Imperial intoxication is the first comprehensive study of the French monopoly over the production and sale of alcohol in colonial Indochina. This in and of itself is long overdue given the size and political importance of the monopoly, which employed twice as many people as the entire colonial civil service and ate up over one-third of the colonial state's revenue, and whose myriad injustices often came to symbolise the inherently exploitative nature of colonialism itself. But Gerard Sasges offers far more than just a meticulous reconstruction of this critical colonial institution: he simultaneously globalises and localises the alcohol monopoly by exploring its ties both to worldwide transformations in knowledge regimes as well as to the most intimate realms of Indochinese social and cultural life. In doing so, he offers a model study of how to transcend often-arbitrary disciplinary categories like ‘world history’, ‘colonial studies’ and ‘area studies’. Imperial intoxication is, in short, a marvelous addition to a growing scholarly literature that diversifies and deepens our understandings of colonial economic regimes in Southeast Asia and beyond.

The first half of Imperial intoxications situates Indochina's alcohol monopoly in the nexus of state institutions and scientific knowledge at the heart of modern colonial power. The monopoly's creation in 1897 was meant to address the new French colonial state's two most pressing needs: ‘the fiscal demands of state building’ and ‘the need to create civilian police systems to take the place of a more overtly military occupation’ (p. 4). But the new regime in fact reflected a ‘contradictory mix of modern and archaic, power and impotence, civil bureaucracy and military occupation’ (p. 28) more characteristic of colonial power in practice. The monopoly institutionalised many aspects of economic structures that it sought to replace, notably Nguyễn dynasty taxation regimes and Chinese-run tax farms in the early period of French rule in Cochinchina, and its ‘civilian’ police force in fact depended heavily on ‘ex-soldiers, former tax enforcers, and even the occasional ex-rebel’ (p. 28). Yet the monopoly also reflected a global scientific revolution in knowledge about industrial alcohol production, brought to Indochina by a medical doctor (Albert Calmette) who came to the colony to study disease, but was soon put to work developing a faster fermentation process that was then institutionalised in the factories of A.R. Fontaine, the monopoly's principal industrial magnate. Yet, as scientifically remarkable as the alcohol monopoly was, it was a fiscal and bureaucratic disaster; it not only failed to generate expected levels of revenue, its inefficiencies and abuses caused serious tensions among colonial officials themselves. Such failures reflected not only the infrastructural, administrative, legal and fiscal challenges that the monopoly faced, but also its ultimate inability to transcend the ‘complex realities of space, people, and history’ (p. 72) that bedevilled forms of colonial power around the world.

Few scholars who achieve such an insightful portrait of a complex economic, fiscal and policing regime like the alcohol monopoly are equipped to say something meaningful about its intersections with colonial society and culture. But Gerard Sasges's scholarship is steeped in the traditions and methods of area studies, and the second half of Imperial intoxications reflects his deep knowledge of the Indochinese dimensions of this subject. He shows, for example, how the alcohol monopoly changed the lives of its Indochinese agents, specifically how ‘their identities would be shaped under the impact of education, increasing professionalization, new forms of association, and new habits of consumption and leisure’ (p. 100). He also explores the opposition of ordinary people to the alcohol monopoly, underscoring how much anti-colonial resistance had ‘little to do with ideology or the overthrow of regimes, but rather with opposition to unjust laws and with the age-old struggle to make a living, protect kith and kin, and live a life of dignity’ (p. 130). But the alcohol monopoly did intersect deeply with Indochinese politics: its most important figure, A.R. Fontaine, was also influential in Franco–Vietnamese political circles (which also included intellectual luminaries like Trần Trọng Kim and Phạm Quỳnh) attempting to articulate a ‘contradictory vision of an Annamese nationalism contained within imperial and international frameworks’ (p. 169) in response to more modern and increasingly radical political visions for Indochina's future. And finally, Sasges shows how the growth of an Indochinese public sphere — primarily through the spread of newspapers and the emergence of sanctioned indigenous political forums — helped to bring about meaningful reforms to even this all-powerful colonial institution.

Like much about Indochina's colonial past, didactic revolutionary narratives of unceasing repression and heroic resistance have obscured the alcohol monopoly's more complex history. Imperial intoxication shows quite clearly that the monopoly was in many ways the oppressive and exploitative institution that Indochinese revolutionaries said it was. But the book's epilogue also shows us that the monopoly has had little-known but lasting legacies for the nations of the former Indochina: many of the myriad institutions that shape the production and consumption of alcohol in the region can trace their roots to the alcohol monopoly's scientific, administrative and fiscal innovations. Like so many other colonial institutional and cultural forms, then, the alcohol monopoly was ‘a configuration of science, industry and state’ that political independence did not, and perhaps could not, fully displace: ‘brutal and nakedly exploitative’ during the colonial period, it has become ‘subtler and more hegemonic’ today (p. 205). Sasges's conclusion points to the exciting but still-unfulfilled possibilities for approaches to the economic history of the former Indochina that explore continuities across the twentieth century and its venerable but analytically fatigued colonial/postcolonial divide. It is thus a fittingly acute end to a scholarly work that, from beginning to end, pushes the study of colonial Indochina in many new and fruitful directions.