This new book by prominent historian of modern and contemporary Korea Kyung Moon Hwang successfully attempts a systematic, well-structured, and holistic overview of the process of modern state-building in pre-1945 Korea, putting together the decade and a half of the precolonial modernization efforts and thirty-five years of Japanese colonialism. Such a combination is not accidental. As Hwang persuasively argues, the main traits of the modern statehood that the precolonial Korean monarchy attempted (not always successfully) to develop, by “levelling the ascriptive social hierarchy, overcoming superstition, enhancing access to education, promoting public health and personal hygiene, and encouraging industry,” (p. 7) were subsequently visible in the modernizing projects undertaken by the colonial state in 1910–45.

In defining the colonial state as a modernizing regime that––while de facto maintaining the walls of ethnic discrimination between the colonial settlers and the locals (p. 256)––seriously attempted to legitimate itself among the colonized population through its achievements in rationalizing Korean society rather than simply in dominating Koreans by military and police force (pp. 9–10), the book builds further on the concept of a colonial “grey zone” pioneered by South Korean historian Yun Hae-dong in the early 2000s. The “grey zone” between the two poles of conquest by force and the full development of ideological hegemony, between the abstractions of “collaboration” and “resistance,” was the politicized space in which local responses mediated the social interventions of the activist colonial state (p. 7). Such a conceptual framework enables Hwang to escape the Scylla of the traditional nationalist overemphasis on colonial exploitation as the only content of the colonial period while also avoiding the Charybdis of the recent South Korean “New Right” revisionism, which makes the colonial regime into a benevolent exercise in transplanting capitalist institutions to a country that supposedly would never have been able to develop them by itself. Indeed, Hwang makes it abundantly clear that the “civilizing thrust” (p. 251) of Chosŏn's (1392–1910) Confucian monarchy in Korea provided a good ground for the rationalizing enterprises of the precolonial state, which took the preexisting involvement of the central bureaucracy in such spheres as education or public health to a qualitatively new level (p. 253). The theoretical foundations of Rationalizing Korea are Weberian and Foucauldian, with such notions as “governmentality” or “bio-power” being an important part of the book's conceptual apparatus.

The book is divided into eight chapters (plus an introduction and a conclusion), which, beyond chronicling the development of the state bureaucracies on the central (chap. 1) and local (chap. 2) levels and describing the attempts of the precolonial and colonial state at building ideological legitimation for themselves (chap. 3), also outline the state interventions into five key spheres of economy (chap. 4), religion (chap. 5), education (chap. 6), population management (chap. 7), and public health (chap. 8). Many of the findings in these chapters––thoroughly grounded in the primary materials, but also including summaries of the most important interpretations in the secondary literature, in Korean, Japanese, and English––are crucially important for understanding the formative age of modernity in early twentieth-century Korea.

Hwang documents, for example, the explosive growth in state expenditures and employment on both the central and the local levels during the colonial period (pp. 58–68), but also demonstrates that the revenue structure of the colonial state concomitantly underwent a modernization as well: the main traditional source of public expenditures, land tax, accounted for approximately 40 percent of the colonial state's income in the early 1920s, but its proportion had fallen to less than 5 percent by the early 1940s. A modern-style income tax was introduced in 1934 and played an increasingly important role in financing the colonial state's activities (pp. 37–38). The state's expansion naturally reached its peak during the wartime mobilization in 1937–45; Hwang, however, is careful to point out that the wartime state was much less all-powerful than its own propaganda often suggested (p. 49). While consciously attempting to concentrate authority in the center, the colonial state was also a fragmented entity, as it had to take a number of interests into consideration in its policy-making. State power was not only centrally concentrated but also dispersed downwards, to the multitude of localities where the majority of Koreans lived. Discontent could be met by negotiations and concessions, in addition to oppression (pp. 253–57). Maintenance of public order was important in order to achieve the sort of managerial legitimacy that the colonial state strove for (pp. 100–101), but to make such governmentality possible the state had to negotiate with the local Korean elites, whose cooperation was crucial for smooth functioning of the state machinery (pp. 76–77). Indeed, much of the colonial-age combination of cooptation and coercion Hwang so masterfully depicts continued beyond the end of colonialism, becoming a salient feature of the authoritarian developmentalist regimes in both North and South Korea. The same may be said about the state-dominated, mercantilist path to economic development that, as Hwang persuasively argues, was already pioneered by the Korean Crown in the precolonial age (pp. 124–29). The continuity between the official secularization of the precolonial and colonial state before the early 1930s (pp. 155–63) and South Korean ways of managing religion is visible; it is also well known that the colonial household registration system (pp. 203–9) was preserved, in a somewhat altered form, in South Korea until very recently.

While rationalization is an important angle in modern Korean historical studies, it––as Hwang himself acknowledges––does not necessarily exhaust the totality of Koreans’ early twentieth-century experiences. The rationality of the Shinto theocracy of the late colonial period (pp. 163–65) is questionable to say the least; the same may be said about the rampant use of torture in the colonial police system. In any case, Rationalizing Korea is a must-read for any student of modern Korea. It is also likely to be highly useful for teaching Korea's modern history, especially on the graduate level.