History Job Candidate Seminar

Abstract: Between 1400 and 1900, the Chosŏn kingdom extended agricultural settlements and administrative control into the northernmost reaches of the Korean peninsula. This talk examines the development of a weather reporting system and its role in integrating Korea's northern frontier during the eighteenth century. This weather information infrastructure featured characteristics often associated with modern meteorology: consistent observation, instrumental measurement, regularized recording, and standardized language. After demonstrating these traits, I discuss how the data gathered in this system informed frontier governance, especially in famine administration. I argue that standardized weather reporting helped reduce the northern frontier's impenetrability in bureaucratic discourse and facilitated policy deliberations that tied this remote periphery to the state's provisioning networks, crucially nourishing a region plagued by a forbidding climate. By illuminating how weather information served the consolidation of territory in early modern Korea, this talk enriches studies of the intertwinement between meteorology and colonialism beyond more familiar examples from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America.