King Norodom's Revenue Farming System in Later Nineteenth-Century Cambodia and his Chinese Revenue Farmers (1860-1891)

From the later 1860s to 1891, King Norodom reorganised the Cambodian fiscal system along increasingly central lines, transforming almost all existing taxes and duties into royal revenue farms, including rights previously not vested in the throne. Norodom succeeded by exploiting weaknesses in the early French protectorate regime, and because diasporic Chinese invested their capital and labour in operating his fiscal system. If some Chinese businessmen accrued great wealth from these activities, the Chinese community of Cambodia generally paid a high price by forfeiting their age-old easy relations with ordinary Khmer people for whom they increasingly became the ugly public face of the royal revenue farming system.