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Podcast: New Books in East Asian Studies
Episode: Paul D. Barclay, "Outcasts of Empire: Japan's Rule on Taiwan's 'Savage Border,' 1874-1945" (U California Press, 2018)
Description: Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874-1945 (University of California Press, 2018) by Paul D. Barclay unveils the causes and consequences of capitalism’s failure to “batter down all Chinese walls” in modern Taiwan. Adopting micro- and macrohistorical perspectives, Barclay argues that the interpreters, chiefs, and trading-post operators who mediated state-society relations on Taiwan’s “savage border” during successive Qing and Japanese regimes rose to prominence and faded to obscurity in concert with a series of “long nineteenth century” global transformations.Superior firepower and large economic reserves ultimately enabled Japanese statesmen to discard mediators on the border a...