The Roots of a New Countryside: Cotton, Capital, and Colonialism in Southern Korea, 1910-1945

• In Event: Environments Under Empire: New Materials and Changing Landscapes in the Japanese Colonization of Korea

Abstract

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, agriculture remained the major industry in Korea with upwards of two-thirds of the population engaged in agriculture. Nonetheless, by the 1940s farming was far from a traditional industry, as new crops, fertilizers, and methods of production swept rural areas. This paper explores the introduction of one new crop—cotton—on the southern Korean countryside. Although cotton had been grown in Korea for centuries, the twentieth century saw both a rapid expansion of cotton cultivation and a shift in the type of cotton cultivated, as a new species—American upland cotton—came to dominate the landscape. The success of American upland cotton over native varieties was anything but spontaneous, however. This paper traces the introduction and expansion of the new cotton crop, from the initial importation and distribution of seeds, to the design of rolling seed replacement programs to prevent the dilution of the upland cotton species over time. In so doing, this paper outlines the various influences that reshaped the Korean countryside under Japanese colonialism, from the commercial incentives that favored one strain of cotton over another, to the geography and management of the administrative mechanisms introduced under colonial rule to influence and guide agricultural production. In promoting American upland cotton, the colonial government did not simply replace one species of cotton with another, but reshaped the Korean countryside and the basis of farmers’ interaction with the rural landscape as colonial institutions came to mediate farmers’ access to cotton, its commercial significance, and its very place within the Korean environment.

Author

• Holly Stephens, Yale University