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The Promised Republic
Developmental Society and the Making of Modern Seoul, 1961–1979
Series: Harvard East Asian Monographs
Brief Description
In The Promised Republic, Russell Burge offers a bold new history of South Korea’s rapid development. By focusing on the experience of rural-to-urban migrants who built and lived in Seoul’s shantytowns, Burge historicises national development as a site of struggle with the urban poor at its...
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Format: Hardback
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The Promised Republic offers a bold new history of South Korea’s rapid national development. Drawing on a range of official sources and personal accounts, Russell Burge links the struggles of rural-to-urban migrants living in Seoul’s shantytowns during the 1960s and 1970s and the conflicts over urban access and inequality that endure today.
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Description
In The Promised Republic, Russell Burge offers a bold new history of South Korea’s rapid development. By focusing on the experience of rural-to-urban migrants who built and lived in Seoul’s shantytowns, Burge historicises national development as a site of struggle with the urban poor at its centre.
What would a society of postcolonial abundance look like? Who was this society built for, and how would access to the city that formed its economic centre be claimed and defended? These were the questions at stake in the urban struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, an era when authorities found themselves caught between a mandate to create well-disciplined cities and the promise of broad uplift that legitimated their leadership.
Utilising memoirs, interviews, newspapers, journals, photographs, literature, anthropological records, and critical as well as official sources, Burge reconstructs a not-altogether-vanished world and provides historical background of conflicts over urban access and inequality that continue to enrage and resonate to this day.
Series: Harvard East Asian Monographs
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Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780674304819
Publisher: Harvard University, Asia Center
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 02 June 2026
Country: United States
Imprint: Harvard University, Asia Center
Illustration: 23 photos, 2 maps, 2 tables
Audience: General / adult, Tertiary education
DIMENSIONS
Width: 152.0mm
Height: 229.0mm
Weight: 0g
Pages: 360
About the Author
Russell Burge is Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Korean History at Indiana University Bloomington.
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