The Indic orientation that informed the nineteenth-century scholarly engagement with the ancient cultural heritage of the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina translated, under the impetus of colonial archaeology and Indology, in a more coordinated and systematic approach to the study of Southeast Asia’s past. This chapter explores the French-Dutch transimperial knowledge network of ‘Greater India’. It discusses the Indological study-trips undertaken by French and Dutch scholars to India, maps the institutional cooperation and exchanges that synchronized research agendas in Hanoi and Batavia, and critically probes the role of the Leiden school inaugurated by Hendrik Kern and the French strand of indianisme epitomized in Sylvain Lévi’s academic oeuvre, in energizing visions of Greater India. In the French and Dutch sphere, Indology came to imply a much broader research agenda, both in geographical scope and interdisciplinary content, than in Germany and Britain. European Indology was a highly differentiated field of studies, and colonial trajectories and a nation’s cultural politics vis-à-vis India translated in different research priorities.

This chapter explores how the strategic value of bird islands increased in the interwar period, even as their economic value dwindled. The Marcus Island Incident helped spark Japanese interest in offshore guano mining for use as phosphate fertilizer, and Japanese-managed mining operations began to pop up on islands throughout the East and South China seas. They were only intermittently profitable, and were abandoned during economic downturns. But they triggered diplomatic disputes first with China (over the Pratas and Paracel groups) and then with France (over the Spratlys). Over time military planners began to conceive of the islands as potential airstrips or submarine refuelling stations. Japanese companies, often competing with each other for rights to the islands, exploited these visions by portraying themselves as useful adjuncts in the defence of Japan’s ‘maritime lifeline’. By the late 1930s the Japanese Navy was directly bankrolling civilian enterprises as cover for military operations.

Official revenue collections in French Indochina were low compared with most other colonies in East and Southeast Asia. This fact stands in contrast to a large body of literature that claims French tax demands were a crushing burden on many indigenous people. French Indochina is often put forward as an example of one of the most extractive colonial states in Asia. This chapter reconciles these seemingly opposing interpretations by examining the formation of the colonial fiscal state, its capacity, and the potential impact on the local population. We argue that the French colonial administration is best characterized as complex, bureaucratic, and centralized. Its fiscal capacity was heavily dependant on the expansion and growth of commercial activities. This led to significant geographical asymmetries in wealth generation and investments, and a complex system of budgetary transfers amongst the different levels of administration. French rule was, however, indirect and responded to local differences. Pre-colonial fiscal institutions survived under French colonial rule, but were not adequately recognised in the figures. This reinforces the claim that the burden to the majority of the population was greater than officially recorded, but it was unevenly distributed.