Abstract
This chapter has two main themes. First, it will consider how it was that an urban-based chemical programme spread at a global level under the force of a conjuncture of specific sites of local knowledge, academic research and intellectual property into the heart of a series of new industries associated with Europe in the later nineteenth century. Secondly, it will analyse how this new chemistry directly impacted on the politicisation of frontier warfare in Formosa from the 1860s, escalating with the colonial invasion of Japan in the mid-1890s. Finally, it will be shown that such global connectivities or impacts might have been rendered either insignificant or turned to more positive account by the very chemistry that had created them in the first place. Chemical work from the First World War allowed the production of plastic material and product to be freed from its dependency upon several raw materials. If such work had come earlier, political disaster in Formosa might well have been avoided.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter owes everything to my employment and my colleagues and friends in Taiwan since 1994, when I first took up a visiting Professorship at Foguang University in the graduate Institute of European Studies, Dalin, Chiayi. My subsequent research on several aspects of Taiwanese history was encouraged both by students and colleagues there and in the Department of International Studies, Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages, Kaohsiung, and by my doctoral students who have since become colleagues, especially Liu Chun-Yu Jerry 劉俊裕, and Pei-Hsi Lin Susan 林姵希. Earlier approaches to this subject were delivered as 17 November 2012, ‘High Tech Europe and the Formosan Civilization Wars circa 1865–1900. A Study in Global Connectivity’, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. November 2012, and as the Plenary Public Lecture ‘Global Commodities as Connectivities. High Tech Chemistry in Birmingham and the Camphor Wars in Formosa, circa 1861–1914’, Cain Conference, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, April 2014.
- 2.
For further information see Inkster, I.: Science and Technology in History, An Approach to Industrialisation, London and Rutgers: Macmillan, 1991, and Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 167–183.
- 3.
This needs explanation. Especially in areas of recent white settlement, the subsequent years of rapid agricultural, commercial and (at times) industrial development were primarily centred in the émigré economy itself. It was the settlers that were counted. The seeming high rates of economic growth, and especially of per capita income growth, were predicated on an accounting process that basically excluded all indigenous elements. The growth centres in areas such as Australia or Canada would have had little or no impact on the measures of ‘economic development’ of India, China or Indonesia, areas of huge and dense population. Reversing this, if we measured the performance of China or India in terms only of their commercial and export/processing centres—often places crammed by and by with expatriate Western engineers and other ‘experts’—then their ‘growth’ rates would have been amongst the highest in the world. As a final vision: what would have been the positive impact on the measured growth rate of India if Birmingham had been located there?
- 4.
For the general and critical analysis of the earlier period of industrial enlightenment see Mokyr, J.: The Enlightened Economy. Britain and the Industrial Revolution, London: Penguin, 2011; For artisanal skills see Inkster, I.: ‘Finding Artisans. British and International Patterns of Technological Innovation 1790–1914’, Cahiers d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences, No. 52, (2004), pp. 69–92, and the other papers in that volume by Pfister, Mottu-Weber, Soler, Chuan-Hui, and Woronoff.
- 5.
A term used widely enough at that time, associated with both Marxist critique and engineering expertise, the establishment of mills, workshops and factories dominated by machinery and power based on metal and chemical manipulations and engineering. It is used here to focus analysis on the manufactures that were dominant in the world capitalist economy prior to the 1970s, strongly emerging in a small core from the 1830s. Most smartly and finely depicted by Joseph Whitworth in his Miscellaneous Papers on Mechanical Subjects, of 1858: the notion provides a backbone to my forthcoming work, Prometheus Chained. Technology and the Victory of the Western World circa 1400–2017.
- 6.
In the years 1839–1842 and 1857–1860, whether the cause was primarily related to Britain’s need to pursue imperial importing of opium into China in order to exchange for the great variety of high-value products imported into Britain from China is not of central concern here. Of more importance is the resulting devastation of the Chinese economy, which had grown throughout the years of Europe’s early economic expansion—fourfold between 1600 and 1820—but then ceased growth until 1913, falling more drastically by 1950; fuller recovery awaited the late 1970s. See Madison, A.: Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run, 960–2030, Paris: OECD, 2007.
- 7.
From the Meiji Restoration of 1868 Japan had benefited enormously from trading into the echoes of the first industrial revolution whilst also gaining industrially and militarily from the substantial technological advances of the second. Whilst several of the industrial Great Powers were apprehensive (and Tsarist Russia rightfully fearful), the commercial giant of the East, Great Britain, readily enough saw an openly trading Japan as a far better commercial ally than a disintegrating Chinese imperial system. See Inkster, I.: Japanese Industrialisation. Historical and Cultural Perspectives, London: Routledge, 2001, especially chapters 4, 7 and 11.
- 8.
For an excellent most recent treatment on a large scale of military and civil technologies in world history see Andrade, T.: The Gunpowder Age. China, Military Innovation and the Rise of the West in World History, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016, especially chapters 14–18. For earlier treatments see Black, J.: War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents 1450–2000, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, and his ‘Conclusion. Global military history, the Chinese dimension’, in van de Ven, H. (ed.): Warfare in Chinese History, Leiden: Brill, 2000, pp. 428–42; and Headrick, Daniel R.: The Tools of Empire, Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Mostly such work deals with the impact of overtly military, transport and communications technologies on major civilisations or colonised nations, rather than more insidious industrial process technologies at the indigenous frontier sites of such places. For any systematic treatment of the latter we must turn to the anthropologists and sociologists of technology; see as an excellent early treatment Hill, S.: The Tragedy of Technology: Human Liberation versus Domination in the Late Twentieth Century, London: Pluto, 1988.
- 9.
Newton, W.: ‘Letters and Suggestions Upon the Amendment of the Laws Relative to Patents for Invention’, London, 1835, quote pp. 78–9; Report of Select Committee on the Law Relative to Patents for Invention, London, 1835, p. 132.
- 10.
Hopkins, E.: The Rise of the Manufacturing Town. Birmingham and the Industrial Revolution, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, chapters 2–4. For the inventive context see Prosser, R.B.: Birmingham Inventors and Inventions, Birmingham, 1881; Berg, M.: ‘Commerce and creativity in eighteenth century Birmingham’ in Berg, M. (ed.): Markets and Manufactures in Eighteenth Century England, London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 173–204.
- 11.
Patent data prior to 1855 in this chapter are calculations from the work compiled in the 1850s by patent officer Bennet Woodcroft, Titles of Patents for Invention Chronologically Arranged 1617–1852, London, 1854. Material from then to 1914, including Fig. 3.1, is derived from the original patent applications, and annual data includes a count of every patent applied for. All other patent data unless mentioned is from Commissioner of Patents Journal annually from 1852 to 1883.
- 12.
Neglect of this simplicity was the initial and fatal mistake at the heart of Weiner, Martin J.: English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. For rebuff see Inkster, I.: ‘Machinofacture and Technical Change: The Patent Evidence’, in Inkster, I. et al. (eds.): The Golden Age. Essays in British Social and Economic History 1850–1870, Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate, 2000, pp. 121–142; For the earlier approach that is far more industrial and technological see Levine, A.L.: Industrial Retardation in Britain 1880–1914, New York: Basic Books, 1967.
- 13.
Inkster, I.: ‘Technology and Culture in the First Climacteric circa 1870–1914 and Beyond’, International History Review, XXXI, 2 (June 2009), pp. 356–364.
- 14.
MS Typed, J.N. Goldsmith, ‘Alexander Parkes, Parkesine, Xylonite and Celluloid’, London, 1934, (British Library 8233 d 6), especially p. 28; British Patent (henceforth BP) 313, 1865; Alexander Parkes, Parkes’ Evidence for the Defendant in Spill v The Celluloid Manufacturing Company, New York, 1878, p.164.
- 15.
Elkington and Co., On the Application of Electro-Metallurgy to the Arts, London: J. King, 1844; Watt, A.: Electro-Deposition. A Practical Treatise, and Chapters on Electro-Metallurgy, London: Crosby Lockwood and Co., 1886.
- 16.
Masselon, Roberts and Cillard, Celluloid, Its Manufacture, Applications and Substitutes, London: Chas Griffin and Co., 1912.
- 17.
Using nitric acid to convert cellulose into cellulose nitrate and water: 3HNO3+ C6H10O5 → C6H7(NO2)3O5 + 3H2O.
- 18.
In summary, early euro-scientific experiments 1832–1846 were on nitric acid on cotton, paper or wood fibres, at Nancy, Paris, Basle, Frankfurt and Brunswick, this producing guncotton (also known as nitrocellulose or cellulose nitrate), at this stage highly unstable prior to the use of camphor.
- 19.
Barnes, Robert F.: The Dry Collodion Process, London: G. Knight, 1856; Goldsmith, op.cit. ‘Alexander Parkes’, pp. 5–30.
- 20.
In this presentation, he had the essentials: realistic plasticising required reducing the flammability of C6H7(NO2)3O5 and the evaporative quality of solvents used to dissolve it, thus camphor. So Parkes was probably most important in producing patent recipes which saw camphor as a solvent, a stabiliser and as a plasticiser.
- 21.
Henceforth individual patent references are sourced directly in this form: BP as British patent, USP as US patent and so on, with year and number given as archive references.
- 22.
Official Gazette of the US Patent Office, Washington, Government Patent Office, 1872, vol. 2. July–December 1872.
- 23.
Annual report of the US Commissioner of Patents for 1869 vols. 1 and 2, Washington: GPO, 1871.
- 24.
Bockmann, F.: Celluloid. Its Raw Materials, Manufacture, Properties and Uses, London: Scott and Greenwood, 1921, 2nd English edition trans. H. B. Stocks [1st ed. 1907].
- 25.
Goldsmith, ‘Alexander Parkes’, p. 1.
- 26.
In a 1870 patent, Hyatt describe the effect of camphor as temporary, the solidity of the substance from the mould only being improved ‘by evaporation of the camphor until it becomes hard and tough like horn … before the camphor has evaporated the material is easily softened by heat’ (US2101 of 1870). The term Celluloid was coined during 1868–1869 by I.S. Hyatt for the substance he and his brother made in Albany and registered on 14 January 1873 [US Patent 133,229, 1872], but this was described by Parkes in 1862 in a leaflet describing his exhibit at the International Exhibition, London, class 4 as Parkesine.
- 27.
Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry (1914), p. 227.
- 28.
Goldsmith, ‘Alexander Parkes’, p. 12.
- 29.
Schuetzenberger, Paul: Technology of Cellulose Esters, A Theoretical and Practical Treatise, New York: Van Nostrand, 1916; Goldsmith, ‘Alexander Parkes’, op.cit., pp. 17–26.
- 30.
The production process itself was far more dangerous. At the outset the factory of the first British licensees of Schônbein, John Hall and Sons of Faversham, blew up when using new material in 1847, and similar explosions occurred in France, Germany and Russia in the following years. G.E. Kahlbaum(ed.): Letters of J. J. Berzelius and C.F. Schonbein (transl. F.V. Darbishire), London: Williams and Norgate, 1900. The guided serendipity is fascinating in this early development. While he was experimenting on ozone—which he discovered—Schônbein found he could ‘convert ordinary unsized paper into a substance having the following properties’, coherence, resistance to most chemicals, firm and tough, especially as an improved paper (primarily that is waterproof) and strong, good for printing, packing and wallpaper (letter of 5 March 1846, pp. 81–85).
- 31.
‘Landmarks of the Plastics Industry’, London: Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd., 1962, p 10.
- 32.
Goldsmith, ‘Alexander Parkes’, p 10.
- 33.
For the detailed science–technology links see originally Worden, J.: Nitrocellulose industry, Vols. 1 and 2, New York: Van Nostrand, 1911; Sproxton, F.: ‘The Celluloid Industry’, Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry, 39, October 1920, pp. 351–368; Most recently, Reilly, Julie A.: ‘Celluloid Objects: Their chemistry and preservation’, Journal of the American Institute of Conservation, 1991, Volume 30, Number 2, 145 to 162.
- 34.
Thus Schônbein’s 1846 discovery was accidental but led to his flurry of entrepreneurial activity secured by his British patent filed on 8 October 1846, followed by British licence agreements in the next year.
- 35.
In Britain at this time perhaps best known were Dr Fletcher’s Quinine and Camphor Pills, and there was nothing at all that they could not cure! For an early advertisement that made its claims for many years see Nottingham Journal (11 April 1836)
- 36.
For the indigenous people of Taiwan generally at this time, see Stainton, Michael: ‘The Politics of Taiwanese Aboriginal Origins’ in Rubinstein (ed.), Taiwan: A New History, op. cit., pp. 27–44, and the doctoral thesis by Susan Lin below (see endnote 37). For the Tayal it should be noted that by 1909 their population had dropped to 28,242 on official estimates but had risen to 87,794 by 1981 and then fallen to 74,321 (even including the 20,000 or more Truku in their number); these figures do seem unlikely so either census takers were too casual, tribal definitions/locations altered or individuals moved back and forth between the east and west of the island for a variety of reasons, this causing confused counts. See also, Preliminary Statistical Analysis Report of 2000, Population and Housing Census, E., Taipei: Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan, R.O.C., National Statistics, 2000; Li, Jen-kuei, Cheng-hwa Tsang Tsang, Ying-kuei et al. (eds.): Austronesian Studies Relating to Taiwan, Taipei: Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, 1995.
- 37.
For full details of the military resistance of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan and a very valuable analysis of the way in which they embedded modern guns within their traditional values and cultural patterns, see Pei Linm, Susan 林姵希: Firearms, Technology and Culture: Resistance of Taiwanese Indigenes to Chinese, European and Japanese Encroachment in a Global Context, circa 1860–1914, PhD Thesis in History, Nottingham Trent University, March 2016. For an early Japanese appreciation of the military and cultural strength of the indigenous peoples see Shinji, Ishii: ‘The Life of the Mountain People in Formosa’, Folklore, 28, no. 2 1917, 115–132; ‘The Silent War in Formosa’, The Asiatic Quarterly Review, 2, October 1913, 77–92. For an introduction to the context and anthropology see Inkster, Ian: ‘Anthropologies of Enthusiasm: Charlotte Salwey, Shinji Ishii, and Japanese Colonialism in Formosa circa 1913–1917’, Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, 9, No.1 (June, 2011), pp.1–32.
- 38.
The first two traders in Taiwan were Jardine Matheson and Company and Dent and Company, Hong Kong, British firms, who opened offices in 1860; see Grajdanzev, Andrew: Formosa Today. An Analysis of the Economic Development and Strategic Importance of Japan’s Tropical Colony, New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1942.
- 39.
For data on camphor production and prices see Davidson, James Wheeler: The Island of Formosa, Past and Present: History, People, Resources, and Commercial Prospects. Tea, Camphor, Sugar, Gold, Coal, Sulphur, Economical Plants, and Other Productions, London: Macmillan, 1903. The large appendix to this volume calculates prices, volumes and exports for camphor and is based on consular trade reporting—checked against the original sources the material is found to be accurate. See also Meskill, J.M: A Chinese pioneer family. The Lins of Wu-Feng, Taiwan 1729–1895, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979; Pao-San Ho, Samuel: ‘Colonialism and Development: Korea, Taiwan and Kwantung’, in Myers, R.H. and Peattie, M.R. (eds.): The Japanese Colonial Empire 1895–1945, Princeton University Press, Princeton New Jersey 1984, pp. 347–398; Allee, A.A.: Law and Local society in Late Imperial China: Tan-Shui Subprefecture and Hsin-Chu County, Taiwan, 1840–1895, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Pennsylvania. 1994, especially pp. 190–240, on tea and camphor in the export economy.
- 40.
Lin Manhong 林滿紅. Cha, Tang, Zhangnao Ye Yu Taiwan Zhi Shehui Jingji Bianqian 茶、糖、 樟腦業與臺灣之社會經濟變遷 (1860–1895) [The Tea, Sugar and Camphor Industries and Socio-Economic Change in Taiwan]. Taipei: Lianjing 聯經, 1997; Tavares, Antonio C.: Crystals from the Savages Forest Imperialism and Capitalism in the Taiwan Camphor Industry 1800–1945, PhD Thesis, Princeton University, 2004.
- 41.
See Gardella, Robert: ‘From Treaty Ports to Provincial Status, 1860–1894’ in Murray A. Rubinstein (ed.): Taiwan: A New History, Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2007.
- 42.
Davidson, The Island of Formosa, op.cit, unpaginated appendix.
- 43.
The sources for this figure are in accordance with data in endnote 39 as well as my calculations from the annual data of The Japan Year Book, 1906, pp. 526–531, and onwards, and are based on a kin weighing just over 1 lb or 600 grammes, the yen at around 2s in sterling.
- 44.
Eskidsen, Robert (ed.): Foreign Adventurers and the Aborigines of Southern Taiwan 1867–1874. Western Sources Related to Japan’s Expedition to Taiwan, Taipei: Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, 2005.
- 45.
News of the Japanese invasion of Taiwan stimulated speculation over increasing prices, and in particular Colonel North, the speculator, established a London syndicate to buy up all supplies, prices jumping from 20 cents to 67 cents per lb., within days.
- 46.
The death/wounded ratios of Japanese fighting on the Formosan frontier during 1896–1909 was around 7/3 according to Japanese data, the official ratio for casualties in the First World War for all sides was around 3/7, so the combination of camphor and colonialism was a particularly dangerous and costly one. May–August 1907 may have been the worst period, when a great advance of the Japanese frontier guard-line was attempted in the midst of camphor regions and insurgent activity. There ensued 107 days of fighting with large casualties. A precise Japanese estimate of 126,628 yen was required in construction of 277 guardhouses, casualties including ninety-three Chinese ‘coolies’, mostly unarmed servants of Japanese on the frontier, including some police. Calculations have been made from data in (Japanese) Government of Formosa, ‘Report on the Control of the Aborigines in Formosa’, Formosa: Bureau of Aboriginal Affairs, Taihoku (1911).
- 47.
Compare this with conditions and instances of resistance—both physical and cultural—in Hill, The Tragedy of Technology, op.cit, and see also Berger, Peter: ‘Four Faces of Global Culture’, National Interest, 49 (1997), pp. 23–29 and Berger, Peter and Huntington, Samuel P.: Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
- 48.
Studies of cost and return on colonialism are usually marred by failing to distinguish between the costs to the colonising nation at large as against the returns to a small group of capitalists within such nations—colonialism represents a redistribution of incomes within the colonising nation—the costs of colonialism being paid by all taxpayers, the returns to colonialism being principally in the hands of commercial and industrial capitalists as well as some technocratic workers and experts. This is perhaps what explains colonialism continuing in the face of its supposed low return/cost ratios.
- 49.
In 1913 exports from Japan of crude camphor were restricted to celluloid manufacture, this being applied to Formosa in 1918, effectively prohibiting exports for refining. By the 1920s, monopoly pricing of camphor by Japan was made ineffective through technological change and by increased world supplies of German camphor. By 1931 there was free competition between synthetic and natural camphor on world markets.
- 50.
Mochizuki, Kotaro (ed.): Japan Today. A Souvenir of the Anglo-Japanese Exhibition held in London 1910, Tokyo: Liberal News Agency, 1910 and printed by Methodist Publishing House, Tokyo, pp. 160–65. In Japan private companies such as Japan Celluloid and Artificial Silk Co., in Aboshi, Hyogo, were hiring German technical experts in attempts to save the use of camphor. See also, Japan Monopoly Corporation, Abstract of researches on Tobacco, Salt and Camphor, Tokyo: JMC, 1958.
- 51.
More recent investigations, that is, c. 1939, have proved that the leaves of the camphor tree yield more camphor and oil of camphor than the wood, and that their proper harvesting does no injury to the tree, so methods of distillation have now been greatly modified. If such a discovery had been made in about 1870, then this story would never have arisen.
- 52.
Mitchell, Charles A.: Camphor in Japan and in Formosa, Chiswick Press for private circulation, 1900; Nock, J.K.: Camphor Cultivation in Ceylon, Colombo, AM and J Ferguson, 1905.
- 53.
But see the early US patents also, as in the production of camphoric ethers, as a thick colourless oil, (USP10433 of 1898 G.W. Johnson, patent agent for Kalle and Co.) or production of camphor and wastes via the heating together of turpentine and anhydrous oxalic acid, this treated with caustic alkali and distilled with steam to separate out camphor (USP14754 of 1900 C.K. Mills, the patent agent for Ampere Electro-Chemical Co.).
- 54.
Already in USA during the 1870s–1880s John H Stevens (and others at the Celluloid Manufacturing Co. of New Jersey, working Hyatt’s patents) was inventing camphor substitutes, and from 1889 chemists throughout the world competed to produce alternative substitutes; but until the 1920s this tack was hindered by the cost of manufacture.
- 55.
Calculated from Davidson Appendix, see endnote 39 above.
- 56.
For some summary details see Inkster, ‘Technology and Culture’, op.cit, endnote No.13.
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Inkster, I. (2018). Indigenous Resistance and the Technological Imperative: From Chemistry in Birmingham to Camphor Wars in Formosa, 1860s–1914. In: Pretel, D., Camprubí, L. (eds) Technology and Globalisation. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75450-5_3
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