Abstract

"Entrepreneurship education for colonized indigenous students: A forgotten educational experiment in colonial Vietnam under French rule in the interwar period"

Adrien Jean-Guy Passant, Léonard de Vinci Pôle Universitaire (adrien.passant@hotmail.fr)

The history of entrepreneurship education has traditionally been addressed by the literature in the setting of Western metropoles (Wadhwani & Viebig, 2021; Menzies, 2009; Kuratko, 2005; Volkmann, 2004; Katz, 2003), which does not consider empirical evidence that historically some education institutions devoted to entrepreneurship education were also founded in the colonies (Minto-Coy, Lashley & Storey, 2018). As such, it has been more than 100 years since the first entrepreneurship program was taught in colonial Vietnam under French domination. Created by the French colonial administration and held at the University of Hanoi from 1920 to 1932, this entrepreneurship program offered the particularity of mainly targeting indigenous students. Although this program aimed to contribute to the formation of a new type of entrepreneurial “indigenous elite”, it was confronted with the contradictions of French colonial policy, which slowed its development.
Drawing on Vietnamese and French archival sources, this paper explores entrepreneurship education developed in a colony under Western imperialism and devoted to indigenous students – an area unaddressed in entrepreneurship literature. Precisely, it examines the case of the first university education institution developed in colonial Vietnam to educate indigenous entrepreneurs.
This research differs from and contributes to the literature in three aspects. First, this paper investigates how university entrepreneurship education in a colony dominated by a Western power involved the pursuit of economic and politic objectives on the part of Western leaders. Second, the paper analyzes the role of entrepreneurship education in the context of colonial empire by trying to give prominence to subaltern voices – i.e. colonized Vietnamese students – heretofore silent in the entrepreneurship literature (Alcadipani 2017; Gantman, Yousfi & Alcadipani 2015). Third, the paper further develops nascent understandings of the-under-analyzed-role-of-Western colonizing countries-in-the-emergence-of-university entrepreneurship education-in Southeast Asia at the beginning of the twentieth century (Aida & Rahatu Hijrah, 2013).