INTRODUCTION

When France seized control of the Lao territories on the east bank of the Mekong from Siam in 1893, the sparsely populated country remained a colonial “backwater” that received only little administrative and commercial attention (Gunn 1990; Ivarsson 2008). However, as Laos was rich in minerals, not only gold and silver but also tin and copper, it evoked imaginaries of a “Klondike Indochinois and New Bolivia” (Deloncle [1930] 2011, p. 116) and attracted numerous entrepreneurs and venturers. Taking the tin mining area in the Nam Phathaen valley (Khammouane Province, central Laos; see Figures 8.1 and 8.2) as an example, this chapter investigates the contingent processes of (capitalist) frontierization—processes of uneven and combined development on the ground—in past and present Laos.

The image of a resource frontier has certainly shaped the perception of Laos until the present day. Still in the 2000s, the Asian Development Bank depicted the country as a “new frontier” (Barney 2009, p. 147) and promoted transnational investment into mining, energy and agribusiness, which was a striking echo of colonial discourses on underdeveloped and underpopulated Laos. Both under colonial capitalism and in the context of present-day “market socialism with neoliberal characteristics” (Hann and Endres 2018), the vast, forested uplands of Laos (80 per cent of the state territory with only half of the country's population of 7 million), in particular, have been envisaged as a resource-rich frontier awaiting exploitation. This imaginary translated into extractive practice that produced considerable social and environmental costs among the fifty different ethnic groups of Laos and their largely subsistence-based economies (see, e.g., Kenney-Lazar 2018; Rigg 2005; Laungaramsri 2012; Dwyer and Vongvisouk 2017; Ponce, this volume).

As several authors have noted (Tsing 2005; Li 2014; Cons and Eilenberg 2019), the concept of the (resource) frontier can be used as a heuristic device to examine the interwoven social, economic, political and environmental dynamics and transformations at the margins of global capitalism (see as well the introduction to this volume by Rowedder and Tappe). In particular, the relationship between global capital and indigenous communities, processes of exclusion, and increasing inequalities can be examined through the lens of the frontier. Shifts in local subsistence strategies and labour relations under conditions of frontier capitalism and rudimentary industrialization constitute a key aspect to be discussed in this chapter.