Commerce, culture, and conflict: Taiwan under European rule, 1624--1662 (China, Spain, The Netherlands)

This study examines the history of Taiwan from 1624, when the Dutch established the first European fortress on the island, to 1662, when they surrendered that fortress to Ming loyalist Zheng Cheng-gong. It treats both the Spanish and the Dutch colonies, focusing on interactions between Europeans, Chinese settlers, and the island's Austronesian aborigines.; During the thirty-eight years during which the Europeans ruled Taiwan, the Chinese population of the island grew from around 1500 to 25,000. This increase occurred mostly in southwestern Taiwan, in the Dutch colony. Indeed, the Dutch encouraged Chinese immigration, giving subventions and tax-breaks to Chinese farmers and protecting Chinese hunters, fishers, and traders from aboriginal attacks. In exchange the Dutch collected taxes and tolls from the Chinese, who were much better at converting the island's ecology into cash than were the aborigines. As one Dutch administrator put it, “The Chinese are the only bees on Formosa that give honey.” By the mid 1640s, an odd system of colonialism had been born: a Chinese colony under Dutch rule. I call this system “co-colonization,” for European and Chinese colonists depended closely on each other. The Dutch provided military force and an administrative framework, creating a pax hollandica. The Chinese colonists took advantage of the Dutch umbrella to hunt, fish, and plant. By the late 1640s the aborigines in Southwest Taiwan had begun to feel the system's effects, as their hunting grounds became depleted and were converted into rice and sugarcane fields.; The system was not entirely stable. Chinese organizations—traders, pirates, and, most importantly, the Zheng family—often undermined company sovereignty. Nor did the aborigines sit idly while the newcomers divided their hunting fields: they played the foreigners off against each other, especially in the colony's early years, when Japanese traders were present. A crisis came in the 1650s and 1660s, when the powerful Zheng family began looking for a new base of operations.