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The Borderland Mines of Northern Vietnam: From Remote Upland Areas to Global Networks

Sat, March 18, 3:00 to 5:00pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: Concourse Level, VIP Room

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of mining in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands from the early eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It investigates effects on local societies, political control, and on the Vietnamese monetary system in the context of wider regional networks of trade and power.
In Vietnamese history, the mining boom of mining in the mountainous northern borderlands was a significant event. Formerly dependent on imports of bullion and monetary metals, Vietnam now became an exporter of silver and of coins. Existing studies have considered the transformation as the result of early capitalism that lead to a change of central state ‘s policies on mining (Phan 1963) or focused on external factors, such as the increasing presence of Chinese overseas and the influences of commercialization and industrialization (Li 1998 and Reid 2013).
Using both Vietnamese and Chinese sources, this paper explores almost two centuries of Sino-Vietnamese borderland mining in the interaction of local, national and international dimensions. It contributes specific answers regarding local and regional processes in the early globalization by exploring how a remote mountain area became linked with into national and global markets through not only the flow of silver and precious metals but of the others such as commodities, capital and peoples.

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