“A Scramble for Freight”: The Politics of Collaboration along and across the Railway Tracks of Korea under Japanese Rule

摘要

New interpretations constantly grow around a familiar story, like life alongncolonial railways. From the vast plains of America to the subcontinent ofnIndia, scholars have noted, railroads played a pivotal role in inscribingnpower on uncharted terrain.n1nThey facilitated conquest, opened lands for settle-nment, and fueled the colonial extractive economy. And railroads were morenthan mere “tools of empire.”n2nFrom missionaries and administrators in thenfield to interlocutors in the distant metropole, Europeans celebrated railroadsnand their locomotives as vehicles of their “civilizing mission” on the benightedncolonial frontier.n3nNot only did railroads reshape local lands into well-orderednspaces of production, they also remade their non-European dwellers by uplift-ning them from their alleged state of cultural decline. An instrument of progress,nindustry, and rationality, the railroad was the personification of the model colo-nnizer: it captured lands as well as the minds of their inhabitants, not by brutenforce but by the sheer power of modernity (see figure 1).