King Chǒngjo, an Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea

Christopher Lovins

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438473659
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Corée

Were the countries of Europe the only ones that were "early modern"? Was Asia's early modernity cut short by colonialism? Scholars examining early modern Eurasia have not yet fully explored the relationships between absolute rule and political modernization in the highly contested early modern world. Using a comparative perspective that places Ch?ngjo, king of Korea from 1776 to 1800, in context with other Korean kings and with contemporary Chinese and European rulers, Christopher Lovins examines the shifting balance of power in Korea in favor of the crown at the expense of the aristocracy during the early modern period. This book is the first to analyze in English the recently discovered collection of 297 private letters written by Ch?ngjo himself. These letters were a vital channel of communication outside of official court historians' scrutiny, since private meetings between the king and his ministers were forbidden by custom. Royal politics played out in an arena of subtle communication, with court officials trying to read the king's unstated, elliptically hinted at intentions and the king trying to suggest what he wanted done while maintaining plausible deniability. Through close analysis of both official records and private letters, including Ch?ngjo's "secret letters, " Lovins shows that, in contrast to previous assumptions, the late eighteenth-century Korean monarchs were not weak and ineffective but instead were in the process of building an absolutist polity.

1

EARLY MODERNITY AND ABSOLUTISM

ABSOLUTISM DOES NOT ARISE UNTIL THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD, BROADLY defined by Victor Lieberman as that period in world history roughly between 1400 and 1800. It is only in early modern states that the government is centralized enough and its bureaucracy strong enough,1 with a shared political culture extensive enough, that the ruler can be recognized as the sole legitimate power, subject to no other earthly authority. Lieberman lists the criteria for an early modern state as follows:

territorial consolidation; firearms-aided intensification of warfare; more expansive, routinized administrative systems; growing commercialization, which (especially from the eighteenth century) contributed to greater social mobility; wider popular literacy, along with a novel proliferation of vernacular texts; more vigorous dissemination of standard dialects and cultural symbols, and an unprecedented intersection between specifically local culture and state power.2

Chosŏn Korea fits all of these criteria,3 which fostered Korean-style absolutism. By the eighteenth century, the Korean king appointed all government officials, including the head of each and every one of the country’s three hundred counties and the mayor of every town. Supported by state printing of both official documents and private writings the state deemed worthy of dissemination throughout the country, the Korean elite became more involved than ever in a national culture.4 With the fall of China to the barbarian Manchus in the seventeenth century, Korea’s elite regarded themselves as the last bastion of true Confucian culture, stimulating a flurry of interest in the Korean heritage: local landscape painting, novels with Korean settings and characters, and an emphasis on the “Koreanness” of the ancient kingdom of Koguryŏ 高句麗, which at its height in the sixth century controlled not only the northern half of the Korean peninsula but most of modern-day Manchuria as well.5 Paradoxically, the eighteenth century also saw an increased openness to intellectual currents in the Qing Empire, especially among a group of intellectuals known as the “Northern School” 北學 (Pukhak), and King Chŏngjo himself shared some of that openness. The continued centralization and routinization of administration, the expansion of the ranks of the yangban ruling class and erosion of its status, and the spread of a “Korean” culture and vernacular writing all made absolutism possible.6 Like Joseph II of Austria, early modern Korean kings interacted directly with the common people through a petition system. The kings traveled away from the capital, meeting the people along the way and adjudicating cases to deal with their grievances, many of which were against the local village heads and administrators. So committed was Chŏngjo to direct royal rule that he revived oral petitions so that those illiterate even in the vernacular could reach him. The elite’s cultural disdain of the Manchus, who ruled China as part of their empire in the eighteenth century, reinforced the Korean monarch’s claim to be the highest judge and the final arbiter in the land. Regardless of its geographical and cultural distance from Europe, Chosŏn Korea exemplified many of the trends evident in Lieberman’s conception of early modernity.

This is not to suggest that the European experience of modernity was either inevitable or universal. In fact, the Korean experience of early modernity illustrates the very opposite—namely, that similar long-term trends and a shared world of growing interconnectedness do not necessarily lead to a loss of cultural distinctiveness or homogenization of societies. Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s call to abandon the developmental perspective of who succeeded and who failed to modernize along European lines is welcome.7 While it may have been true that in the 1970s the “early modern field was formed by backfill from the debris of the collapsed breakthroughs to modernity that had not quite come about,”8 this is no longer the case. Amy Stanley offers a fine example of how early modern comparison can reveal continuity and connection without subsuming all human experience under a European model. She approaches agency in context in order to illuminate that “certain grooves worn into the social or economic landscape made some avenues of resistance or rebellion not only more possible but more thinkable than others,” making macrolevel comparison easier.9 Stanley examines how “[a]cross the Eurasian continent, a rise in demand for female domestic labor drew women into expanding cities” through a cross-cultural analysis of maidservants.10 She finds that the “[i]ntimate, local details [of microhistories] … can also provide an illusion of specificity, obscuring broader patterns that can be seen more easily by employing a wider geographical frame.” Thus, “[s]een through the eyes of these women, the ‘early modern’ world looks more contiguous—and lingers longer—than we might previously have imagined.”11 She concludes that “[f]rom the maidservant’s point of view, London in 1620, Paris in 1750, and Edo in 1840 were surprisingly alike … a basic story of urban migration, service, and settlement [that] was shared.”12

As we shall see, while Chŏngjo as an absolute monarch faced similar challenges, operated under similar constraints, and sought broadly similar solutions as did the rulers of early modern Europe, he did so in distinctive ways that reflect the cultural context by which he himself was shaped, even as he exerted his considerable intellectual and political skills to shape it in turn. In our own period of increasing globalization through advanced communication technology and neoliberal free flow of capital and investment, fears of a bland, homogenized, indistinct world of conformity to dominant cultures and the loss of cultural expression are very real in many areas of the world that have long histories of cultural and linguistic unity. Chŏngjo’s kingship in the early modern world shows us that a shared world need not be an interchangeable world. While Randolph Starn was correct to point out that all periods “can be thought of as being pulled between old and new, tradition and innovation,”13 as Mary Elizabeth Berry pointed out when discussing Japan, “[l]ike all labels, the term ‘early modern’ is a blunt tool for detecting shared properties without leveling its subjects into uniformity. But insofar as it draws into relief the differences as well as the similarities in those subjects, the term abets the goal of historical analysis: understanding the reasons for convergence and divergence by examining the particularities of local experience.”14

One of the most crucial aspects of early modernity that concerns absolute monarchy was the relationship between the throne and the aristocracy. Rather than the breakdown of the nobility, the trend across Eurasia (with China the conspicuous exception) was for centralization to increase the power of the powerful at the expense of those weaker than them, including lesser nobles. Hillay Zmora reveals that early modernity did not mean the nobility was replaced by the bourgeoisie, but rather “Western European societies underwent a process of aristocratization” in which the center and periphery often both got stronger—the center got greater powers even as local institutions saw their traditional freedoms strengthened.15 Noble identity in Western Europe was much more in flux in the Middle Ages with no neat definition or criteria, leading Western European nobles to clarify and tighten both of these in the early modern period, such that “the more exact criteria of nobility may have made movement into it more difficult.”16 As other social groups sought to imitate the upper-class lifestyle, the nobles responded by “defining their behavioral norms still further” to keep themselves separate. Thus, court norms “filtered down from the Court to change lesser social groups, gradually transforming the whole of society.”17 The same trend is evident in Chosŏn Korea, where increasing centralization meant that the top yangban clans became even more restrictive and exclusive in their specific criteria for membership. Secondary sons were explicitly banned in the early fifteenth century, and the class known as the chung’in (middle people) were established, as formerly acceptable occupations were no longer considered noble enough. That is, with the high aristocrats increasingly refusing to serve in these vital positions, a hereditary class emerged below the aristocracy but above the common people to fill the need.18 Over the course of the Chosŏn period, the filtering down of upper-class Confucian norms brought about what Martina Deuchler famously termed “the Confucian transformation of Korea,” as Koreans at all levels of society adopted the cultural symbols and norms of the thoroughly Confucianized yangban, forcing more stringent policing of the boundaries like occupation and high office-holding that the most powerful clans used to distinguish themselves.19

As the high nobles sought to strengthen their superiority over the lower orders, they were helped by early modern monarchs, who co-opted them into their centralizing state. As the state got larger and the crown’s extraction of wealth became more efficient, the nobles were drawn to and assimilated to the state. They competed with each other over access to it, which enhanced the ruler’s role as arbiter among competing nobles. Absolutism can only emerge when the elite have been co-opted, such that they have a stake in the state and they consider it more worthy of controlling than obstructing; too much noble control paralyzes the state, as in eighteenth-century Poland, while having little stake in it can lead to outright opposition to it, as in seventeenth-century-century England. As Zmora concludes, “for all the inherent conflicts, a strong monarchy and a strong nobility were not mutually exclusive.”20 Loss of noble autonomy of the state—as expressed in open defiance and rebellion—does not equate to a loss of power but to a conversion of power from one type to another, from violent resistance to exercising influence at court. “Thus, despite differently configured sets of determinants, the crises of the fourteenth century had one similar net result in England, France and Castile: the formation of an alliance between the crown and the lordly class—an alliance which strengthened both to the marked disadvantage of the lower orders.”21 We see the same trend in Chosŏn, where the yangban have more to gain by working with the king than against him. After King Kwanghae’s overthrow by his officials in 1623, no Chosŏn king faced a serious aristocratic revolt. The most dangerous of all, the 1728 rebellion against Yŏngjo, failed in large part because most of the Disciples faction supported the king rather than joining their brothers in revolt.22

Twenty-five years ago Hamish Scott wrote that “[f]ew historical concepts have had their obituaries written more frequently than enlightened absolutism, yet so obstinately refuse to die.”23 While Nicholas Henshall famously disparaged the term as meaning whatever historians want it to mean, Daryl Dee countered in 2009 that “the term absolutism still retains considerable analytical value,”24 and it has indeed refused to die. For Peter H. Wilson, there is no point in constructing a single model of absolutism, since “what we are really dealing with here is a range of comparatively diverse and even partially contradictory ideas.”25 Indeed, it may be that the theoretical clarity scholars strive to get from the term would not reflect the messy realities of the practice of absolute monarchy, even assuming scholars were ever to achieve such theoretical clarity. Still, even if absolutism describes a cluster of related phenomena rather than a single theoretical model, it is still useful for demarcating that cluster from other manifestations of political power. Political actors have debated and contested, if rarely explicitly, different aspects of this cluster for centuries. As Michael Rappaport points out, in the early modern period itself there was “no clear demarcation between what constituted a just, ‘absolute’ monarchy and what was to be considered ‘despotic’ or tyrannical,” and so royal powers’ legal limits were a negotiated frontier rather than a fixed legal boundary,26 just as the early modern French state itself was “a system of everyday practices” rather than “a static set of institutions.”27 Cesare Cuttica and Glenn Burgess, in their introduction to Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Mode...