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The Formation of the Modern East Asian Economy
In 1642, they drove off the island a small settlement of Spaniards who had earlier driven Japanese out of this area in order to protect their Manila-Amoy trade from this site. Having pacified the north, the Dutch then secured a north-south route along the western coast in 1645, and by c. 1650 controlled 268 villages and c. 68,657 villagers.

The Chinese presence on the island had long antedated the arrival of the Dutch. By the time the Dutch ships arrived in 1624, between 1000 and 1500 Chinese were working there as village traders and a much smaller number possibly as farmers. Disorders on the China mainland, eventually leading to the fall of the Ming and the rise of the Qing dynasty, would see a dramatic increase in the number of Chinese settlers. About 10,000 Chinese lived in Dutch-controlled areas by 1638-39, about 15,000 in 1650, and 35,000 in 1661. It was in this year that another 25,000 Chinese arrived under the command of a notable Chinese pirate rebel, Zheng Chenggong, and within 10 months his troops forced the Dutch to surrender their Zeelandia Castle and leave the island for good. Two decades later, however, the Qing dynasty sent its own forces, and in 1683 subdued this rebel force to establish for the first time in Chinese history direct dynastic control over this island and its growing population of some 60,000 Chinese and about 100,000 aborigines.

Such is a crude outline of the early history of the interaction between different peoples on this island. And in giving it this textbook way, I have repeated the common error of presenting this history in terms of nation states and their separate peoples. For just as the Dutch forces contained aborigines and the Spanish troops on Taiwan many Pampangans, slaves, and Chinese, so were the Qing forces manned by Chinese, Manchus, and aborigines. Just as Japanese and early Chinese came to this island without their government's knowledge, let alone approval, so even did the Dutch arrive on Taiwan without an official go-ahead from their government.

In seeking how these very different peoples then interacted, often beyond the barriers of their states, I will try today to place Taiwan's history within the perspective not of Chinese dynastic history but of overseas Chinese history and colonial settlements in East and Southeast Asia. I hope to compare the Chinese settlement in Taiwan with that of their rivals on the island as well as to Chinese settlement in the Spanish colony of Manila and the Dutch colony of Batavia. In seeing then how Chinese interacted with other peoples in East Asia once they were free of the direct controls of their state, we will acquire a clearer understanding of how they established a particularly successful settlement in Taiwan compared to their fate elsewhere.

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