Abstract
In the formative period when Taiwan was under Japanese rule (1895–1945), modernizing the sugar manufacturing
industry was a pressing issue. To promote the economy and reduce reliance on imported sugar, as agricultural economist Nitobe Inazō insisted in his Tōgyō Kairyō Ikensho (Opinion Paper on Improving the Sugar Industry), Taiwan was expected to mass-produce sugarcane-based raw sugar. However, the Japanese Empire had little experience with this type of modernization; therefore, Hawai‘i, having established itself as the leading sugar-producing region in the late-19th-century Pacific, became a frequent and significant reference for Taiwan. This study focuses primarily on the implementation of what Bosma and Knights called a "global factory." Large-scale sugar-manufacturing machinery and factories became standards in the sugar-industry world by the early 20th century, including in Taiwan. The study purports that people who had connections with Hawai‘i, including immigrants, contributed to establishing the industry in Taiwan. These people were divided into two groups: those involved in the government-initiated migrant-labor project between Japan and the Hawaiian kingdom (1885–1894), and those who worked in the sugarcane fields at factories in Hawai‘i. The former group, including Robert W. Irwin and Takechi Tadamichi, was directly involved in the migration project and, later, the establishment of the Taiwan Sugar Company in 1901. The latter group was considered by Taiwan’s sugar company managers the experienced "engineers" who were able to operate machinery and run factories. This case study attempts to connect the history of Japanese migration to Hawai‘i and the Japanese colonial history of Taiwan by examining the sugar-related interactions between the two islands. Eventually, these interactions shaped the image of Taiwan as a protégé of Hawai‘i in the 1930s. Similar to the global history of other cash crops, skills and systems of sugar production were transplanted from the west to the rest of the world. In emphasizing the multiple trans-Pacific movements of people, machinery, and skills related to sugar, this study challenges the west-centered global history of sugar and reveals segments of power dynamics that appeared within sugar-producing islands in the pre-war Pacific.
