Abstract:
This is a study of nation-state formation. Theoretically, it demonstrates how the biography of a belated nation can be written in a non-essentialist way by taking a world-historical view. Empirically, it puts forward a civilizational-constitutional thesis of Taiwanese national history – or, to put it simply, a constitutional history of Taiwan. By reviewing and building on two peerless historiographical endeavors, Tsao Yung-ho’s thesis of “History of Taiwan Island” (HTI) and Wu Rwei-ren’s thesis of “Interfacial Nation-State Formation in Taiwan” (INSF), I lay out what is termed the “trilogy of historiography” in writing a non-essentialist Taiwanese national history, with which the present study hopes to make a modest contribution to the unfinished cause initiated by Tsao and taken on by Wu. Adhering to the world-historical tenet implied in Tsao’s thesis of HTI, I propose a civilizational-constitutional perspective, from which civilization is understood as an anthropic system with its own idiosyncratic ways of organizing collective lives, and constitution is conceptualized as a subset that specifically points to the socio-political properties and configuration of a civilization. The merit of taking this civilizational-constitutional view is twofold. Theoretically, it can remedy the logically fatal weakness of skipping political history altogether inherent in Tsao’s HTI, while also solving the three faults, i.e., an overly-filtered geopolitical viewpoint, a lopsided approach leaning toward the political aspect, and an inbuilt settler bias, from which Wu’s INSF suffers. Empirically, we are able to move beyond the deeply ingrained understanding of Taiwan history, whose periodization is done in line with the duration of the island’s successive foreign rule. Instead, through a systematic understanding of civilization and constitution, we develop a tripartite periodization of Taiwan history consisting successively of the Short Seventeenth Century, the Long Eighteenth Century, and the Lasting Nineteenth Century. Each of the three periods is characterized by a particular pattern of civilizational intersection that took place on Taiwan island and that had distinct impacts of the constitutional transformation of Taiwan. First, the Short Seventeenth Century, spanning only around four decades between the mid-1620s and the early 1660s, marks the historic first encounter of Austronesian, European, and Chinese civilizations on Taiwan island. In the first-ever encounter of the three civilizations, the constitutional prototype of contemporary Taiwan – that is, a Western-style political regime established on top of the tense coexistence of aborigines and settlers – was previewed, albeit on a smaller scale, on the island. Second, the Long Eighteenth Century signifies an interval of nearly two hundred years between the first presence and the second arrival of European civilization in Taiwan. Between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Taiwan had witnessed confrontations, fusion, and hostile coexistence between Austronesian and Chinese civilizations in the absence of European civilization. In this historical window created by the withdrawal of the Dutch VOC in the early 1660s, the dual constitution consisting of a stateless Austronesian tribal society and an imperial Confucianized settler society took shape in Taiwan. Third, the Lasting Nineteenth Century, characterized by the second intersection of the three civilizations following the reentry of European civilization into Taiwan in the mid-nineteenth century, has undergone a circuitous course of nation-state building, in which the Taiwanese nation-state as a Western-style political superstructure has been established upon the previously formed dual-constitution social fabric of Taiwan.
