Japan’s Colonial Subalterns and the Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan, 1873-1930

FAIN: FB-53354-07

Paul David Barclay
Lafayette College (Easton, PA 18042-7625)

A social history of Japanese colonial rule in a diverse, contested, and fabled frontier zone, Taiwan’s "Aborigine Territory." This project will investigate the technologies used by centralized bureaucracies to govern unfamiliar populations under fluid political conditions. Two ideal-typical colonial agents emerge from the biographically detailed and thickly descriptive Japanese colonial archive: centripetally oriented policy-makers and centrifugally oriented field officers. My analysis attempts to explain how political and epistemic divisions between these two types led (and leads) to needlessly tragic policies of dispossession and self-defeating imperial hubris, in prewar Taiwan and in analogous situations elsewhere, then and now.