Cotton, capital, and colonialism in Southern Korea, 1910-1945: Semi-governmental organizations in the construction of Imperial agriculture

This article investigates cotton promotion policies in colonial Korea, with a focus on the role of a series of semigovernmental organizations (SGOs) in implementing colonial policies to shape farmers’ interactions with global, capitalist markets. As a quintessential commodity of modern capitalism, colonial attempts to develop cotton cultivation highlight the incorporation of the Korean countryside into imperial networks of commercial commodity production and circulation. However, despite appeals to the rhetoric of capitalism and the expected response of profit-maximising cotton cultivators, in practice colonial cotton campaigns relied on the active intervention of the colonial state to reinforce the adoption of new scientific and commercial agricultural practices. SGOs performed multiple roles in the promotion of cotton cultivation—distributing resources, defining expertise, regulating the production and sale of cotton, and attempting to change the behaviour of cotton cultivators, landlords, and even merchants in line with the colonial government’s strategic interests. As such, SGOs represent an understudied extension of the colonial state into the rural economy, which influenced the conditions under which farming households engaged in the commercial cultivation of cotton.