UCLA

This dissertation examines the relationship between Taiwan’s 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 access to and control of camphor-producing forests. At the dawn of the twentieth century, camphor crystals were vital to the production of celluloid, a variety of pharmaceuticals, and multiple industrial chemicals. The consequences of Japan’s quest to access and control this lucrative commodity were far-reaching and highly destructive. Japanese armies shelled and burned Indigenous villages to the ground, forcibly relocated tens of thousands of Indigenous people, and killed both resistance fighters and innocent civilians. This dissertation explores the ways in which the productive and consumptive demands of the camphor industry shaped the political, military, and ideological structures of Japanese 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.