Germans in Korea in the late 19th - early 20th centuries as a translocal and bourgeois community

Abstract

This study deals with the German community in Korea between the conclusion of Korea’s first international treaties in the early 1880s and the country’s annexation by the Japanese Empire in 1910 in the context of transnational and global history. In the decades around 1900 the circulation of people, ideas, goods and capital beyond and across the national borders increased. The Korean peninsula has gradually integrated into global economic and political processes. The result of it became the formation of the European community in Joseon (Choson). The German community in Korea made up of diplomats, foreign experts hired by the Korean government as well as merchants and missionaries. They were individuals who defined themselves as bourgeois (or middle-class) who actively interacted with representatives of the Korean elites, becoming agents of an imperialist policy in East Asia. German citizens influenced the development of German-Korean relations contributing into the cultural dialogue between the two countries and the subsequent modernization of Joseon.