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The 1728 Musin Rebellion: Politics and Plotting in Eighteenth-Century Korea provides the first comprehensive account in English of the Musin Rebellion, an attempt to overthrow King Yŏngjo (1694–1776; r. 1724–1776), and the largest rebellion of eighteenth-century Korea. The rebellion proved unsuccessful, but during three weeks of fighting the government lost control of over a dozen county seats and the rebels drew popular support from the inhabitants of three southern provinces. The revolt profoundly unsettled the early years of Yŏngjo's reign and had considerable influence on the subsequent course of factionalism. In this keenly reasoned study, Andrew David Jackson investigates the causes, development, suppression, legacy, and significance of the bloody Musin Rebellion. The Musin Rebellion had its roots in the factional conflicts surrounding Yŏngjo's troubled succession to the throne. Jackson analyzes an aspect of the conflict previously neglected by researchers, namely how the rebels managed to create an armed rebellion. He argues that the rebellion should be understood in the context of other attempts on power by factional members that occurred over a hundred-year period leading up to 1728. By exploring the political and military context of the event, the book demonstrates that the Musin Rebellion was not driven by systemic breakdown, regionalism, or ideology, but was a failed attempt by political players to take control of the court. Central to the eruption of violence in 1728 was the intervention of key rebel plotters, several of whom were serving officials with access to state military resources. The book provides an in-depth view of factional politics in the Chosŏn court, and the final section deals with the rebel legacy, bringing to the fore issues about managing, forming, and directing the historical memory of the rebellion.
The first detailed analysis in English of monarchy and governance in Korea during King Chŏngjo’s reign. 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 Chŏngjo, 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 Chŏngjo 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 Chŏngjo’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.
A multifaceted exploration of the South Korean film industry
This open access book examines the depiction of Korean history in recent South Korean historical films. Released over the Hallyu (“Korean Wave”) period starting in the mid-1990s, these films have reflected, shaped, and extended the thriving public discourse over national history. In these works, the balance between fate and freedom—the negotiation between societal constraints and individual will, as well as cyclical and linear history—functions as a central theme, subtext, or plot device for illuminating a rich variety of historical events, figures, and issues. In sum, these highly accomplished films set in Korea’s past address universal concerns about the relationship between structure and agency, whether in collective identity or in individual lives. Written in an engaging and accessible style by an established historian, Fate and Freedom in Korean Historical Films offers a distinctive perspective on understanding and appreciating Korean history and culture.
This book is divided into three sections comprised of pairs of chapters. First, a section examining how Confucianism interacts with democratic resilience in South Korea, compared with the societal role and challenge of Islam in Indonesian democracy. The second section will conduct brief historical surveys of the role of civil society role in Korean and Indonesian democratization, and debates about the appropriate role for civil society after democratization. In particular, the various roles of civil society non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and popular movements will be highlighted in both countries. The final section looks at socio-economic conditions and distributive justice in relation to democracy in the Republic of Korea (ROK) and Indonesia.
This book departs from existing studies by focusing on the impact of international influences on the society, culture, and language of both North and South Korea. Since President Kim Young Sam’s segyehwa drive of the mid-1990s, South Korea has become a model for successful globalization. In contrast, North Korea is commonly considered one of the least internationally integrated countries. This characterization fails to account for the reality of the two Koreas and their global engagements. The opening essay situates the chapters by highlighting some significant contrasts and commonalities between the experiences of North and South Korea’s history of engagement with the world beyond the Peninsula. The chapters explore both the longer-term historical influence of Korea’s international contacts as well as specific Korean cultural, linguistic, and social developments that have occurred since the 1990s demise of the global Cold War and greater international integration.
Dynamic and meticulously researched, A History of Korea continues to be one of the leading introductory textbooks on Korean history. Assuming no prior knowledge, Hwang guides readers from early state formation and the dynastic eras to the modern experience in both North and South Korea. Structured around episodic accounts, each chapter begins by discussing a defining moment in Korean history in context, with an extensive examination of how the events and themes under consideration have been viewed up to the present day. By engaging with recurring themes such as collective identity, external influence, social hierarchy, family and gender, the author introduces the major historical events, patterns and debates that have shaped both North and South Korea over the past 1500 years. This textbook is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Korean or Asian history. The first half of the book covers pre-20th century history, and the second half the modern era, making it ideal for survey courses.
Lady Hyegyong's memoirs, which recount the chilling murder of her husband by his father, form one of the best known and most popular classics of Korean literature. From 1795 until 1805 Lady Hyegyong composed this masterpiece, depicting a court life Shakespearean in its pathos, drama, and grandeur. Presented in its social, cultural, and historical contexts, this first complete English translation opens a door into a world teeming with conflicting passions, political intrigue, and the daily preoccupations of a deeply intelligent and articulate woman. JaHyun Kim Haboush's accurate, fluid translation captures the intimate and expressive voice of this consummate storyteller. Reissued nearly twenty years after its initial publication with a new foreword by Dorothy Ko, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong is a unique exploration of Korean selfhood and an extraordinary example of autobiography in the premodern era.
Seoul is a colossus both in its physical presence and the demand it places on any intellectual effort to understand it. How did it come to be? How can a city this immense work? Underlying its spectacle and incongruities is a city that might be described as ill at ease with its own past. The bitter rifts of Japanese colonization persist, as does the troubled aftermath of the Korean War and its divisions; the economic “Miracle on the Han” that followed is crosscut by memories of the violent dictatorship that drove it. In Seoul, author Ross King interrogates this contested history and its physical remnants, tacking between the city’s historiography and architecture, with attention to monuments, streets, and other urban spaces. The book’s structuring device is the dichotomy of erasure and memory as necessary preconditions for reinvention. King traces this phenomenon from the old dynasties to the Japanese regime and wartime destruction; he then follows the equally destructive reinvention of Korea under dictatorship to the brilliant city of the present with its extraordinary explosion of creativity and ideas—the post-1991 Hallyu, the Korean Wave. The final chapter returns to questions of forgetting and memory, but now as “conditions of possibility” for what would seem to underlie the present trajectory of this extraordinary city and culture. Seoul can be read, King suggests, in the context of the hybrid ideas that have characterized Korean cultural history. It may be their present eruption that accounts for the city of contradictions that confronts the contemporary observer and that most extraordinary of Korean phenomena: the rise of an alternative, virtual world, eclipsing both city and nation. Has the very idea of Korea been reinvented even as the weakly defined nation-state slips away?
This is an English translation of one of Korea's most celebrated historical works, a premodern classic so well known to Koreans that it has inspired contemporary literature and television. This translation opens a new window on early 19th-century Korea.