Policies put forth by the Office of the Governor-General to stimulate industry in Taiwan, which became a Japanese territory after the First Sino-Japanese War, were dominated by initiatives to develop a modern sugar industry, and for a few years around the turn of the century, several large-scale modern raw sugar factories were established on the island using Japanese capital. In 1910, raw sugar companies in Taiwan formed the Taiwan Togyo Rengokai (Taiwan Sugar Industry Association) (later the Togyo Rengokai, and then the Nihon Togyo Rengokai), and sustained a prosperous sugar industry as a cartel through the First World War, Great Depression, Manchurian Incident and Second Sino-Japanese war, to the end of the Pacific War.
This collection of historical source material includes minutes from meetings covering the activities of this Togyo Rengokai, painting a comprehensive, intimately detailed picture of the development of the modern sugar industry, and throwing into relief the Japanese sugar industry's full-scale shift offshore using domestic sugar capital. In addition to documents such as basic agricultural surveys issued by the Office of the Governor-General, the records contain a wealth of hitherto unreleased material, such as the individual writings of civil servants at the Office of the Governor-General, shedding light not only on the state of the Taiwanese economy during the colonial period, but the circumstances that led to policies to stimulate agriculture using crops such as sugar cane and rice.