Introduction

This paper presents preliminary findings regarding population and labour force in Vietnam under French rule, between 1900 and 1954. These data are based on estimations and censuses carried out by the colonial administration. For the major part of former Indochina population and labour force in industrial branches, sources are extremely fragmentary and their reliability is uncertain. As a rule, French colonial administration was hardly interested in producing accurate figures of native population, especially before the end of the nineteenth century. This explains the time limitation of the research to the 1900-1954 period.

In addition, Vietnamese pre-colonial administrative traditions made it difficult for the local administration to investigate the size and composition of each family. Under Annam's Empire administration, each village council was charged to report to the administration the exact number of families, but not the total population. Following strict Confucian rules, family members were under the authority of the head of the family; for this reason, an attempt of local administration to know how many boys and girls were living in each family, their age and activity, was seen as an intrusion and bad government policy.

Regarding labour force, the same situation prevailed. The French administration investigations focused on fiscal issues. Labour force was not regarded as a good indicator for estimating economic activities, either of the Vietnamese, the Chinese, or the European controlled shops, workshops, industrial and transportation enterprises. Production of goods and services was not presumed to be a question of labour force, which was abundant, but a question of local resources, of equipment and, above all, of local or international demand.

Besides, many cottage industry and even several manufacturing activities were seasonal. The tax system did not consider the possible labour force but the size of the equipment, for example for river transportation by Natives and Chinese. For agriculture, forestry and fishing, we have almost no labour force indication, whereas these branches represented the most important share of the production and export items.

A large part of the historiography of the last five decades on Vietnam under French rule focuses on labour exploitation by French firms and colonial administration. Even if one may understand this point of view, the fragility of these works resides in the fact that few evidences were produced, except fragmentary examples based on microeconomic data. All these features make population and labour force estimation a difficult but essential task for research on Vietnam's quantitative economic history.

This paper is divided into three parts. Part I presents the sources on Vietnam's demography under French rule; Part II, analyses the patterns of population and labour force according official series; part III proposes a reconstruction of Vietnam population history. The reverse projection method is presented in appendix 1, data sources and estimates on population and labour force in appendix 2.