Although sovereignty (self-rule) as a modern, political imperative is often identified with the Westphalian Peace (1648) in Europe, the concept's iterations across the globe were inextricably linked to imperialism. Henry Em's The Great Enterprise elaborates on this paradoxical relationship between self-rule and global imperialism by tracing the ideal of sovereignty that was rigorously and often contentiously explored during the long hundred years of Korean history writing, heralded here as “the great enterprise.” Em's study takes a creative, interdisciplinary approach to these two related concerns of nationalism and historiography, drawing innovatively from the more established disciplines of history (historical materialism, positivism), political science (Park Chan-seung, anti-communism, world systems theory), and archaeology (colonial “discovery” of the Sŏkkuram Buddha, Manchurian history), as well as from the more recent disciplines of cultural history (hair cutting, the modern exhibitionary complex), translation studies (minjok as a neologism), and what Em calls “postnational/postcolonial” studies (subaltern, the waiting room of History).

The book is organized into two parts. Part one opens with a detailed analysis of the ritual significance surrounding King Kojong's 1897 pronouncement of the Great Han Empire's sovereignty, and shows how Korea's precolonial transition from the late Chosŏn “Little China” (soChunghwa) mentality into a modern state necessitated a realigning of ancient Korean genealogies back to KoChosŏn and Tan'gun against multiple competing claims. Korea's placement within the nineteenth-century racial and civilizational hierarchy was visually mapped in the 1893 Chicago World Fair which Yun Ch'i-ho visited. The “nation” came to be translated as minjok in East Asia through semantic innovation, and the modern subjectivity of Chosŏn inmin (Korean people) emerged as a part of liberal discourse. Em takes to task Syngman Rhee's early writings on citizenship in The Independent as typifying a discernible “liberal-bourgeois subjectivity,” wherein the conception of sovereignty and peoplehood was “seemingly inclusive of everyone” but “profoundly undemocratic and colonial” (p. 75). Em borrows from Uday Mehta (and Dipesh Chakrabarty) to expose the exclusionary underbelly of liberalism, which he rightly notes is derived from its theoretical core, in which only people believed to be qualified for citizenship are governed democratically while others need to be educated and shepherded through the political waiting room.

Part two focuses on history writing as a contested field with roots in the colonial period by opening with the Japanese “discovery” of the Sŏkkuram Buddha. Em identifies the larger political stakes in the imperialist narratives of Mansenshi and Chōsenshi as well as the more collaborationist and cooptable strains. The heroes of part two are not difficult to identify despite the fact that Em devotes a fair amount of attention to the complicated conditions undergirding other forms of historical production—the ethnic nationalist (early Sin Ch'ae-ho), the imperialist (Chōsen henshūkai), the establishment nationalist (Ch'oe Nam-sŏn, An Chae-hong, Yi Pyŏng-do, Yi Ki-baek), and the post-liberation conservative (the New Right). Em's protagonists, who he says wrote instead a Korean history gesturing toward a “more egalitarian and autonomous path from below,” are Sin Ch'ae-ho in his later 1930s anarchist (minjung) years; the Marxist historian Paek Nam-un who explored a universalizing socioeconomic history able to challenge particularism in its attendant colonial and bourgeois nationalist forms; and Paek's disciples, Kang Man-gil and Kim Yong-sŏp, who under a safe, postwar “nationalist canopy,” reestablished intellectual links to a form of history writing based on “anticolonial, oppositional nationalism.” This is an intellectual lineage that Em applauds as contributing greatly to an “understanding [of] the dynamic nature of Korea's social and economic development in late Chosŏn” (p. 15).

While not a comprehensive account of Korean historiography, The Great Enterprise draws from a broad range of disciplines, from the social sciences to cultural studies, in its narrating of the trajectory of modern sovereignty and could have only been written by an author who was intimately familiar with the field both domestically and outside Korea. Thus, it is oftentimes difficult to discern a consistent voice and audience, which is not the book's failing specifically, but speaks to the structural challenges of negotiating transnationalism and nationalism as manifest in the expanding field of Korean studies. It might have been helpful to treat in a more sustained manner the burgeoning historiographic sphere outside Korea, which, as Em acknowledges by citing Bruce Cumings's influence, speaks to the “domestic” peninsular schools of thought (hakp'ung). Em gestures toward this dialogue by explaining the so-called New Right's cooption of the Haebang ch ŏnhu sa ŭi chaeinsik anthology (Reexamination of Korean History before and after Liberation, 2006), which he states was enthusiastically embraced because postcolonialism served the South Korean establishment and sublimated the collaboration problem under the rubric of “colonial modernity” (p. 159). A clearer account of this (mis-)appropriation and a few words about the emergence of postcolonialism and postnationalism in a global context might have better balanced Em's admirable convictions about the problem of class and the locus of democracy.