Pub Date : 2023-06-22DOI: 10.1017/s0026749x23000173
O. Kwon
After the Second World War, the US government established a new oil order, forming close ties with three major oil companies—Standard Vacuum, Shell, and California-Texas—referred to as the ‘Three Sisters’ in Korea, which was newly liberated from Japanese colonialism. Even after the South Korean government was established, the US government and the Three Sisters worked to maintain the order. Using the carrot of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) funds, in 1949 the US government pressured the South Korean government into oil agreements that would facilitate the supply of petroleum products to the country. The 1949 oil agreements were completed after three rounds of negotiations. The process of signing the agreements was not limited to the import, storage, and sale of petroleum products in exchange for US aid to South Korea. It also sought to respond to the various interests of Koreans who wanted to create an independent economic structure in the midst of establishing a new government. This article explores the three rounds of negotiations for the 1949 oil agreements whereby the symbiotic relationship between the US government and the Three Sisters was realized in partnership with the interests of the South Korean government. Furthermore, it seeks to broaden the research on the history of Korean oil by promoting an understanding of how US oil policy affected Korea immediately after its liberation from Japanese colonial rule.
{"title":"The secret of September: The 1949 oil agreements between the United States and South Korea","authors":"O. Kwon","doi":"10.1017/s0026749x23000173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x23000173","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 After the Second World War, the US government established a new oil order, forming close ties with three major oil companies—Standard Vacuum, Shell, and California-Texas—referred to as the ‘Three Sisters’ in Korea, which was newly liberated from Japanese colonialism. Even after the South Korean government was established, the US government and the Three Sisters worked to maintain the order. Using the carrot of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) funds, in 1949 the US government pressured the South Korean government into oil agreements that would facilitate the supply of petroleum products to the country. The 1949 oil agreements were completed after three rounds of negotiations. The process of signing the agreements was not limited to the import, storage, and sale of petroleum products in exchange for US aid to South Korea. It also sought to respond to the various interests of Koreans who wanted to create an independent economic structure in the midst of establishing a new government. This article explores the three rounds of negotiations for the 1949 oil agreements whereby the symbiotic relationship between the US government and the Three Sisters was realized in partnership with the interests of the South Korean government. Furthermore, it seeks to broaden the research on the history of Korean oil by promoting an understanding of how US oil policy affected Korea immediately after its liberation from Japanese colonial rule.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47314462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-15DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X23000070
Anand A. Yang
All societies embody various forms of exchange. In South Asia, different mechanisms, including economic markets, have long engaged buyers and sellers in transactions involving goods and services for money or other goods and services. This assessment of Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction begins by briefly rehearsing Karl Polanyi’s formative ideas about the workings of precapitalist and capitalist economies. Although only a few of its 13 chapters explicitly reference Polanyi, his insights about embedded exchange represent a significant point of departure for the entire volume, as they often have for scholars in anthropology, economic sociology, geography, history, and even economics (at least those associated with institutional economics). All the essays in Rethinking Markets build on arguments about the intersections of economy and society that hark back to Polanyi’s seminal writings in the 1940s and 1950s about the market principle being foundational to the economic organization of modern society. For much of human history, transactions were largely negotiated through institutions and practices that he terms ‘reciprocity’ and ‘redistribution’. These modes of exchange predominated until the ‘great transformation’ ushered in by the Industrial Revolution led to the rise of a capitalist economy in the nineteenth century, first in Britain and Europe and subsequently in other world regions. Thereafter, the primary mode of economic integration was through a market economy whose participants behaved seemingly in accord with what Adam Smith and neoclassical economists assume to be an inherent human propensity to ‘truck, barter,
{"title":"Everywhere a market: Rethinking embedded exchange in modern India","authors":"Anand A. Yang","doi":"10.1017/S0026749X23000070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X23000070","url":null,"abstract":"All societies embody various forms of exchange. In South Asia, different mechanisms, including economic markets, have long engaged buyers and sellers in transactions involving goods and services for money or other goods and services. This assessment of Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction begins by briefly rehearsing Karl Polanyi’s formative ideas about the workings of precapitalist and capitalist economies. Although only a few of its 13 chapters explicitly reference Polanyi, his insights about embedded exchange represent a significant point of departure for the entire volume, as they often have for scholars in anthropology, economic sociology, geography, history, and even economics (at least those associated with institutional economics). All the essays in Rethinking Markets build on arguments about the intersections of economy and society that hark back to Polanyi’s seminal writings in the 1940s and 1950s about the market principle being foundational to the economic organization of modern society. For much of human history, transactions were largely negotiated through institutions and practices that he terms ‘reciprocity’ and ‘redistribution’. These modes of exchange predominated until the ‘great transformation’ ushered in by the Industrial Revolution led to the rise of a capitalist economy in the nineteenth century, first in Britain and Europe and subsequently in other world regions. Thereafter, the primary mode of economic integration was through a market economy whose participants behaved seemingly in accord with what Adam Smith and neoclassical economists assume to be an inherent human propensity to ‘truck, barter,","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49291747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-15DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X23000094
Muhammad Ali Jan
Abstract In this Modern Asian Studies book symposium, scholars of South Asia analyse the political, ethical, and epistemic aspects of market life, building on the volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India.1 This interdisciplinary conversation approaches transactional realms from the disciplines of history, anthropology, development studies, and political economy. The symposium’s contributors examine a range of pertinent issues that encompass customary forms of exchange and capitalist aspects of trade. Among the topics discussed are those of market fetishism, bazaar knowledge, social embeddedness, forms of transactional representation and translation, and institutional and regulatory contexts for commerce.
{"title":"The entanglements of exchange in India","authors":"Muhammad Ali Jan","doi":"10.1017/S0026749X23000094","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X23000094","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this Modern Asian Studies book symposium, scholars of South Asia analyse the political, ethical, and epistemic aspects of market life, building on the volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India.1 This interdisciplinary conversation approaches transactional realms from the disciplines of history, anthropology, development studies, and political economy. The symposium’s contributors examine a range of pertinent issues that encompass customary forms of exchange and capitalist aspects of trade. Among the topics discussed are those of market fetishism, bazaar knowledge, social embeddedness, forms of transactional representation and translation, and institutional and regulatory contexts for commerce.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46388445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-15DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X23000112
Ajay Gandhi, B. Harriss‐White, Douglas E. Haynes, Sebastian Schwecke
Abstract In this Modern Asian Studies book symposium, scholars of South Asia analyse the political, ethical, and epistemic aspects of market life. They build on the 2020 Cambridge volume, Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction, edited by Ajay Gandhi, Barbara Harriss-White, Douglas Haynes, and Sebastian Schwecke. This interdisciplinary conversation approaches transactional realms from the disciplines of history, anthropology, development studies, and political economy. The symposium’s contributors examine a range of pertinent issues that encompass customary forms of exchange and capitalist aspects of trade. Among the topics discussed are those of market fetishism, bazaar knowledge, social embeddedness, forms of transactional representation and translation, and institutional and regulatory contexts for commerce.
{"title":"Translating transactions: Markets as epistemic and moral spheres","authors":"Ajay Gandhi, B. Harriss‐White, Douglas E. Haynes, Sebastian Schwecke","doi":"10.1017/S0026749X23000112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X23000112","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this Modern Asian Studies book symposium, scholars of South Asia analyse the political, ethical, and epistemic aspects of market life. They build on the 2020 Cambridge volume, Rethinking Markets in Modern India: Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction, edited by Ajay Gandhi, Barbara Harriss-White, Douglas Haynes, and Sebastian Schwecke. This interdisciplinary conversation approaches transactional realms from the disciplines of history, anthropology, development studies, and political economy. The symposium’s contributors examine a range of pertinent issues that encompass customary forms of exchange and capitalist aspects of trade. Among the topics discussed are those of market fetishism, bazaar knowledge, social embeddedness, forms of transactional representation and translation, and institutional and regulatory contexts for commerce.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49606974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-15DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X23000069
Isabelle Guérin
The edited volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India offers a fresh and stimulating look at the day-to-day fabric and running of markets in the Indian context, both past and present. Much more broadly, it is a solid contribution to the conceptualization of markets as a material, social, moral, political, and unequal process, and not as an abstract concept and a normative ideal. Yet the idea of the market as an abstract concept and as an economically and morally superior reality remains the foundation of neoclassical economics. And neoclassical economics tends to be increasingly hegemonic, both in terms of research and teaching. India is no exception. The rich tradition of plural economics schools of thought has been constantly challenged since the neoliberal reforms of the early 1990s, and this is even more the case with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in 2014. Neoclassical economics conceptualizes themarket as an abstractmechanism,which results from the confrontation of supply and demand between two types of actors— producers and consumers—who are assumed to be equal, rational, and seeking to maximize their individual interests. Moreover, neoclassical economics considers the ‘perfect’ market as the most efficient and fairest mechanism for allocating resources. Even though various branches of neoclassical economic theory have developed sophisticated models that relax certain assumptions, the market as the optimal and fairest mode of resource allocation remains prevalent. Of course, any theory aims at a
{"title":"Rethinking markets to rethink economics","authors":"Isabelle Guérin","doi":"10.1017/S0026749X23000069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X23000069","url":null,"abstract":"The edited volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India offers a fresh and stimulating look at the day-to-day fabric and running of markets in the Indian context, both past and present. Much more broadly, it is a solid contribution to the conceptualization of markets as a material, social, moral, political, and unequal process, and not as an abstract concept and a normative ideal. Yet the idea of the market as an abstract concept and as an economically and morally superior reality remains the foundation of neoclassical economics. And neoclassical economics tends to be increasingly hegemonic, both in terms of research and teaching. India is no exception. The rich tradition of plural economics schools of thought has been constantly challenged since the neoliberal reforms of the early 1990s, and this is even more the case with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in 2014. Neoclassical economics conceptualizes themarket as an abstractmechanism,which results from the confrontation of supply and demand between two types of actors— producers and consumers—who are assumed to be equal, rational, and seeking to maximize their individual interests. Moreover, neoclassical economics considers the ‘perfect’ market as the most efficient and fairest mechanism for allocating resources. Even though various branches of neoclassical economic theory have developed sophisticated models that relax certain assumptions, the market as the optimal and fairest mode of resource allocation remains prevalent. Of course, any theory aims at a","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47600563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-15DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X23000045
Thomas Blom Hansen
Abstract This introduction begins with a brief overview of the three major factors shaping economic life and exchange in India, as laid out by contributions in the edited volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India: embedded exchange, contested jurisdiction, and pliable markets. The overarching logic of all the contributions is that markets in India must be understood as path dependent, that is, expressing a historical trajectory and specific, and changing, political and moral regimes. The remainder of this introduction discusses the origins of the distinction between ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ in the nationalist critiques of empire and how these critiques have led to a widespread moral ambivalence vis-à-vis the commercialization of everyday life in India that persists today across the political spectrum.
{"title":"Real abstractions: Markets, moralities, and social segmentation in modern India","authors":"Thomas Blom Hansen","doi":"10.1017/S0026749X23000045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X23000045","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This introduction begins with a brief overview of the three major factors shaping economic life and exchange in India, as laid out by contributions in the edited volume Rethinking Markets in Modern India: embedded exchange, contested jurisdiction, and pliable markets. The overarching logic of all the contributions is that markets in India must be understood as path dependent, that is, expressing a historical trajectory and specific, and changing, political and moral regimes. The remainder of this introduction discusses the origins of the distinction between ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ in the nationalist critiques of empire and how these critiques have led to a widespread moral ambivalence vis-à-vis the commercialization of everyday life in India that persists today across the political spectrum.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44747016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-15DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X23000082
J. Mathew
Abstract This review article on Rethinking Markets in Modern India1 uses the notion of the fetish as an entry point to consider the rich and innovative arguments put forward in this volume. It also interrogates ‘the market’ as a conceptual grounding for understanding India’s political economy in the past and present.
{"title":"The fetish in the market","authors":"J. Mathew","doi":"10.1017/S0026749X23000082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X23000082","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This review article on Rethinking Markets in Modern India1 uses the notion of the fetish as an entry point to consider the rich and innovative arguments put forward in this volume. It also interrogates ‘the market’ as a conceptual grounding for understanding India’s political economy in the past and present.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44233710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1017/S0026749X21000706
A. Balasubramanian
Abstract Mass disease and starvation in the princely state of Travancore during the Second World War claimed some 90,000 lives. However, this episode has never received much prominence, especially when compared to the simultaneous crisis in Bengal. It is, in many ways, forgotten. Instead, Travancore’s wartime food management apparatus appears in some accounts as a success story. How did this happen? Integration into the world economy, the reordering of a rigid social structure, and popular political pressures on an autocratic princely regime created a unique set of conditions that left Travancore vulnerable to food scarcity and conflict during the Second World War. A particularly draconian princely regime that suppressed civil liberties prevented the gravity of the situation from being understood. This culminated in vastly unequal suffering and disease-related deaths. But the story is not merely one of despair. The Indian communists took advantage of war conditions to bring together agricultural and factory labourers and contribute to improving the food situation in this ‘People’s War’, while mainstream nationalists sought to obstruct the war effort and have the British ‘quit’ India. Wartime activities would shape the unique post-colonial politics of what became the state of Kerala in 1956. Intervening at the intersection of the historiographies of food and the princely states, this article adds a regional perspective to the nation-centric social history of the Second World War in South Asia. Hunger was a constitutive experience of this period across various parts of India, but the post-colonial political legacies of war could be regionally distinct.
{"title":"A forgotten famine of ’43? Travancore’s muffled ‘cry of distress’","authors":"A. Balasubramanian","doi":"10.1017/S0026749X21000706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X21000706","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Mass disease and starvation in the princely state of Travancore during the Second World War claimed some 90,000 lives. However, this episode has never received much prominence, especially when compared to the simultaneous crisis in Bengal. It is, in many ways, forgotten. Instead, Travancore’s wartime food management apparatus appears in some accounts as a success story. How did this happen? Integration into the world economy, the reordering of a rigid social structure, and popular political pressures on an autocratic princely regime created a unique set of conditions that left Travancore vulnerable to food scarcity and conflict during the Second World War. A particularly draconian princely regime that suppressed civil liberties prevented the gravity of the situation from being understood. This culminated in vastly unequal suffering and disease-related deaths. But the story is not merely one of despair. The Indian communists took advantage of war conditions to bring together agricultural and factory labourers and contribute to improving the food situation in this ‘People’s War’, while mainstream nationalists sought to obstruct the war effort and have the British ‘quit’ India. Wartime activities would shape the unique post-colonial politics of what became the state of Kerala in 1956. Intervening at the intersection of the historiographies of food and the princely states, this article adds a regional perspective to the nation-centric social history of the Second World War in South Asia. Hunger was a constitutive experience of this period across various parts of India, but the post-colonial political legacies of war could be regionally distinct.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49227354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1017/s0026749x22000622
S. Poddar
This article draws attention to the provincial city of Allahabad at the turn of the century as the site of a prolific and multilingual print culture. While publishing trends in this city were shaped by the intertwined histories of political culture and cultural politics, specific journals responded to these forces in ways that remain unexamined. Taking the Indian Press—established in 1884 and arguably the city’s most important multilingual publishing house—and four prominent journals that it produced (Saraswatī, Prabāsī, The Modern Review, and Adīb) as case study, I analyse the entanglements between print culture and debates on the contentious issues of languages and identities in a divided public sphere. Based on an extensive analysis of several decades of publishing trends for Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and English, I argue that the continued thriving of many languages, or multilingualism, cannot be read simply as evidence for the proliferation of syncretism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a detailed reading of this complex field of cultural production, I show that while multilingual publishing thrived, cultural discourse led by middle-class and elite intellectuals was increasingly becoming homogeneous and insular, pushing a milieu of multilingual readers and publishers towards a narrow nationalist and majoritarian ideal. Thus, upon close analysis, multilingualism as a cultural value in the era of colonial modernity mirrored the fractures within the public sphere.
{"title":"The decline of multilingualism in a divided public sphere: The Indian Press and cultural politics in colonial Allahabad (1890–1920)","authors":"S. Poddar","doi":"10.1017/s0026749x22000622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x22000622","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article draws attention to the provincial city of Allahabad at the turn of the century as the site of a prolific and multilingual print culture. While publishing trends in this city were shaped by the intertwined histories of political culture and cultural politics, specific journals responded to these forces in ways that remain unexamined. Taking the Indian Press—established in 1884 and arguably the city’s most important multilingual publishing house—and four prominent journals that it produced (Saraswatī, Prabāsī, The Modern Review, and Adīb) as case study, I analyse the entanglements between print culture and debates on the contentious issues of languages and identities in a divided public sphere. Based on an extensive analysis of several decades of publishing trends for Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and English, I argue that the continued thriving of many languages, or multilingualism, cannot be read simply as evidence for the proliferation of syncretism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a detailed reading of this complex field of cultural production, I show that while multilingual publishing thrived, cultural discourse led by middle-class and elite intellectuals was increasingly becoming homogeneous and insular, pushing a milieu of multilingual readers and publishers towards a narrow nationalist and majoritarian ideal. Thus, upon close analysis, multilingualism as a cultural value in the era of colonial modernity mirrored the fractures within the public sphere.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42876034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-13DOI: 10.1017/s0026749x22000464
G. R. Reynolds
During the 1930s the Japanese Government General of Korea’s Society for the Compilation of Korean History commissioned facsimiles of some 21 rare historical sources to accompany the publication of the colossal History of Korea (Chōsenshi 朝鮮史), funnelling select xylographic, typographic, and chirographic products of the defunct Chosŏn dynasty’s book ecology through offset lithography and collotype, and on occasion movable type. This article investigates the Society for the Compilation of Korean History’s collection and classification of historical materials against the larger backdrop of colonial knowledge production, illuminates the different economic and editorial logics of the new printing technologies used to produce the facsimiles, and examines the products as one example of the significance of facsimiles in the field of history. It suggests that the interplay of traditional print media, dominated by woodblock prints, and the new photomechanical means of reproduction, allowed for the swift reproduction of the unfolded page image and the easy utilization of traditional-style binding, permitting the Society to create purposefully antiquated reproductions with a high degree of fidelity to the original. At the same time, the use of modern materials (paper, string, and covers) and certain features common to traditional Japanese book binding meant that the facsimiles were irrevocably hybrid. These facsimiles ended up in a wide range of research libraries, representing the Korean past to the scholarly community in the Japanese empire.
{"title":"Facsimiles of yore: printing technology and the page image in the Japanese Government General of Korea’s reproduction of historical sources","authors":"G. R. Reynolds","doi":"10.1017/s0026749x22000464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x22000464","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 During the 1930s the Japanese Government General of Korea’s Society for the Compilation of Korean History commissioned facsimiles of some 21 rare historical sources to accompany the publication of the colossal History of Korea (Chōsenshi 朝鮮史), funnelling select xylographic, typographic, and chirographic products of the defunct Chosŏn dynasty’s book ecology through offset lithography and collotype, and on occasion movable type. This article investigates the Society for the Compilation of Korean History’s collection and classification of historical materials against the larger backdrop of colonial knowledge production, illuminates the different economic and editorial logics of the new printing technologies used to produce the facsimiles, and examines the products as one example of the significance of facsimiles in the field of history. It suggests that the interplay of traditional print media, dominated by woodblock prints, and the new photomechanical means of reproduction, allowed for the swift reproduction of the unfolded page image and the easy utilization of traditional-style binding, permitting the Society to create purposefully antiquated reproductions with a high degree of fidelity to the original. At the same time, the use of modern materials (paper, string, and covers) and certain features common to traditional Japanese book binding meant that the facsimiles were irrevocably hybrid. These facsimiles ended up in a wide range of research libraries, representing the Korean past to the scholarly community in the Japanese empire.","PeriodicalId":51574,"journal":{"name":"Modern Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-06-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46440283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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