From the Atlantic to the Manchu: Taiwan Sugar and the Early Modern World, 1630s–1720s

Abstract

Taiwan, the first post-Dutch-colonial society in Asia, experienced an exponential growth of sugar production in the six decades following the Siege of Fort Zeelandia (1661–1662) and emerged as a world-leading sugar producer in the 1720s, overshadowing any single sugar island in the contemporary Caribbean region. This unprecedented expansion of a non-western sugar frontier encourages us to revisit the existing theories about sugar and early modern globalization, which represent highly productive offshore sugar islands as a unique product of the expansion of the European capitalist economy in the Atlantic World. The case of Taiwan sugar instead shows how a former European colony in East Asia with a nascent sugar economy was first militarily occupied by a non-western maritime power, then politically incorporated by a non-western empire, and eventually economically integrated by a non-western consumer market. Combining Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, and English sources, in this article, I investigate the rise of Taiwan sugar in a global context from a sugar crisis of the Atlantic system in the 1630s to the Pax Manjurica in the China Seas region in the early eighteenth century.