Peter Zinoman's The Colonial Bastille

Peter Zinoman’s book on the prisons in the late colonial French Indochina is a valuable contribution to the history of prisons as well as modern Vietnamese history. This work not only demystifies the nature of the colonial prisons and the lives of the prisoners, but also historicizes their roles in the development of a new political awareness in the larger Vietnamese society. Moreover, he managed to make his narrative stably consistent while dealing with various sorts of source materials including administrative repots, inspection records, newspapers, diaries, and huge amount of prison memoires. It makes this work historically well-grounded one, in addition to its strength derives from the readable writing style.

In the early chapters, Zinoman clarifies his projects in relation to the preceding scholarly works on history of prisons: First, the author takes up the call for researching the daily lives of the prisoners by Michelle Perrot, and critically examines Michelle Foucault and his followers’ neglect of such effort and their preoccupation “with strategies and discourses of institutional domination”: (p. 98) Second, departing from Foucauldian understanding of prison as a site to transform and to enlighten the prisoners through continuous surveillance, discipline, punishment, and total-care, the author affirms that the prisons in French Indochina were of completely different nature: the colonial prisons were originated more directly from the preexisting Sino-Vietnamese tradition of carceral institutions and the repressive prisoner-of-war camps rather than “modern disciplinary French prisons.” (p. 14 - 16) The author implies that the repressive and brutal characteristics and lack of modern disciplinary ideals in the c...

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...e of statistics is unconvincing in some occasions. For example, when he insists on “the extraordinary level of putitiveness in colonial Indochina,” he cites only the rates from Japan, Dutch East India, and France from different years. Moreover, the rates of incarceration of colonial Indochina in 1936, in today’s standard, belongs to mediocre: it is roughly one seventh of the rate of the United States in 2013. The incarceration rate should have been used, perhaps, to explain the local context of increase/decrease in the prison population.

Even though these minor problems are found, this book is still worth reading for people interested in prison studies, Vietnamese history, rebellions, communism and nationalism.

Works Cited

Peter Zinoman, “The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940” University of California Press, 2001