves, to the new British rulers for whom they worked. In so doing, they strove to inform and guide the new British colonial authorities into employing them in the new administration as well as into valuing the cultural mores and bureaucratic experience which they embodied. They also wrote introspectively for the own class, trying to understand the causes of the revolution that had displaced their own traditional rulers and themselves with rule by Europeans and administrations staffed increasingly by Indians with backgrounds different from their own.

If power is mediated by knowledge, then the early decades of British colonial rule in India were indeed, as Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai, the intellectual and historian par excellence of those times wrote, a time of ‘half-knowledge’.The decades between 1757 and 1772 witnessed the implantation of this colonial regime in Eastern India through the transformation of the English East India Company from a mercantilist trading corporation into the paradoxical status of ‘merchant-sovereign and the sovereign merchant’ at the same time. The role of sovereign thrust upon the officials of the company the far from easy task of administering this society in ways that were most conducive to the extraction of the largest possible surplus from it for its new masters.

The growth of industrial suburbs with a large working-class population around Calcutta in the final years of the nineteenth century profoundly influenced the politics on the streets of the ‘second city’ of the British empire. The increasing concentration of a large industrial work force in the newly growing mill towns around Calcutta in these years was accompanied by frequent industrial action and violent confrontations between the colonial law enforcement agencies and various sections of factory operatives in the city and the suburban mill towns. In the 1890s, when the Indian Jute Mill Association (hereafter IJMA) extended working hours and increased the work load in the factories, Calcutta and suburban mill towns witnessed numerous strikes. In 1895 these strikes frightened the jute mill owners so much that the IJMA pleaded with the government to reorganize police forces in the mill municipalities in order to protect the European managerial staff from the wrath of angry workers.

Since the end of World War II, the ever-increasing role of government in advanced democratic nations has resulted in a massive organizational growth in the public sector. The impact of the welfare state provides an explanation for changes in traditional patterns of central–local government relations. The era of the welfare state has witnessed the rapid emergence of an intermeshed system of making and implementing policies, which necessitates integration between central and local government.