Crystals from the savage forest: Imperialism and capitalism in the Taiwan camphor industry, 1800--1945 (China).

摘要

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially between 1875 and 1920, the island of Taiwan became the world's largest exporter of camphor crystals and camphor oil for markets in Europe, America, India, and Japan. The production and sale of camphor on the world market impacted the livelihood of thousands of Taiwan workers, foreign and Chinese native merchants, Japanese industrialists in the colony and the metropole, and indigenous peoples who lived in Taiwan's camphor forests. It also affected the revenues of a provincial government and colonial state and the profits of a growing number of industries in Europe and America. The camphor industry operated on the borders of the Qing (1684--1895) and Japanese (1895--1945) colonial empires, enmeshed in the social, political, and economic structures of the island's frontier zone---an often violent, expanding zone of contact between state agents, Chinese settlers, and the indigenous peoples of Taiwan's central mountains.; This dissertation examines the intersection of imperialism and capitalism at the center of frontier society through a study of the camphor industry. It aims to expand our theoretical and empirical understanding of the articulation between non-capitalist systems of political economy and emerging industrial capitalism in East Asia. I study the camphor industry on Taiwan as a site of political and economic struggle between foreign powers and East Asian empires, examining how both sought to gain and extend control over a natural resource whose end markets underwent a fundamental transformation from luxury good to industrial raw material between 1875 and 1920. I rely on sources in Chinese, Japanese, and English, both published and archival, to conduct my analysis.