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rfmcdonaldI've always liked John Wills' 2000 conference paper "More Luzon than Hainan: Taiwan Before Qing Rule" (PDF format). In the 16th century, Taiwan and Luzon were both islands located off the coast of China with Austronesian-speaking populations, both islands taken by a European maritime power to serve as a regional trading bases (the Dutch in Taiwan and the Spanish in the Philippines), both islands acquiring large Chinese mercantile and migrant-worker populations. In the mid-17th century, however, Taiwan was taken by the anti-Qing regime of Coxinga; after Coxinga's death, the Qing felt obliged to occupy Taiwan in order to remove a threat to their rule, leading to the eventual Sinicization of that island. Luzon remained under Spanish rule, however tenuously, and survived to constitute the nucleus of the modern-day Filipino nation.
The genius of the paper lies in the way that it uses counterfactual assumptions (what if the Dutch retained Taiwan? what if the Spanish lost Luzon?) to highlight the extreme contingency of East Asian frontiers and nation-building. If the Dutch had been able to keep Taiwan, quite possibly Taiwan would be an independent state populated mainly by Austronesian-speaking Calvinists, with admixtures of Chinese migrants from adjacent Fujian and perhaps some Indonesians. If the Spanish had lost Luzon, Chinese frontiers might well extend deep into insular Southeast Asia with potentially significant repercussions on global trading patterns and local great-power rivalries. Other outcomes are equally imaginable: an insular Chinese byarchy based on Luzon and Taiwan, perhaps incorporation as a peripheral region of the Japanese state on the model of the Ryûkyûs or Hokkaido, perhaps even a Spanish Taiwan.
The contingency of events was limited by Taiwan's proximity to the Chinese mainland, and knowing that this contingency existed doesn't change the very real question of national identities. This contingency does, as Wills writes, "provide an argument, if any is still needed among academics, against the essentializing of a nation and its boundaries, and for what historians always have to teach: the sense of continuity and discontinuity that we find so strikingly present in the trajectory of Taiwan’s history in 1650 and in 2000." For the world as a whole, I'd add.
The genius of the paper lies in the way that it uses counterfactual assumptions (what if the Dutch retained Taiwan? what if the Spanish lost Luzon?) to highlight the extreme contingency of East Asian frontiers and nation-building. If the Dutch had been able to keep Taiwan, quite possibly Taiwan would be an independent state populated mainly by Austronesian-speaking Calvinists, with admixtures of Chinese migrants from adjacent Fujian and perhaps some Indonesians. If the Spanish had lost Luzon, Chinese frontiers might well extend deep into insular Southeast Asia with potentially significant repercussions on global trading patterns and local great-power rivalries. Other outcomes are equally imaginable: an insular Chinese byarchy based on Luzon and Taiwan, perhaps incorporation as a peripheral region of the Japanese state on the model of the Ryûkyûs or Hokkaido, perhaps even a Spanish Taiwan.
The contingency of events was limited by Taiwan's proximity to the Chinese mainland, and knowing that this contingency existed doesn't change the very real question of national identities. This contingency does, as Wills writes, "provide an argument, if any is still needed among academics, against the essentializing of a nation and its boundaries, and for what historians always have to teach: the sense of continuity and discontinuity that we find so strikingly present in the trajectory of Taiwan’s history in 1650 and in 2000." For the world as a whole, I'd add.
