Historical geographies of Korea's incorporation: The rise of underdeveloped and modernized colonial port cities

Abstract

In the century proceeding the Second World War the historical geography of Korea, increasingly influenced by Imperial Japan, experienced rapid change. From a macroscopic perspective, Korean port cities' unprecedented spatial changes were deeply related to Korea's incorporation process into the capitalist world-system and direct Japanese rule from 1910. This study uses two conceptual categories (the underdeveloped colonial city and the modernized colonial city) to explain the massive urban transformations of four Korean port cities. Because Korea's incorporation into the world economic system has gained relatively little attention, this paper contributes to filling this gap in the literature. Furthermore, it allows us to explore the macro geopolitical and geo-economic changes in port cities via a microscopic perspective.