In many places and for many people, incorporation into European colonial empires was a traumatic experience. Especially for small-scale societies, the loss of life, homes, cattle, crops, and land was devastating. In 1902, a British soldier in East Africa described what happened in a single village: “Every soul was either shot or bayoneted. . . . We burned all the huts and razed the banana plantations to the ground.”8

For the Vietnamese elite, schooled for centuries in Chinese-style Confucian thinking, conquest meant that the natural harmonies of life had been badly disrupted; it was a time when “water flowed uphill.” Nguyen Khuyen (1835–1909), a senior Vietnamese official, retired to his ancestral village to farm and write poetry after the French conquest. In his poems he expressed his anguish at the passing of the world he had known:

Fine wine but no good friends,

So I buy none though I have the money.

A poem comes to mind, but I choose not to write it down.

If it were written, to whom would I give it?

The spare bed hangs upon the wall in cold indifference.

I pluck the lute, but it just doesn’t sound right.9

Many others also withdrew into private life, feigning illness when asked to serve in public office under the French.