ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how changes in the global oil industry affected the colonial Korean oil market in the 1920s, focusing on Royal Dutch Shell's Korean oil installation. Existing studies attribute interwar Korean industrialization to Japanese imperial and colonial states’ expansionism. In contrast to this state-centered approach, the chapter emphasizes the global market origins of the colonial industrial transformations. In particular, it demonstrates the colonial aspects of the oil market through a case study of Royal Dutch Shell's Korean oil installation and colonial Korean workers’ 1928 labor strike against this Western oil enterprise. Its primary sources are Royal Dutch Shell's annual Petroleum Handbook, the annual trade reports of British consuls in both Korea and Japan, and the reports of Japanese central, municipal, and colonial governments on the business of the Western company. As the first historical study of the 1920s colonial Korean oil market, the chapter offers an early example of the transformative effect of economic globalization on the Korean economy.
