Vietnamese Fish Sauce under Colonial Rule: Coastal Ecological Knowledge and Human Sustainability in a Traditional Food System (1914-1933)

Background and objective: Human sustainability is increasingly understood as communities’ capacity to sustain livelihoods, knowledge, and everyday practices amid long-term environmental and institutional change. This article examines nuoc mam (Vietnamese fermented fish sauce) production under French colonial rule as a historically grounded coastal humanenvironment system. Rather than treating nuoc mam as a traditional craft or commodity alone, the article conceptualizes it as an integrated food system shaped by indigenous ecological knowledge, material infrastructures, scientific expertise, and governance institutions, and analyzes how processes of scientification and colonial regulation reconfigured human sustainability between 1914 and 1933.Methods: The study combines historical analysis of colonial decrees and administrative records, Pasteur Institute scientific publications, and Vietnamese- and French-language newspapers. A food systems perspective and discourse analysis are used to examine interactions among ecological knowledge, biochemical science, and regulatory power.Results: Two parallel modernization trajectories emerge. Vietnamese enterprises selectively appropriated scientific standardization to combat adulteration, enhance credibility, and stabilize livelihoods. In contrast, the 1933 proposal for mandatory centralized bottling triggered widespread resistance as hygiene-based regulation became entangled with monopolistic control, rising costs, and the erosion of producers’ and consumers’ freedom of choice.Conclusion: The 1933 resistance did not reject science or technology per se; it opposed their deployment as coercive instruments of centralized power. The case highlights the fragile boundary between standardization as a public-good mechanism and standardization that undermines community autonomy and livelihoods, offering historically grounded insights for contemporary food-system governance.