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"Paul Barclay's exploration of indigenous histories in Taiwan is sophisticated and engaging. This highly original narrative of a formative period will be of great interest to all those concerned with comparative colonial history."—Nicholas Thomas, Professor of Historical Anthropology, University of Cambridge
"Barclay’s work reveals how indigeneity evolved coevally with capitalist imperialism and nationalism during the last century. It is a multisided and multiscale analysis—incorporating global, regional, and local scales—and it is embedded in a coherent and compelling narrative. Analysts are greatly concerned about resource frontiers in today’s world; this study furnishes them with an indispensable historical framework."—Prasenjit Duara, Oscar Tang Professor of East Asian Studies, Duke University
"Analytically precise and theoretically ambitious, Barclay’s wonderful new book examines the entanglements of the interstate system, indigeneity, and sovereignty through the case of Japanese-occupied Taiwan. A must-read for anyone interested in the fate of indigenous peoples under modern colonialism."—Louise Young, author of Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism
List of contents
List of Illustrations and Tables
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Translation
Introduction: Empires and Indigenous Peoples, Global Transformation and the Limits of International Society
PART ONE. THE ANATOMY OF A REBELLION
1. From Wet Diplomacy to Scorched Earth: The Taiwan Expedition, the Guardline, and the Wushe Rebellion
2. The Longue Durée and the Short Circuit: Gender, Language, and Territory in the Making of Indigenous Taiwan
PART TWO. INDIGENOUS MODERNITY
3. Tangled Up in Red: Textiles, Trading Posts, and Ethnic Bifurcation in Taiwan
4. The Geobodies within a Geobody: The Visual Economy of Race Making and Indigeneity
Notes
Glossary
Index
About the author
Paul D. Barclay is Professor of History at Lafayette College. He is also general editor of the East Asia Image Collection, an open-access online digital repository of historical materials.
Summary
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit
www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
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.
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"Outcasts of Empire has inaugurated a most welcome turn to theoretically informed indigenous studies. . . . [and] lays the ground for sophisticated work in and beyond East Asian studies."
