Written by Evan N. Dawley.
Image credit: The Island Formosa and the Pescadores, public domain.
Taiwan’s history is long and varied, but Taiwan Studies as a realm of inquiry only emerged in the last three or four decades. As a result, the field of Taiwanese history has been shaped by relatively few paradigms, the dominant of which are rooted outside of Taiwan’s territory, frame the islands and their inhabitants as elements within the histories of China or Japan, and tend to marginalise the experiences of Taiwanese people. At least, that was the prevailing condition in early 2017, when the International Journal of Taiwan Studies (IJTS) issued a call for contributions to its inaugural issue. At that time, I was finalising the manuscript for my first monograph, Becoming Taiwanese, a book that self-consciously transcends the standard periodisation of modern Taiwan’s history into pre-1895, 1895-1945, and post-1945. I was also then on a year of sabbatical. I had the opportunity to think more deeply than I previously had about the perspectives that we can use to examine Taiwan’s past, and so I decided to answer the call.
In the essay that resulted from this decision, I sought to break out of the standard state-centric periodisation within Taiwan Studies by placing the history of its people at the centre. I was and am not critical of scholarship that focuses on the states that have governed Taiwan or the numerous state-focused efforts of residents of Taiwan to resist or reshape the government because these are crucial issues. Nonetheless, a state-centred perspective limits the range of subjects that can be studied and questions that can be asked. It potentially ignores the experiences of indigenous Taiwanese and others at the periphery of the state. I proposed a new periodisation that divided up time-based on a range of factors—interactions between different demographic groups as well as between society and state, social transformation, and especially the creation of Taiwanese identities—rather than the change from one governing regime to another. The key watershed periods came in the middle of the seventeenth century, the 1870s–1880s, and the 1970s–1990s. With these factors in mind, I separated time into four eras: the Indigenous Era, the Era of Assimilation and Localization, the Era of Taiwanisation, and the Taiwanese Era.
I think that this periodisation is significant primarily because it allows us to think of Taiwan in ways that are different from the norm. In recent years, the most prevalent view of Taiwan has been some variation on The Economist’s headline about “the most dangerous place on earth”, which is itself an elaboration on a longer tendency to view Taiwan primarily in terms of cross-straits relations. To put it another way, China is at the centre of so much of what gets written about both contemporary and historical Taiwan. Depending upon the era being studied, other external factors guide the narrative: the Cold War, Japanese imperialism, or Qing expansion. All of these approaches can be appropriate, but putting Taiwan and Taiwanese people at the core opens new avenues for research and analysis. Indigenous Taiwanese become central actors in Taiwan’s history rather than peripheral figures who only respond to state policies. It becomes possible to observe the ways that languages, cultures, and identities developed along their own trajectories rather than as parts of some other history. We can see that Taiwan’s democracy and Taiwanese identities are older than the end of martial law in 1987 and can use parts of Taiwan’s historical experience—authoritarianism and democratisation, economic development, settler colonialism, and Indigenous rights movements—in a comparative way.
I cannot effectively assess whether or not this essay has had an impact on the field of Taiwan Studies. On the one hand, it is not among the top five most-requested articles published by the IJTS, so it is probably not as widely read as others have been (based on the journal’s own data shared with its Board in the fall of 2024; I joined the Board after my essay was published). On the other hand, in the years since it was published, there has been a noticeable increase in Taiwan-centric academic and popular publications. The English-language media coverage of Taiwan has become much broader. It has looked more deeply into Taiwanese politics and society. A growing number of books are being published that unquestionably tell the recent history of Taiwan in its own right and make the people of Taiwan the most significant figures in that history. For example, Niki Alsford’s Taiwan Lives uses individual life stories—some of them non-Taiwanese—to depict Taiwan as a place deeply enmeshed in world history since the nineteenth century. In Revolutionary Taiwan, Catherine Chou and Mark Harrison show that Taiwan’s post-war democratic transition was revolutionary precisely because it was led by people who envisioned Taiwan as a fundamentally different place—an independent nation-state—than it had previously been seen. Scott Simon’s recent book on Indigenous Taiwanese, Truly Human, demonstrates that we cannot understand Taiwan without incorporating this long-marginalised segment of the population. To be sure, there was earlier Taiwan-centric scholarship, such as Thomas Gold’s study of Taiwan’s “economic miracle” or Shelley Rigger’s explanation of Taiwan’s importance in global affairs. Nonetheless, these sorts of books are becoming more regular; they are no longer anomalies. But I would not claim that I caused this shift. Rather, I think that my essay in the IJTS captured and elaborated upon an existing trend more than it directly influenced the recent burst in Taiwan-focused publications.
The one instance in which I am certain that my re-periodisation of Taiwan’s history had an influence is the framework that it provided for my own book on that subject. I am in the process of completing A People’s History of Taiwan (forthcoming from Reaktion Books), in which I relate the history of the four eras named above and explore the developments that caused the shift from one era to the next. The chapters of the book do not follow that chronology perfectly or rigidly—narrative continuity sometimes requires temporal flexibility—but the periodisation and the ideas that underlie it guided me as I wrote the text. Taking this approach allowed me to write the book as an explanation of the origins and evolution of Taiwan’s contemporary multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-identity polity and to highlight all of the frictions that existed and exist within it and between the people and the state. That is because I was not primarily concerned with cross-strait tensions, the outcomes of particular elections, or the interests of other countries—all of which subjects show up in the text—I could instead concentrate on the social and cultural features, in addition to the political contexts, that shaped Taiwanese identities over the very long term. Knowing the depth and strength of those identities is essential to understanding how Taiwan and Taiwanese operate in the world today.
Evan N. Dawley is an Associate Professor of History at Goucher College. He is the author of Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s – 1950s (Harvard Asia Center Press, 2019; Chinese version, National Taiwan University Press, 2021), co-editor of Beyond Versailles: The 1919 Moment and a New Order in East Asia (Lexington Books, 2021) and The Decade of the Great War: Japan’s Interactions with the Wider World in the 1910s (Brill, 2014), and co-organiser of the Primary Sources on Taiwan documentary translation project (https://taiwanprimarysources.com/).
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘IJTS Open Access Awards‘.