Colonial Encounters and Identity Formation: Dutch Colonizers, Hoklo Immigrants, and Indigenous Peoples in Seventeenth-Century Formosa

This study combines Anderson’s concepts of spatial boundaries and administrative classification with Gellner’s theories of state and nationalism to analyse identity reconstruction in seventeenth-century Formosa under the tripartite interaction of colonial powers, Hokkien immigrants, and indigenous peoples. Multiple toponyms – Ilha Formosa, Takasago – reveal external powers’ construction of Formosa as a ‘strategic frontier’ in their geopolitical imagination; naming and cartography abstracted scattered spaces into governable units. Under Dutch and Spanish colonial rule, indigenous societies were systematically restructured. Colonizers, driven by resource extraction, governed through military repression, religious assimilation, and economic control. Nevertheless, indigenous peoples demonstrated agency through resistance and strategic cooperation – e.g. the Matta Incident and exile of inibs (indigenous priestesses). Driven by maritime prohibition policy and the Ming-Qing transition’s push-pull dynamics, Hokkien immigrants developed an instrumental, situationally adaptable ‘maritime Hokkien Chinese’ identity; under certain conditions, they formed cross-ethnic anti-colonial alliances with indigenous groups. Although seventeenth-century colonial governance did not immediately give rise to modern nationalism, the ‘territorialized’ imagination it established laid the historical and epistemological foundation for the subsequent formation of Taiwanese identity.