A New Look on the Economic History of Colonial Korea Using Agriculture as an Example

The article critically analyzes the main theoretical concepts that are used in the study of the economic history of colonial Korea and attempts to provide a new perspective on this period. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the concept of the so-called “non-linear” understanding of history emerged in Russian historical science. This approach is the most productive for analyzing world history. Within the framework of the “non-linear” understanding of history, the theory of the so-called “colonial mode of production” should be used to analyze such a complex socioeconomic and socio-political phenomenon of world history as colonialism. It breaks the previously dominant frame of “feudalism-capitalism” and defines the colonial economy as specific, with its peculiarities and laws. Moreover, colonialism, being a “dead end” in the process of historical development, cannot give rise to a new socio-economic system and leads only to the degradation of the colony’s economy, even if there may be some development in certain periods and sectors. All theoretical concepts of Korean and Russian historical science have been based on the socalled “unilinear” understanding of the historical process, where one socio-economic system must be followed by the next, more progressive one. Previously, colonial Korea was perceived as either a “semi-feudal colonial” or “colonial capitalist” society, but this understanding limited the possibilities of socio-economic analysis and confined the economic history of colonial Korea within the “feudalism-capitalism” dichotomy. The article attempts to move beyond the above dichotomy by analyzing colonial Korea’s agriculture using the theory of “colonial mode of production”.

Colonialism, theory of colonial modernization, theory of internal development, colonial mode of production, colonial Korea, agriculture