“The Camphor Question Is in Reality the Savage Question”: Indigenous Pacification and the Transition to Capitalism in the Taiwan Borderlands (1895–1915)

This article examines the relationship between the Taiwan camphor industry and Japan’s conquest of the island’s Indigenous peoples. Between 1895 and 1915, Japanese police and military forces invaded Taiwan’s Indigenous highlands for control of camphor. At the dawn of the twentieth century, camphor crystals were a vital natural resource used in the production of celluloid, pharmaceuticals, and industrial chemicals. The consequences of this single commodity were far reaching, as Japanese pacification armies shelled and burned Indigenous villages to the ground, forcibly relocated tens of thousands, and killed both resistance fighters and innocent civilians. This article looks at the ways in which the productive and consumptive demands of the camphor industry directly shaped the political, military, and ideological structures of imperial governance in upland Taiwan. Through the prism of the Taiwan case, it examines the violent forms of colonial occupation that accompany the imposition of capitalist social relations on native societies.