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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.