Highways to Coal Mines
South Korea’s Highland Road Construction for Household Fuel Transition, 1945–1962
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19220362 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jaeyoung Ha (0000-0002-3053-2054, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 187-217 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The journal of Korean studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0731-1613 • E-ISSN: 2158-1665 |
| Publisher | Rowman & Littlefield (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/07311613-12189453 |
| OpenAlex | W7147715618 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 11 |
This article investigates American and South Korean efforts to shift domestic fuel use from firewood to fossil fuels in the 1950s, and how building transportation routes around the Taebaek Coalfield—the mining heartland of South Korea—contributed to this transition. After the Korean War, excessive biomass fuel use in households—which accounted for 97 percent of household fuel—was expected to obliterate South Korea’s entire forest stock and collapse its agriculture. As fuel transition emerged as an imperative to tackle South Korea’s environmental crisis, this paper argues that delivering coal to households and building energy transportation routes became a focal point of South Korea’s modern statecraft. The first part of this article demonstrates that South Korea’s abundant anthracite, previously regarded as a source for industrialization, was developed as the energy source for household fuel transition by the South Korean and US governments. In the second part, this article highlights the various forms of labor mobilization—including corvée, conscripts, and forced labor—that built the energy transportation routes—railroads and roads across the steep Taebaek Highlands—to open new mines and resolve transportation bottlenecks. Through this draconian labor exploitation, I argue that the authoritarian regime sought to establish its legitimacy by supplying cheap household fuel to urban residents. This article also argues that the construction of these “coal highways” was key to South Korea’s transition to fossil fuels and ushered in its Anthropocene
Coal · Energy transition · Firewood · Fossil fuel · Road construction · American Environmental and Regional History · Asian Industrial and Economic Development · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |