| Summary/Abstract |
On the eve of its foundation in 1954, the Republic of Vietnam had five motorised fishing boats; 20 years later, that figure had swelled to over sixty thousand. This conversion to fossil fuels, along with associated developments like the intensified exploitation of marine ecologies and the use of new synthetic materials, form part of what has come to be called the ‘Great Acceleration’. This article follows a Japanese fisheries expert who spent six years in Vietnam in the early 1960s to explore the physical and conceptual work this process entailed, its entanglement with projects of war-making and nation-building, and the way it was both a product of and producer of the collapse of local ecologies.
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