Paul Barclay's Outcasts of Empire: Japan's Rule on Taiwan's “Savage Border,” 1874–1945 is a meticulously researched treatise on the complicated history of Taiwan's indigenous populations. He details how these groups have had to negotiate their quasi-sovereignty living amid Han settlers from China during the late Qing (1644–1912) dynasty and Japanese colonial bureaucrats during Japan's occupation of Taiwan (1895–1945). Barclay also considers more contemporary Taiwanese identity formation that includes recognition of Taiwan's indigenous populations: the Atayal, Bunun, Saisiyat, Tsou, Amis, Paiwan, Rukai, and Puyuma peoples.
Outcasts of Empire contributes to an already rich scholarly conversation about what it means to be Taiwanese in a country long ruled by outsiders. However, focus on the aborigines of Taiwan is still a rather new thread in this conversation. Robert Tierney's Tropics of Savagery is one example.Footnote 1
Barclay's work adds another important layer to the study of Taiwan's indigenous communities by looking at how their culture was economically and politically used at both the micro and macro levels as well as the active role indigenous people played in the game of empire building. Influenced by the theoretical framework of Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper's Empires in World History and Lauren Benton's idea of “quasi-sovereignty,” Barclay writes that “empires are best understood as successors to other empires and that postcolonialism did not resolve itself into a world of sovereign nation-states based on former colonial boundaries” (p. 13).Footnote 2 Rather, the hallmark of nineteenth-century imperialism was “its symbiosis with industrial capitalism, a geostrategic setting of multipolar competition, and a susceptibility to liberal and anti-imperial inflections,” which produced what Barclay calls “indigenous modernity” (p. 13). Barclay acknowledges that he is not the first to argue that indigeneity and the international system are interrelated historical phenomena, but what has not been argued, he claims, is how the historical process of indigenization has been an integral part of the international system's development and how, out of such a process, indigenous territories have become what Barclay refers to as a second-order geobody (p. 13).
Drawing on Foucault's theory of power formation through a disciplining society and Gramsci's idea of hegemony, Barclay defines a first-order geobody as “a spatially configured unit of administration” that produces “more or less self-actuating populations who surrender revenues to central authorities over and above the cost of funding myriad projects in governmentality” (p. 33). Second-order geobodies, Barclay explains, are found at the “extremities of empire, where various combinations of local resistance, rugged terrain, sparse population, and other factors rule out the creation of revenue-neutral regimes of governmentality” (p. 33). In the context of Taiwan under Japanese rule, this means that “legal centralism reached its geographic limit at the boundary of the Aborigine Territory” (p. 33). Barclay ties his ideas of geobodies to the intersection of indigeneity and the international system as follows:
Although not brought within the fold of governmentality, the second-order geobodies were nonetheless constituted as objects of accounting, surveillance, and biopolitical ministration because the modern international system—unlike the interdynastic order it displaced—did not allow for ungoverned territories to exist “beyond the pale.” (p. 33)
The goal of his book, therefore, is to examine the processes and structures that coproduced nation-states and indigenous peoples out of an “incomplete consolidation of legal centralism characteristic of state building in the era of competitive imperialism and high-velocity capitalism” (p. 38). Further, he shows how “indigenous modernization” was a two-part invention. Part one entailed military forces that robbed people in dynastic-state peripheries of their autonomy at a time when ruling state resources were insufficient. In the case of the Japanese, they had to create social systems of discipline to govern the aborigines in response to the lack of resources (economic and cultural know-how) to control such populations. Part two entailed the construction of second-order geobodies that formed the bulwarks of cultural pluralism in colonized Taiwan and that later were turned into the reimagined communities of cultural identity that make modern Taiwan (p. 248).
Where Barclay shines is when he describes important historical events. Usually these descriptions begin a chapter. There is a storytelling mode to his style that is appealing and provides a bit of a break from the heavy theoretical discussions. For example, he begins his work explaining the Wushe Rebellion of 1930:
On October 27, 1930, terror visited the small community of Japanese settler-expatriates in the picturesque resort town of Wushu, an administrative center nestled on a plateau in the central mountains of Taiwan. (p. 1)
He then skillfully analyzes its implications as follows:
Over the course of Japanese rule (1895–1945), the Taiwan Government-General forcibly relocated hundreds of other hamlets like Mehebu. The invasive and exploitative policies that provoked Mona and his confederates also eroded precolonial forms of social organization, authority, and ritual life among Taiwan's indigenes. As it severed bonds between indigenes and their lands, in addition to prohibiting or reforming folkways it deemed injurious to its civilizing mission, the government-general nonetheless laid the groundwork for the emergence of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples as a conscious and agentive historical formation. (p. 1)
By the end of his book, Barclay deftly shows how the political and economic implications of the 1930 Wushe Rebellion that reflected the various forces at work in Japan's colonial project turned into the identity of Taiwan's Indigenous Territories of today, a critical part of modern Taiwan's cultural imaginary.
Chapter 1, titled “From Wet Diplomacy to Scorched Earth: The Taiwan Expedition, the Guardline, and the Wushe Rebellion,” begins by telling the stories of the “Yoshimura beating incident,” which occurred on October 7, 1930, and led to the Wushe Rebellion two weeks later, and the 1871 murder of fifty-four shipwrecked Okinawans on Taiwan's Hengchun Peninsula, which “put opposing logics of dynastic and international systems on a collision course” (p. 39). By recounting these events, Barclay then shows how reactions to these events, seemingly local and isolated, would become part of a more macro system of rule by the Japanese toward the aborigines. He traces how the initial “wet diplomacy,” the conjoined drinking tradition of northern tribal communities in Taiwan used by Han Chinese settlers and later coopted by the Japanese, transitioned to a “durai” (dry) interaction, a rule-governed system in which priority went to social and official ranks rather than the “conjoined” imagery of two people drinking out of the same cup. Over time, as Japan's rule strengthened, Japan created bunkers, relay stations, and guard posts along what was dubbed the scorched earth trail to enclose the Atayal settlements in northern Taiwan. Barclay shows how this inward march set the foundations for what later would become the territory of the Taiwanese Indigenous Peoples.
In chapter 2, “The Longue Durée and the Short Circuit: Gender, Language, and Territory in the Making of Indigenous Taiwan,” Barclay considers the role of aborigine women who were married to Chinese settlers and later Japanese colonials to serve as linguistic and cultural interpreters. These intercultural marriages, a relic from Qing era practices, were a bottom-up solution, and often a “cheap way” for the Japanese to rule the aborigines, especially at the beginning when the Japanese bureaucrats sent to Taiwan were poorly trained and knew little about the country in which they were living.
In chapter 3, “Tangled Up in Red: Textiles, Trading Posts, and Ethnic Bifurcation in Taiwan,” Barclay focuses on how material culture has been used in economic trade and cultural image making. Once again, Barclay's strength comes out as he begins this chapter. This time the story is about a 2014–15 exhibit, titled Rainbow and Dragonfly, which, “housed in a neoclassical, neocolonial edifice, was in good measure a dusting off, repackaging, and repurposing of the artifacts collected among indigenes during the Japanese occupation” (p. 161). He argues that colonial ethnography, museum practices, and photography were and continue to be active players in “the sustenance and revival of Atayal culture,” and this repackaging has become central to modern “Taiwan's national heritage” (p. 162).
Chapter 4, “The Geobodies within a Geobody: The Visual Economy of Race Making and Indigeneity,” looks at twentieth-century Japanese official, academic, and commercial publications about Taiwan's indigenes and how these sources have produced a “large reservoir of cultural imaginaries” that serve as reference points for the “Indigenous Renaissance” of the twenty-first century (p. 40).
Overall, this is a fascinating work that provides a much-needed critical examination of the multiple tribal communities that constitute what today is called Taiwan's indigenous populations. The only suggestion would be to include a footnote at the end when Barclay refers to a dispute over Atayal land that is part of Maqaw National Park. This reviewer would have liked to know more about this event. Otherwise, Outcasts of Empire is an important addition to the conversation about Taiwanese history, especially the overlooked history of Taiwan's indigenous populations, who are a critical part of, as Barclay has shown, Japanese colonialism and modern Taiwanese cultural identity.
