How Taiwan became Chinese

About this book

"At the beginning of the 1600s, Taiwan was a sylvan backwater, sparsely inhabited by headhunters and visited mainly by pirates and fishermen. By the end of the century it was home to more than a hundred thousand Chinese colonists, who grew rice and sugar for export on world markets." "How Taiwan Became Chinese examines this remarkable transformation. Drawing primarily on Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese sources, Tonio Andrade argues that, paradoxically, Europeans started the large-scale Chinese colonization of the island, along with the Spanish, who established a base in northern Taiwan, and the Dutch, who ruled a colony from 1628 to 1662. Taiwan, therefore, was the site of a colonial conjuncture, a system Andrade calls co-colonization."--Jacket.