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 1623 to 1662. Taiwan, therefore, was the site of a colonial conjuncture, a system Andrade calls co-colonization. The Dutch relied closely on Chinese colonists for food, entrepreneurship, translation, labor, and administrative help, while Chinese colonists relied upon the Dutch for protection from headhunting aborigines and other Chinese groups, such as pirates who ranged the China Seas.
Andrade sheds light on one of the most important questions of global history: how do we understand the great colonial movements that have shaped our modern world? By examining Dutch, Spanish, and Han colonization on one island, he offers a compelling answer: Europeans established colonies throughout the globe not by technological superiority but by sponsoring overseas colonialism, whereas Asian states, in general, did not. When they did, European colonies became vulnerable, and Andrade ends with the capture of Taiwan by a Chinese army, led by a Chinese warlord named Zheng Chenggong.
