Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean History

Michael Seth, Michael J Seth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317811480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: History

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century when Korea became entangled in the world of modern imperialism and the old social, economic and political order began to change; this handbook brings together cutting edge scholarship on major themes in Korean History. Contributions by experts in the field cover the Late Choson and Colonial periods, Korea's partition and the diverging paths of North and South Korea.

Topics covered include:

• The division of Korea
• Religion
• Competing imperialisms
• Economic change
• War and rebellions
• Nationalism
• Gender
• North Korea Under Kim Jong Il
• Global Korea

The Handbook provides a stimulating introduction to the most important themes within the subject area, and is an invaluable reference work for any student and researcher of Korean History.

1 Introduction

Understanding modern Korean history

Michael J. Seth

DOI: 10.4324/9781315816722-1

Modern Korean history, much like Korea itself, has emerged in recent years out of the shadows of its larger and better known neighbors China and Japan. Several decades ago it was possible to place almost all the scholarly literature on Korean history in English on a single shelf of books. Indeed, Korea was so little understood that when it appeared at all in Western textbooks, it often was restricted to developments related to the Korean War and the Cold War. But in recent years the historical scholarship available to non-Koreans has grown enormously.

A tributary of China, a colony of Japan, it failed to emerge in Western consciousness as a distinctive variant of East Asian culture with its own long historical tradition. The study of Korean history was also hampered by the formidable linguistic challenges, generally requiring at minimum the knowledge of the difficult Korean language, and in most cases the ability to read Japanese as well as classical Chinese. Furthermore, there were few institutions in the West that had Korean studies programs or the staff and facilities to train scholars and few positions for academics who had Korea as their specialty. And for those interested in North Korea, the near impossibility of gaining access to its archives or even entering the country was a serious impediment. As a result Korean history was a neglected area of study.

In recent years this neglect of Korean history has been replaced by a rapidly developing interest by Western academics. Partly this reflects the general expansion of East Asian studies, but it is also due to South Korea’s emergence as a major economic, cultural and political presence in the world. In 2008, South Korea became a member of the G-20, major economic powers whose leaders meet annually. South Korean products have penetrated almost every market and have given the country a degree of recognition it previously lacked. South Korean popular culture, what is called the “Korean Wave,” has made the country a major exporter of TV dramas, movies, pop music and videos, and Seoul has become the pop culture capital of the Pacific Rim of Asia. Furthermore, South Korea’s “economic miracle” has drawn the interest of economists, historians, and social scientists as well as policymakers. Many aspects of its economic development have become models for countries from China to Chile. The country’s transition from authori tarianism to a vibrant democracy has also been the subject of many scholarly studies. Then of course, there is the interest in North Korea. The country’s truculent posture, its isolationism, the security threats it poses and more recently its human rights record have drawn international attention. And there is a popular fascination with the seemingly bizarre behavior of its leadership and its overall “strangeness.”

The essays in this volume both reflect this growing interest in Korea and represent the trends in the study of modern Korean history by South Korean and Western scholars. The modern period for Korean history has been defined in different ways. South Korean historians often regard “modern history” (hyŏndaesa) as beginning with the establishment of the Chosŏn period (also referred to as the Yi Dynasty) in 1392. This handbook defines modern more narrowly as starting from the 1860s, when the old Sino-centric political order in East Asia began to crumble and Korea entered the world of late nineteenth-century imperialism. Although somewhat arbitrary, the essays are then divided into several groupings. The first is the late Chosŏn period, that is, from the start of the modern era to the Japanese annexation in 1910 and the end of the dynastic state. This is followed by the colonial period from 1910 to 1945, the division of Korea in 1945, North Korea since 1945 and South Korea since 1945.

Although a significant body of Western scholarship on modern Korean history has appeared only in the past several decades, it was preceded by earlier work in Korea. Korean intellectuals began to study their modern history in the first decade of the twentieth century. They already had a long, sophisticated tradition of historical scholarship in the Chinese-style Confucian mode, but the nature of historical literature changed when scholars began to examine their past, employing Western concepts and analytical tools. These often came via Japanese translations of Western works that students read while studying in Japan or that circulated in Korea. Meanwhile, the Japanese scholars carried out historical and archaeological research mainly focused on the early period of Korean history, and in doing so, introduced more modern methods of historical scholarship to Koreans. Historians and political thinkers such as Pak Ŭn-sik (1859–1923) and Sin Ch’ae-ho (1880–1936) began reexamining Korea’s place in the world and what it meant to be Korean. In 1908, the young Sin published an especially important essay, “A New Reading of History” (“Toksa Sillon”), in which he borrowed the concept of “Volk” (Korean: minjok) from Japanese and Chinese writers and placed it at the center of history. Sin sought to replace the older narratives that reinforced loyalty to the king with one based on a new ethnic-national identity. The history of Korea became a history of a Korean nation and its unique cultural tradition.

Korean historical scholarship soon became preoccupied with understanding the loss of their country’s sovereignty in 1910 and the humiliation of Japanese rule. Many Korean intellectuals sought to counter the work of state-sponsored Japanese scholars that found Korean history characterized by stagnation in contrast to the progressive societies of Japan and the West. Writers such as Ch’oe Nam-sŏn (1890–1957) sought to create national histories that pointed to the unique and dynamic nature of their nation’s past. Ch’oe looked for Korea’s “soul” or ŏl, its unique Volkgeist that he traced from ancient times. Korean history became a story of the struggle of Koreans to develop their society and maintain their political and cultural autonomy while threatened by outsiders. Historians such as Yi Pyong-do began to take a more academic approach to history, attempting to produce objective scholarship. They established the Chindan Hakhoe (Chindan Society) in 1934 to publish historical scholarship. The same period saw an emergence of Marxist historical scholarship pioneered by Paek Nam-un (1894–1979). This focused on class struggle, with peasant masses struggling against their feudal, landowning exploiters. Marxists also sought to place Korean history within the context of universal historical processes. All basic schools were similar in their linear, progressive view of history and their incorporation of Western concepts and categories for understanding their past. They also saw themselves as guardians and promoters of the nationalist spirit. Historical scholarship during colonial times, however, was hampered by Japanese restrictions, and historians were frequently arrested.

After 1945, with the division of the country, Paek and many other leftist historians went to North Korea. There, history had to conform to ideological purposes to such an extent that little real scholarship could flourish. In South Korea, scholarship on modern Korean history was hindered by a series of anti-communist authoritarian governments which feared that the examination of the messy origins of the South Korean state in the years since 1945 could undermine its legitimacy. Twentieth-century history, as a result, was often avoided by scholars.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, however, historians such as Song Kon-ho, Kang Man-gil and Choi Jang-jip began a refocus on more recent history. Among the issues to emerge was the origins of modernization. Yi Ki-baek, in his major work Kuksa Sillon (A New History of Korea), incorporated American ideas of modernization theory to trace its origins back to the emergence of modern science and the political ideas in eighteenth century Europe. Modernization began in Korea toward the end of the eighteenth century, he argued, when Koreans began to adopt these Western concepts and practices. Others such as Kang Man-gil held to the “sprouts of modernization” concept that saw an autonomous Korean path to the modern world that began in the late Chosŏn. These scholars, rather than seeing Korea as a stagnant society, saw it as having its own dynamic nature. They pointed to writers, thinkers and reformers in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, a group they labeled Sirak, who were critical of their own society and proposed progressive changes. They saw the development of commerce, the growth of a more monetized economy and improvements in agriculture and technology as signs that Korea was developing its own parallel modernization. It was not initiated by Western and Japanese imperialist interventions in their country but hijacked by it. Many of these writers came from or were influenced by the leftist nationalist tradition; modernization, they often argued, came not from the top but emanated from the common people: peasants rebelling against the feudal landlord class, low-caste merchants seeking economic opportunities, and “middle people” (chungin), sub-elites of talented professionals who were open to new ideas resisted by the aristocratic class. In the past two decades, an increasing number of South Korean historians have focused on their often troubled recent past, including the social and political costs of South Korea’s “economic miracle.”

The lack of translations into Western languages and the nationalist preoccupation of Korean scholars have limited the influence of these works outside Korea. Nonetheless, most non-Korean historians have remained indebted to their efforts. And in recent years, free from political restraints, historical scholarship is flourishing.

Late Choso˘n

One issue examined by Western as well as Korean historians is whether Korea, just prior to its “opening” in the late nineteenth century, was a society in political, economic and social decline. Historians have often seen Korea as going through a period of political stability, effective governance, economic prosperity, cultural creativity and even technological innovation in the eighteenth century and then falling into a period of political corruption, factionalism, weak and ineffective rulers, economic stagnation or decline, social unrest and less cultural creativity in the nineteenth century. James B. Lewis along with Jun Seong Ho and Kang Han-Rog (2009) have argued that the country went into economic decline after 1830. Lewis in this volume states that imperialism came at a time when internal political and economic crises were coming into “conjunction.” Japanese and Western imperialism arrived, many historians believe, at a time when the government was weakened by fiscal problems, a subject touched upon in Owen Miller’s essay in this volume.

Historians have attempted to understand the collapse of the old order in Korea and the country’s loss of independence by studying the international and regional diplomacy that country became enmeshed in. An important early work still valuable on this was Eugene Kim and Han-kyo Kim’s Korea and the Politics of Imperialism (1967). In later works, Kim Key-Hiuk examined the international politics surrounding the “opening of Korea” and the collapse of the Chinese tributary system (1980). Swiss historian Martina Deuchler documented the efforts to adjust to the new diplomatic order (1977). Japanese specialists such as Hilary Conroy (1960) and Peter Duus (1995) focused on Tokyo’s involvement in Korea, while Kirk Larsen in Tradition, Treaties, and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Chosŏn Korea, 1850–1910 (2008) has looked at the role played by China during this period, arguing that Qing was an imperial power using modern diplomacy, international law, telegraphs and steamboats to aggressively assert itself in Korea. More recently, Yumi Moon in Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896–1910 (2013) has looked at the active participation of Koreans in the annexation. Much of our understanding of the international politics from this period is summarized in Larsen’s essay in this volume.

Korea during this period was undergoing dynamic internal change that historians are still exploring. Albert L. Park in this volume looks at religious ferment and change during this period, and Carl Young (2014) in a recent work and in this volume examines the Tonghak Rebellion in 1894 and its legacy. A number of reform movements emerged in the late nineteenth century, which are examined along w...