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Molnar , Aaron Albert

University of British Columbia

Goryeo Korea (918-1392) was an integral part of the Mongols’ Eurasian empire and its webs of exchange. The Mongol Empire (1206-1368) was a watershed in Eurasian connectivity and global exchange: by patronizing movements of peoples and objects while reducing barriers to exchange, it wove regional and local patterns into larger possibilities for trans-Eurasian interaction through overland and maritime routes. Mongol-sponsored connectivity facilitated human, material, and political-cultural as well as technological and intellectual exchange. Though Goryeo became an intimate part of the Mongol Empire after its 1259 submission and 1274 imperial marriage alliance, study of its connections with the outside world largely revolves around the anachronistic binary of China-Korea. Research has focused on resource and demographic extraction by the Mongol Yuan state (1271-1368), political integration, as well as commercial exchange, but has not attempted to understand Goryeo within the Mongols’ larger world empire and its global exchange. In that broader framing, Goryeo remains an unintegrated imperial periphery in global histories. This study thus seeks to meaningfully integrate Goryeo in the global history of the Mongol period. The dissertation mobilizes steppe anthropological and global material archaeological research with Mongol Yuan and Goryeo official histories, Chinese materia medica, literati poetry, merchant instructional materials, and diplomatic missives. It utilizes the lens of mobility as a practice of power for steppe empire to reassess this written and material archive in order to understand Goryeo’s integration in global empire. Accordingly, it argues that Goryeo adapted to and adopted Mongol mobile political forms, like the itinerant court, to project its own political authority into the empire as well as domestically. Second, Goryeo’s silver currencies merged with Eurasian trends to facilitate the political and commercial mobility that underpinned that Eurasian integration. Third, it argues through peninsular ginseng that Goryeo material culture melded into a hybrid Eurasian milieu at the Mongol court. Last, it examines how material object mobilities spanned East Asia, the Mongol steppe, southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe through the global dispersal of Goryeo celadon and paper. The study highlights the importance of a multi-disciplinary and multi-lingual approach in integrating Korea into premodern global history.

Text

2024-09-12

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89230

History

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/