Eugene Y. Park – Författare

From the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, millions of Korean men from all walks of life trained in the arts of war to prepare not for actual combat but to sit for the state military examination (mukwa). Despite this widespread interest, only for a small minority did passing the test lead to appointment as a military official. Why, then, did so many men aspire to the mukwa?Eugene Y. Park argues that the mukwa was not only the state's primary instrument for recruiting aristocrats as new members to the military bureaucracy but also a means by which the ruling elite of Seoul could partially satisfy the status aspirations of marginalized regional elites, secondary status groups, commoners, and manumitted slaves. Unlike the civil examination (munkwa), however, that assured successful examinees posts in the prestigious central bureaucracy, achievement in the mukwa did not enable them to gain political power or membership in the existing aristocracy.A wealth of empirical data and primary sources drives Park's study: a database of more than 32,000 military examination graduates; a range of new and underutilized documents such as court records, household registers, local gazetteers, private memoirs, examination rosters, and genealogies; and products of popular culture, such as p'ansori storytelling and vernacular fiction. Drawing on this extensive evidence, Park provides a comprehensive sociopolitical history of the mukwa system in late Choson Korea.

Koreans are known for their keen interest in genealogy and inherited ancestral status. Yet today's ordinary Korean would be hard pressed to explain the whereabouts of ancestors before the twentieth century. With A Family of No Prominence, Eugene Y. Park gives us a remarkable account of a nonelite family, that of Pak Tŏkhwa and his descendants (which includes the author). Spanning the early modern and modern eras over three centuries (1590–1945), this narrative of one family of the chungin class of people is a landmark achievement.What we do know of the chungin, or "middle people," of Korea largely comes from profiles of wealthy, influential men, frequently cited as collaborators with Japanese imperialists, who went on to constitute the post-1945 South Korean elite. This book highlights many rank-and-file chungin who, despite being better educated than most Koreans, struggled to survive. We follow Pak Tŏkhwa's descendants as they make inroads into politics, business, and culture. Yet many members' refusal to link their family histories and surnames to royal forebears, as most other Koreans did, sets them apart, and facilitates for readers a meaningful discussion of identity, modernity, colonialism, memory, and historical agency.

Korea is a historical region of prominence in the global political economy. Still, a comprehensive overview of its early modern era has yet to receive a book-length treatment in English. Comprising topical chapters written by 22 experts from 11 countries, The Routledge Handbook of Early Modern Korea presents an interdisciplinary survey of Korea’s politics, society, economy, and culture from the founding of the Chosŏn state (1392–1897) to 1873 when its political leadership began preparing for treaty relations with Imperial Japan, the United States, and other Western nations.Chosŏn mirrors shared historical patterns among literate sedentary societies of early modern Afro-Eurasia. Various long-term developments that shaped early modern Korea include the completion of centralized bureaucratic governance as codified in the State Administrative Code (Kyŏngguk taejŏn); the appearance of regular rural marketplaces facilitating transactions in an increasingly liberalized economy; continuity of an aristocracy (yangban) from the medieval period (Koryŏ: 918–1392); a decreasing correspondence between ascriptive status and socioeconomic class; and the state and the elite’s growing interest in encyclopedic knowledge and its dissemination while their monopoly on knowledge production weakened.This handbook provides historical context for readers wishing to know more than just the “Korea” that evokes K-pop or North Korea’s nuclear weapons, while Hyundai, Samsung, and other South Korean brands have gained visibility in everyday life. Interested English-speaking scholars, educators, students, and the general public without access to the large body of Korean-language works on Chosŏn will find this book a valuable critical introduction to early modern Korea.

On October 26, 1909, the Korean patriot An Chunggun assassinated the Japanese statesman Ito Hirobumi in Harbin, China. More than a century later, the ramifications of An’s daring act continue to reverberate across East Asia and beyond. This volume explores the abiding significance of An, his life, and his written work, most notably On Peace in the East (Tongyang p’yonghwaron), from a variety of perspectives, especially historical, legal, literary, philosophical, and political. The ways in which An has been understood and interpreted by contemporaries, by later generations, and by scholars and thinkers even today shed light on a range of significant issues including the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings for both imperial expansion and resistance to it; the ongoing debate concerning whether violence, or even terrorism, is ever justified; and the possibilities for international cooperation in today’s East Asia as a regional collective. Students and scholars of East Asia will find much to engage with and learn from in this volume.

On October 26, 1909, the Korean patriot An Chunggun assassinated the Japanese statesman Ito Hirobumi in Harbin, China. More than a century later, the ramifications of An’s daring act continue to reverberate across East Asia and beyond. This volume explores the abiding significance of An, his life, and his written work, most notably On Peace in the East (Tongyang p’yonghwaron), from a variety of perspectives, especially historical, legal, literary, philosophical, and political. The ways in which An has been understood and interpreted by contemporaries, by later generations, and by scholars and thinkers even today shed light on a range of significant issues including the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings for both imperial expansion and resistance to it; the ongoing debate concerning whether violence, or even terrorism, is ever justified; and the possibilities for international cooperation in today’s East Asia as a regional collective. Students and scholars of East Asia will find much to engage with and learn from in this volume.

In early modern Korea, the Chosŏn state conducted an extermination campaign against the Kaesŏng Wang, descendants of the preceding Koryŏ dynasty. It was so thorough that most of today's descendants are related to a single survivor. Before long, however, the Chosŏn dynasty sought to bolster its legitimacy as the successor of Koryŏ by rehabilitating the surviving Wangs—granting them patronage for performing ancestral rites and even allowing them to attain prestigious offices. As a result, Koryŏ descendants came to constitute elite lineages throughout Korea. As members of the revived aristocratic descent group, they were committed to Confucian norms of loyalty to their ruler. The Chosŏn, in turn, increasingly honored Koryŏ legacies. As the state began to tolerate critical historical narratives, the early plight of the Wangs inspired popular accounts that engendered sympathy. Modern forces of imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, urbanization, industrialization, and immigration transformed the Kaesŏng Wang from the progeny of fallen royals to individuals from all walks of life. Eugene Y. Park draws on primary and secondary sources, interviews, and site visits to tell their extraordinary story. In so doing, he traces Korea's changing politics, society, and culture for more than half a millennium.

While popular trends, cuisine, and long-standing political tension have made Korea familiar in some ways to a vast English-speaking world, its recorded history of some two millennia remains unfamiliar to most. Korea: A History addresses general readers, providing an up-to-date, accessible overview of Korean history from antiquity to the present. Eugene Y. Park draws on original-language sources and the up-to-date synthesis of East Asian and Western-language scholarship to provide an insightful account. This book expands still-limited English-language discussions on pre-modern Korea, offering rigorous and compelling analyses of Korea's modernization while discussing daily life, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ history, and North Korean history not always included in Korea surveys. Overall, Park is able to break new ground on questions and debates that have been central to the field of Korean studies since its inception.