Outcasts of Empire : Japan's Rule on Taiwan's "Savage Border," 1874-1945 EPUB

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Outcasts of Empire unveils the causes and consequences of capitalism's failure to ';batter down all Chinese walls' in modern Taiwan. Adopting micro- and macrohistorical perspectives, Paul D. Barclay argues that the interpreters, chiefs, and trading-post operators who mediated state-society relations on Taiwan's ';savage border' during successive Qing and Japanese regimes rose to prominence and faded to obscurity in concert with a series of ';long nineteenth century' global transformations.

Superior firepower and large economic reserves ultimately enabled Japanese statesmen to discard mediators on the border and sideline a cohort of indigenous headmen who played both sides of the fence to maintain their chiefly status. Even with reluctant ';allies' marginalized, however, the colonial state lacked sufficient resources to integrate Taiwan's indigenes into its disciplinary apparatus. The colonial state therefore created the Indigenous Territory, which exists to this day as a legacy of Japanese imperialism, local initiatives, and the global commodification of culture.