International organizations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation (FAO) respect techniques for managing a specific agricultural system and landscape adapted to the local environment. These are defined as āremarkable land use systems and landscapes which are rich in globally significant biological diversity evolving from the co-adaptation of a community with its environment and its needs and aspirations for sustainable development.ā Such useful knowledge is sought after by people across the globe today.
There is an unbelievable story for the remarkable land-use system from the Central Asia, which is Koreans became the first people who led to grow rice along the nomadic steppes, despite the local opinion that its cultivation would be impossible because of severe salt accumulation and climatic condition. In 1937, the first large-scale operation of massive deportation occurred in the Soviet under Stalin regime, about 175,000 āKoryo Saramā were relocated by brutal force from Far East to Central Asia, but their farming knowledges were so powerful that they have a world record for rice yield.1
The achievement of āKoryo Saramā after the Second World War was crucial to the changes in the Russian attitude toward Central Asiaās economic future. In contrast to the pre-war and Cold War attitude, āKoryo Saramā was expected to use their political and economic strength to counter capitalist penetration. This change allowed āKoryo Saramā to pursue the systematic introduction of entrepreneurship to the socialistic economy.
This book is a story showing the argument and attempts to place the āKorean miracleā in the context of global history, which has the longest contextual history of a land-use system and the most significant biological diversity. The longevity and the stability of the Agrarian State have long captured the mind of the East Asia. Confucianism is an agrarianist philosophy which has been developed in the framework of the prevalent East Asian rural society of the time. It inspired global comparison with the Christian and Islamic worlds in an attempt to explain its development and survival for over millennia.
There is a comparatively unexplored question of the āKorean miracleā here, that is, how Korea managed to escape Malthusian traps and record such a vast increasing rate of population without serious worsening in the standard of living. Essentially, the same observation can be seen with regard to developments in China and Japan in the seventeenth century, which, as will be argued below, took place under the influence of the Confucian-oriented international economy of East Asia.2
This book shows the argument and endeavors to place the āKorean miracleā in the context of global history. It will be argued that Industrious Revolution of the East Asian multiplicity, the pillar of the stability of the world economy between 1400 and 1850, created the nomadic society-settled society harmony and succeeded to make a sustainable growth in the balanced way, emphasizing a more efficient utilization of human resources through labor-intensive farming technology.
During the last decades, there has been a discussion on the origins of the divergence between the urban economie...