Phnom Penh was founded in the sixteenth century after the abandonment of Angkor. It flourished as an entrepôt until the late eighteenth century when unrest in Vietnam, dynastic disarray in Cambodia, and Thai invasions ravaged the kingdom. By then, the city had been cut off from the sea and was dependent on Vietnam for trading privileges. The first half of the nineteenth century was chaotic. In the 1840s Cambodia almost disappeared as Thai administrators took charge of much of the country west of the Mekong and the Vietnamese controlled the Cambodian royal family, the capital region, and the eastern part of the country. An uneasy peace concluded between the Thai and the Vietnamese in 1848 left most of Cambodia a Thai protectorate.11

The French established themselves in Cambodia in 1863, and during the colonial era, Cambodia’s economy was integrated with that of France’s new colony in southern Vietnam, Cochinchina. Cambodian exports of rice, corn, dried fish, timber, and other products were handled by Chinese and Vietnamese entrepreneurs in Saigon and its sister city of Cholon, while the rubber plantations established in eastern Cambodia in the 1920s were under French control. Inside Cambodia, Chinese petty traders purchased agricultural products, particularly rice, from Khmer farmers. Chinese entrepreneurs milled the rice and sent it to overseas markets. Profits from these transactions flowed to the Chinese and Sino-Khmer entrepreneurs in Phnom Penh and in provincial towns and then to the French, Chinese, and Sino-Vietnamese export houses in Phnom Penh and Saigon. The French administration levied export taxes on the crops and other taxes on the peasants, whose labor subsidized not only the palace (as it had always done) but also the colonial regime (which was staffed to a large extent by Vietnamese). Years later, spokesmen for Democratic Kampuchea compared Cambodia’s tiny capitalist class to the colonial rulers who had “lived off the backs” of Cambodia’s rural population.

In the 1870s, as these chains of economic dependency were being forged, the French left the trappings of sovereignty in the hands of Monivong’s uncle King Norodom (r. 1860-1904) and his advisers. In exchange for commercial privileges, the French took charge of the country’s foreign affairs, finances, and defense. In the 1880s, after an uprising against their rule, the French became more systematic in their control, and royal power was reduced. Taxes were imposed to recoup the costs of the protectorate; French residents were placed alongside Khmer governors in the provinces and superseded them; the king was given a fixed allowance and lost his power to choose and dismiss officials. In this system that paralleled the princely states of India or the regencies in the Netherlands East Indies, the king retained some prestige and some symbolic value but abdicated political control.12