The nine chapters of this edited volume trace an extensive range of social transformations on the Korean peninsula under Japanese rule. In “Colonial Rule and Social Change: The Paradox of Colonial Control,” Yong Chool Ha compares and contrasts what he sees as opposing examples of state intervention in the form of the education system, on the one hand, where colonial authorities actively created new and tightly controlled institutions, and the traditional family system, on the other hand, where officials could exploit resistance to change for their own gain. In “The Politics of Communication and the Public Sphere in 1920s Korea,” Yong-Jick Kim asserts that Korean print capitalism flourished into a brief but nonetheless vibrant public sphere in the early 1920s that was effectively crushed by colonial authorities by 1926, inhibiting public discourse that would have aided in Korea's decolonization in 1945. Co-authors Seong-Cheol Oh and Ki-Seok Kim demonstrate in “Expansion of Elementary Schooling under Colonialism: Top Down or Bottom Up?” how the demands and expectations Koreans brought to colonial schools were often in stark contrast to the outcomes pursued by the system's architects, a disconnect which ultimately exacerbated rather than alleviated educational exclusion. In “National Identity and Class Interest in the Peasant Movements of the Colonial Period,” Dong-No Kim argues that by creating a modern landholding system and rationalizing tax collection, the government was able to transform its own role and serve as mediator between disgruntled peasants and landlords, which in turn caused peasants to understand their identities in newly class-specific ways while allowing colonial authorities to pursue their overarching aim of increasing agricultural production. Mark Caprio's “The 1920 Colonial Reforms and the June 10 (1926) Movement: A Korean Search for Ethnic Space” explores the shift in government strategies related to both monitoring and preempting social unrest and also highlights how divergently Emperor Sunjong was seen by Koreans from his father Kojong, while Keongil Kim contrasts the complexities of thought conversion in Korea to its applications in Japan in “Japanese Assimilation Policy and Thought Conversion in Colonial Korea.” In “‘Colonial Modernity’ and the Hegemony of the Body Politic in Leprosy Relief Work,” Keunshik Jung studies Western missionary efforts at treating leprosy in Korea in comparison with those of state-run institutions, while Kwang-Ok Kim examines regional tensions between Confucians, shamans, and officials in “Colonial Body and Indigenous Soul: Religion as a Contested Terrain of Culture.” In the final chapter, “The Korean Family in Colonial Space—Caught Between Modernization and Assimilation,” Clark W. Sorenson explores how the evolution of the family structure in the wake of Japanese rule was shaped by a backlash against what Koreans perceived to be colonial legacies.

This collection explicitly aims to contextualize colonial history within both a longer timeframe and a larger regional framework, to include Korean sources as well as Japanese sources, and to expand the English-language scholarship on social (as opposed to economic) aspects of the colonial period. The acknowledgements mention an unusually long journey from its inception in the 1990s to its recent publication (p. ix), which no doubt leaves a mark on the sensibilities that emerge in the final work. For example, the introduction dedicates significant time to critiquing Colonial Modernity in Korea, published in 2001, and Carter Eckert's 1996 work Offspring of Empire: The Koch'ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876–1945 at the expense of engaging with the intersections of the collected chapters as productively as possible. Likewise, objections to assessing the “overall cost and benefit of colonialism” (p. 23) seem like an outdated concern.

“Korean scholars residing and teaching in South Korea” (p. 31) make up seven out of eleven of the volume's contributors, a welcome element of this collection, and this work is at its strongest when it elucidates the impact of the colonial state on diverse aspects of Koreans' lives. Throughout the book, we see colonial authorities not only actively engaging with more obvious realms like education, but also enacting social changes that reshaped how Koreans related to one another, as evidenced in the evolving relationship between peasants and landlords (chapter 4); Confucians and practitioners of shamanism (chapter 8); students and other potential dissidents, not to mention their perceptions of monarchs such as Emperors Kojong and Sunjong (chapter 5); and the lepers with differing intensity of symptoms within leprosariums (chapter 7). While some of the chapters in this volume hold together better than others, Colonial Rule and Social Change in Korea's focus on the complexity of Koreans' lived experience of Japanese colonization in and of itself is a contribution to the English-language studies of the colonial period, one that invites further scholarly exploration of, for example, the intersections of gender, family, tradition, and the state, or of divergent ways to understand and treat disease under colonial rule.