Europeans and Americans in Korea, 1882-1910: A Bourgeois and Translocal Community

This article deals with the European and American community in Korea between the conclusion of Korea’s first international treaties in the early 1880s and the country’s annexation by the Japanese Empire in 1910. The article starts out by presenting an overview of the community. Concentrated in Seoul and Chemulp’o, the Anglo-Saxon element dominated a community made up of diplomats, foreign experts in the service of the Korean government, merchants and missionaries. Next, the article describes two key characteristics of the European and American residents in Korea. Firstly, they were individuals defining themselves as bourgeois, or middle-class; secondly, the term “translocality” serves to bring together the multiple layers of border-crossing these individuals were involved in – as long-distance migrants between Europe or Northern America and East Asia, as migrants within the East Asian context, and as representatives of different Euro-American nationalities living together in Korea.