Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America

Chapter 1. A Sacred Economy of Value and Production: Capitalism and Protestantism in Early Modern Korea (1885–1919)

19 1 A Sacred Economy of Value and Production Capitalism and Protestantism in Early Modern Korea (1885–1919) Albert L. Park This essay argues that Western missionaries contributed to the cultivation of new forms of economic thought and practice through the establishment of ideological and physical structures between 1885 and 1919. Ideologically, through the Nevius Plan, which encouraged the construction of financially self-sustaining churches throughout Korea, missionaries taught church members that they were each stakeholders in their church and had the duty to contribute money constantly to ensure its survival and vitality. This idea helped promote a view of money as a form of productive capital, while it also transformed the definition of labor for Koreans to mean an activity necessary for the accumulation of money. The Nevius Plan also put into place physical structures called Industrial Education Departments (IEDs), factory-like settings where Korean students acquired industrial skills and knowledge, manufactured goods that were sold to the public, and consequently learned and experienced the process of the production, exchange, and circulation of goods for the market . Through the Protestant Church, Korean Christians encountered new language and practices that not only gave spiritual justification for the production of wealth, but also provided the means to acquire and circulate 20 chapter 1 money and capital. Through such processes, Korean Christians learned how to behave as capitalists. By critically studying missionary activities to produce new forms of economic behavior grounded in religion, this essay seeks both to augment the empirical data and arguments already put forward by economic and religious historians and to expand methods of exploring noneconomic data and historical materials to excavate the processes through which capitalism developed in modern Korea.1 An important goal of this essay is to push the fields of both economic and religious history to incorporate different ways of thinking about the relationship between religion and economics. Indeed, scholars of Korea’s complex economic history such as Kim Yŏngs ŏp, Hong Sŏng-chan, Pang Kie-chung, and Carter Eckert have played important roles in laying out how capitalism originated in Korea during the eighteenth century, owing to internal developments such as technological innovations, and further expanded and transformed when Korea was connected to the global market after 1876 and underwent industrialization beginning in the 1920s under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945).2 However , they have paid little attention to the significant role Christian missionaries from the West have played in spreading ideologies and building institutions that fostered capitalist modernity. In particular, these scholars have overlooked individuals at work between the 1905 Protectorate and the start of massive capitalist developments after 1919, when the Japanese colonial state embarked on major initiatives to boost agricultural output. In contrast, scholars of the history of Christianity in Korea such as Kenneth Wells, Jim Yong Kim, and Kyusik Chang have provided valuable information and analyses on the role of missionaries and Korean Christians in cultivating capitalism in Korea. However, works by these and other scholars of Korean Christianity contain little information on how the Nevius Plan and IEDs specifically influenced the development of capitalism in modern Korea.3 In fact, books and articles about the Nevius Plan and IEDs rarely discuss how they might have played a role in the development of capitalist thought and practices in the everyday lives of Koreans.4 While seeking to bridge the gap between economic and religious histories of modern Korean, this essay also seeks to enhance our understanding of how Korean capitalism unfolded through a diverse process that involved multiple institutions and agents by specifically examining the role of the Protestant Church after 1885 in fostering thoughts and behaviors associ- a. l. park 21 ated with capitalism. This study is indebted to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and takes seriously Weber’s belief that the understanding of capitalist development must include a study of ideas and how they become effective forces in history. Along with Weber, this essay is also influenced by the research and theoretical work of anthropologists , especially the works of Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff. Recently, anthropologists have increasingly conducted detailed ethnographies on the interaction of capitalism and economics in various societies and have come up with categories and arguments that illuminate the relationship between religion and economics, especially the theory that religious language endows money with a sacred or magical quality that sustains efforts to accumulate money and...