Making the past of early modern Taiwan between Europe and East Asia
Organized by The Cluster for Colonial Connections and Comparisons
As part of my research on the co-production of historical narratives of empires, I examine how European sources helped to integrate Taiwan into a Japanese History of the Southern Seas. When gathering sources on Japanese interactions in the South China Sea in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Japanese translator historian Murakami Naojirô (1868-1966) side glanced at Taiwan. Inspired by the work of British diplomat historian Ernest M. Satow and the German historian Ludwig Riess, Murakami established a colonial archive of seventeenth-century Taiwan, which was primarily based on Spanish, Dutch and Sinkan manuscripts. Murakami contributed to Taiwan’s pre-Qing by paying particular attention to primary source material found in Taiwan, China and the Netherlands. In doing so, Murakami and his colleagues introduced a new periodisation which although not ignoring indigenous people it downplayed their agency. Stressing Japanese and European dimensions in the history of early modern Taiwan they attributed centrality to Taiwan in the the South China Sea. These views became institutionalised with the foundation of the first chair in the History of the nanyô in 1929. Within this multi-layered process Taiwan became a testing ground for Murakami Naojirô, whose main goal was to synchronise Japanese and European histories of encounters and connections for the seventeenth century.
Birgit Tremml-Werner is a global historian working on transcultural encounters in South East Asia in the early modern period.