This document summarizes Jonathan Dresner's presentation on migration and modernity in East Asia. It discusses how modernization and the transition to economic and social modernity cannot occur without migration. However, many definitions of modernity fail to include new patterns and high volumes of human movement as a primary component. The document then reviews definitions of modernity and Osterhammel's perspective on the 19th century. It analyzes patterns of migration in Japan, China, and Korea and how migration distinguishes East Asian civilization. It concludes by arguing modernity has technological migration at its core and history must consider mobile populations.

1. Migration and Modernity in
East Asia
Jonathan Dresner
Pittsburg State University
ASPAC 2015

2. • History is more sensible when a mobile, not
static, population is assumed.
• Modernization -- the transition to economic
and social modernity -- cannot happen without
migration.
• In spite of that basic fact, many definitions
and descriptions of modernity fail to include
new patterns and volumes of human
movement as a primary component.

4. Consensus definition of modernity
• industrialization, labor markets, wage labor
• rational, scientific and technological development;
increasing application of bureaucratic, scientific, and
technological methods
• constitutionalism, and increasing emphasis on rights and
needs of the people
• a public sphere
• nationalism and imperialism
• individualism
• anti-traditionalism and opportunistic future-orientation

5. Osterhammel's 19th C.
• Asymmetrical efficiency growth: industrialization and on
innovation, frontier development, military might, state
control of citizenry
• Mobility increased in scale, speed, and infrastructure
• asymmetrical reference density: information mobility, rise
of "the West" as a discourse, non-Western studies
• tension between equality and hierarchy: social and legal
equality as an ideal, creation of a new hierarchy of
nations and races.
• emancipation, including democratization (pressure
towards, if not success in), legitimation of
colonialism/imperialism as emancipatory

6. East Asia and Migration
• Japan: "successfully modern" and highly mobile
despite some attempts at government control.
• China: relatively liberal 19th century; traumatic
displacements; 20th century communistic
control
• Korea: relatively low mobility in 19th century,
modernization movements, colonial controls.
Post-split: liberal, mobile south; communistic
north.

7. Concluding Thoughts
• East Asian civilization distinguished by
migration studies?
• Modernity with technological migration at the
core?
• History is more sensible when a mobile, not
static, population is assumed.

8. Sources
• Background image from Chinese Art: anonymous Song era scroll "Streams and
Mountains"
• Cartoon: Kiyama, Henry (Yoshitaka). 1998. The Four Immigrants Manga: A
Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904-1924. Trans. and edited by Frederik L.
Schodt. Stone Bridge Press: San Francisco, CA.
• Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2014. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of
the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Princeton University
Press: Princeton, NJ.
• Adam McKeown. 2008. Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization
of Borders. Columbia University Press: New York.
• Sztompka, Piotr. 1994. The Sociology Of Social Change. Wiley-Blackwell:
Hoboken, NJ.
• Patrick Manning. 2003. Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past,
Palgrave Macmillan.