Hawaii Mission of the MEC as a Colonial Institution among the Korean Migration Workers

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국교회사학회
· 수록지 정보 : 한국교회사학회지 / 54호 / 135 ~ 165페이지
· 저자명 : 박형신

초록

The 1893 coup led by a group of American entrepreneurs against the Kingdom of Hawaii, backed by the U.S. troops, should be considered as an American colonization process. The sugar industry was the most productive industry in the nineteenth century economy of Hawaii. In its early period, sugar plantation owners employed native Hawaiians, Europeans, and Latin Americans for the labor force of the plantations, but these workers, by and large, broke away from the plantations in complaint of the atrocious working conditions. In the late 1800s, the plantation owners brought the Chinese and Japanese to the plantations, but these new workers were also dissatisfied with the working conditions and often went on strikes. The plantation owners, who founded the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (the HSPA) to promote their own interests in 1895, resorted to importing laborers from Korea and the Philippines with the objectives of resolving the shortage problem in the labor force and decreasing the power of the Chinese and Japanese laborers. Their hope to import Koreans was dealt with by Horace N. Allen, who came to Korea as a medical missionary but soon became the minister of the U.S. legation in Korea, and the Rev.
George Heber Jones, a missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Korea. Allen, who met the HSPA directors in both the mainland of the US and Hawaii in 1902, initiated the first step of the immigration of Korean workers. e, who had wanted to expand the political influences and economic profit in Korea, successfully persuaded the King of Korea, Gojong, to set up the immigration office, and appointed David W. Deshler, the president of the East-West Development Company, as the recruiter for the HSPA. The Rev. George Heber Jones, in turn, made an effort to persuade the converts in his parish to migrate to Hawaii for working in the plantations and eventually contributed to send the half of the entire laborers on board the first immigration ship in 1902. Most importantly, the HSPA’s demand for obedient workers was dealt with by the early Superintendents of the Hawaii Mission, John W. Wadman and Henry Fry. Due to the lack of funds from the Board of Missions, they constantly asked the HSPA and sugar planters to sponsor the Mission. They encouraged the Korean believers to be faithful workers for the plantations as a reward to the donations, and even asked them to bring their colleagues who left the plantations back to them. The Rev. W. Arthur Noble, who visited Hawaii to help Wadman’s Korean work, unfolded a ‘model minority’ rhetoric to the Korean Christian laborers in order to support the prosperity of the plantations. While the Methodist Mission and its Korean churches and chapels prospered, the Korean workers themselves did not receive any help from the Mission to improve their poor working conditions. They were, rather, put in poverty and predicament with low wages, job type differential,and cruel treatments. At the turn of the twentieth century when America escaped from its isolationist policy and started to take the White Man’s Burden beyond the American West, the Hawaii Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church, along with the strong and consistent support of American ministers and missionaries in Korea, opted for Western Colonialism in response to the call of the HSPA.

참고자료

· 없음