Coping with the Cold: Nature and State on Chosŏn Korea’s Northern Frontier

Abstract

My dissertation is a climate history of Chosŏn frontier expansion in P’yŏngan and Hamgyŏng Provinces, which are now part of present-day North Korea. It examines the ways that the kingdom’s bureaucrats understood and responded to the frigid climate in northern Korea and how human-climate interactions shaped governance, economy, society, and the environment on the frontier. At the core of my analysis is what I call “the rise of environmental expertise”: the growing role of officials and managerial personnel in collecting first-hand information on the northern climate, influencing policies with environmental knowledge, and managing resource use on the ground. I argue that bureaucratized environmental management allowed the state to conceive of the harsh northern climate as malleable, lending crucial support to the political and economic integration of the frontier. Chapter 1 explores the centrality of climate concerns in the early settlement of the northern frontier. I show how the association of the cold weather with the otherness and agricultural backwardness of the frontier led bureaucrats to introduce crops and agricultural practices from the southern heartland in attempts to ameliorate the adverse effects of the climate. Ultimately, the imported species and technologies were constrained by environmental conditions on the ground, but these checkered experiences placed climate issues at the heart of frontier governance. Chapter 2 examines the development of a weather information network that relied on regulated observation, instrumental measurement, and standardized reporting language during the eighteenth century. The infrastructure generated systematic knowledge about the northern climate and guided agricultural planning and food provision that led to greater economic integration of the frontier. Focusing on the commodification and conservation of wild ginseng, Chapter 3 explores how the state relied on bureaucratized management to both extract the precious mountain resource and ensure its sustainable use for maintaining local livelihoods. Chapter 4 highlights the role that expert intermediaries such as professional estate managers played in raising funds, organizing labor, and mustering materials to engage in large-scale, multi-dimensional coastal resource development. These projects increased the northern population’s climate resilience by expanding their resource bases. As a whole, the chapters reveal that the eighteenth century was a key moment when bureaucratic networks expanded to gather information and oversee resource use. These developments allowed the Chosŏn state to devise policies that better fit the northern climate and extend its reach into the frontier’s environment and society. The findings of my dissertation add an ecological perspective to Chosŏn state-building and shed new light on its bureaucracy from previously little-studied vantage points such as environmental governance. This study also contributes a pre-industrial, non-Western case of climate adaptation and resilience to the growing field of climate history.