Migration and the Myth of Joseon Backwardness. An exploration into migration and mobility in premodern Korea using the Danseong and Daegu household registers from the late eighteenth century.
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2024-06-15
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en
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This thesis explores migration in Joseon Korea with a case study from the late eighteenth century in order to combat the assumption that premodern Korea was a backward and stagnant place characterised by an immobile population. The existing literature assumes migration only exists after Korea’s symbolic modernisation of 1879, leading to research on migration only starting late in the nineteenth century. Instead, the goal of this thesis is to explore the possibilities for researching migration before the modern period. After discussing the lacklustre existence of secondary literature and its fragmentation, seven migration types and their appearance on the Korean peninsula will be elaborated on. Next, the household registers from Danseong and Daegu serve as a case study that explores the usefulness of historical demographic data to research migration. Three hypotheses will be tested before suggesting steps for future research that can be determined based on this exploration, resulting in an insight in premodern Korea’s migration movement. Showing that this was by no means an immobile and stagnant society, but instead was characterised by dynamism.
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