In order to pave the way for the writing of a global history of Indochinese ports under colonial rule, a two-day international conference will be held October 27-28, 2022 at the University of Sciences and Education – University of Đà Nẵng in Việt Nam. By bringing together researchers from Việt Nam, France and beyond, this conference will aim to establish the current state of research on a question that remains largely unexplored. It will address the ports of the Indochinese Union (Việt Nam, Laos, Cambodia) in all their aspects (colonial and imperial, economic, social and cultural, military and strategic, etc.), at the crossroads of different historiographies, different disciplines, and with a comparative approach in mind. Moreover, the conference hopes to foster new perspectives on these singular spaces, situated in a land-sea continuum and whose trajectories of development did not end with the decolonization of French Indochina. At a time when the maritimization of the world continues to accelerate, and when exports are becoming a major lever of development for Southeast Asian economies (particularly for Việt Nam), a historical study of former colonial ports can provide useful insights into understanding current issues, whether in terms of port infrastructures, geostrategy, or regional economic development and positioning in the globalization of trade. Therefore, the debate will not be limited to the colonial period, even if this will constitute the core of the program; instead, the conference will endeavor both to introduce the region’s pre-colonial port realities and to bridge the gap between the colonial and postcolonial by including port projects developed on the Vietnamese coastline after the country’s independence.