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STATECRAFT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY ON THE TAIWAN FRONTIER, 1600-1800. By John Robert Shepherd. Stanford (California): Stanford University Press. 1993. xviii, 596 pp. (Figures, maps, tables.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 0-8047-2066-5.
ASSAILED by more powerful cultures, aborigines are either wiped out, assimilated, or forced into marginal habitats. Such was the received wisdom that would not fit the "plains aborigines" of Taiwan, the subjects whom anthropologist John Shepherd set out to study. Discovering why Taiwan was different led Shepherd into a deep investigation of how it was colonized and administered over the past three centuries. The result is this masterful history of how Qing government policy shaped the settlement of Taiwan.
The underlying assumption fits well with G. W. Skinner's insistence that social forms and government policies can best be understood as a single research subject. Shepherd's work resembles Skinner's...