Soju is a global beverage. For those who have imbibed, soju's potent proof joins with distinct aromatics suggestive of high mountain pines to sweep one into a moment of tender-grilled beef ribs with good company; or perhaps a bottle over ttŏkpokki: both distinctly Korean moments. At least this is the image Kpop celebrity ads and dramas offer for consumption, and thus an attractive way to commune with Korean culture characteristic of the global Hallyu movement. Yet, soju's place in the modern nationalist firmament belies the other globalisms that underwrite its origins and development. Park Hyunhee in her present work seeks to clarify these turbid global waters of soju's history by linking Mongol imperialism, Japanese colonialism, and Korean nationalism to the multi-vectored movement of distillation technology into Koryo, its localization and subsequent re-export as a Korean cultural object in the modern period. This allows Park to achieve the much larger goal of reframing Korean history as global history, therein providing a blueprint for understanding other premodern technologies and objects whose movement is globally embedded, but locally transformed.
The book is divided into six both thematic and chronological chapters. Chapter one is a detailed review of the archeology and historiography of distillation's global origins. It argues that distillation spread to East Asia before the Mongols with multiple origins and vectors: either medieval Central Asians or southeast Asians via the Indian Ocean littoral were responsible for its transference to China. Chapter two asserts that the Pax Mongolica and the socio-political importance of alcohol to Mongols propelled distillation more quickly and intensively throughout Eurasia, and ultimately the Koryo state (918–1392) in Korea. Chapter three builds on this latter point by looking specifically at Koryo as a satellite of the Mongol Empire (1206–1368), thus providing the Eurasian links and the intensive exchange necessary for distillation to spread to Korea. Chapter four addresses the long-durée process of the localization of distillates, while chapter five addresses their industrialization, homogenization, and bureaucratization under the tutelage of Japanese colonialism and subsequent South Korean regimes. The final chapter applies the blueprint of exposure, localization, and re-export from soju to Japanese shochu and Mexican tequila.
The heart of Park's work, however, is the remodeling of Korean medieval history during Koryo as global history through the lens of distillation with an intensively comparative and multi-disciplinary approach. Park's previous study, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds (Reference Park2012) used the exchange of geographic and cartographic knowledge between China and the Islamic worlds between 700 and 1500 to challenge the Eurocentric narrative of globalization in the Age of Discovery. Similarly to Eurocentric narratives, Koryo histories have often elided Eurasian connections and focused instead on intensive relationships with Song and Yuan China (Kim Reference Kim2007; Yi Reference Yi2013). Previous histories of distillation preserve divisions too. They are siloed into broad Western and Asian bodies, and even more parochially in the case of Korean liquor. Park dissolves these barriers, but goes further than her last monograph, adopting a fully global lens beyond China and the Dār al-Islam. First, she unites previously isolated Korean and Western historiographies of distillation. Soju's history then flows into larger history of cultural and economic exchange between western Eurasia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Park postulates that a Eurasian cross-fertilization of multiple distillation traditions joined by well-established routes of exchange prefigured distillation's transference to Korea (25–66). Second, she contextualizes the notably bi-directional long-durée exchange of alcohol knowledge and culture between Chinese and Korean states facilitated largely by diplomatic and scholarly networks (67–80). Third, she employs two Koryosa passages and a poetic snippet from the late Koryo official Yi Saek (1328–1396) to argue that these elite networks intensified during the Koryo-Yuan alliance (1268 CE) and were plausibly responsible for the importation and domestication of soju (80–84; 93–95). Subsequently, building on the work of Kim Hodong, Yi Kanghan, and Thomas Allsen, she creatively employs research on the cultural, economic, and political exchange between Koryo and the Mongol world to establish plausible military and commercial trajectories beyond elite networks (96–126). Choson excavations of stills in Cheju are corroborated with patterns of Mongol military occupation and Chinese language-learning texts like Nogeoldae that serve as evidence of intense commercial contact. The abundance of proximal evidence encourages the conclusion that distillates and stills entered Koryo from the mid-thirteenth century. Accordingly, tracing distillation's movement into Korea links its West Asian rise with long-standing regional patterns of East Asian exchange and the particulars of a Mongol world empire.
This multi-vectored approach to the globalization of objects here is further laudable as it moves past simple linear or unidirectional analyses that have plagued global histories of material objects. Allsen (Reference Allsen2019), in his last book on pearls in Mongol Eurasia, suggested that pre-modern global history had to take into account multiple, simultaneous axes of movement. Park skillfully demonstrates the rich complexity of these processes and possibilities. Koryo's overland economic communion with the Yuan realm means the East to West exchange of people, foods, and textiles, while links to the Ryukus, southern China and SE Asia where dyes, fragrant woods, and other items originate are simultaneously operative. Still technology too must be moving along these trajectories. These movements are then paralleled in Choson, where distillation knowledge as well as distillates move both into Japan and even Spanish America via the Manila galleon trade, all while Chinese texts, like encyclopedias on liquor, continue to enter Choson (127–163).
A second strength is its insistence that the global exchange of objects is only rendered coherent when considered alongside processes of local transformation and consumption. In Choson, inclement summer heat, the household cottage industry, and elite consumption practices altered soju's form and flavor. Local ingredients in use, such as Lithospermi radix were used to make hongju, or in other recipes ginseng was added to make novel local varieties (147). Locally available wines became the raw materials. Cheju even developed a variety based on barley and millet, as rice did not grow well there (110). Soju's subsequent industrialization too must be understood in the local context of the Japanese colonial state that sought to rationalize the Korean economy to benefit the metropole. Introductions such as industrial column stills using sweet potatoes and tapioca increased productivity, while profits were assured by a new taxation and licensing regime. This system was inherited by the Korean post-war government. It was further bureaucratized for revenue, promoted as the national beverage, and mass-produced for the new legions of industrial laborers. As such, although now globally exported, soju is a direct product of local processes of colonialism and nationalism (164–199).
Although impressive in scale and mastery of the literature, the lack of direct evidence for soju's entry into Korea is concerning. Chapters two and three argue for the increase of particular distillation technologies and cultural transfers between the Mongol Yuan and Koryo, but this amounts to a history of probabilities loosely laced together with “circumstantial evidence” (93). There is no smoking gun, and this is a challenge for a study that touts this section as its largest contribution to soju and Korea's global history. The lack of any archeological evidence for Mongol stills from this period is very troubling. Yet, this shortcoming is not particular to Park's work, but rather widespread in global histories of medieval Afro-Eurasia. Allsen's (Reference Allsen2009) work on the transference of historiographic knowledge via the Mongol statesman Chingsang Bolad is similarly rooted in reasonably convincing circumstantial evidence.
This theme of uncertainty muddies the waters about soju's ultimate identity too. Park's conclusion suggests that any definition should be diluted to include any and all distilled liquors descended from Choson soju and industrial ethanol-based replicants introduced by the Japanese with a geographic relationship to the Korean peninsula (234–236). Modern industrial soju is a combination of column-still mass-produced ethanol combined with flavorings and other industrial ingredients to produce consistent brand-specific flavors, while traditional soju either used a region-dependent grain mash, rice, or barley, or a fermented wine as a base and was distilled once before aging. This would be like saying industrially produced ethanol if cleverly combined with grape juice and buffered with chemicals is still French wine, because the column-stills are in Bordeaux. Without a firm definition of process or ingredients, by the book's end soju has become somewhat watered down as an analytical category.
What could have fortified the argument would have been a more intensive look at ceramic accoutrements of alcohol consumption. Mapping cultural transfers through ceramics has already been successful demonstrated by Hur (Reference Hur2015) in his study of Korean tea bowls' penetration into Japan. Shuo and Misun (Reference Shuo and Misun2021) have argued in the Chinese context that mutual influences were transmitted between liquor vessels and tea vessels. Furthermore, and importantly, Han (Reference Han2019) has argued that a sudden burst of creativity occurred in ceramic drinking vessels during the Mongol period, as kumiss, araq, and grape wine were absorbed and accommodated by domestic ceramic culture. This material archive might provide a better purchase on global exchanges, and supplement what has been to date suggestive documentary evidence.
Another enduring issue for histories of globalization that manifests itself here is periodization. Recently, Valerie Hansen and others have argued for an early dating of the onset of globalization. Hansen (Reference Hansen2020) has argued that by 1000 CE the entire globe exhibited increased commercial, social, and cultural exchange built on the back of intensified maritime and continental mobility. Other authors look even earlier to Rome, India, and China arguing for globalization's genesis in antiquity (Benjamin Reference Benjamin2018). Park chooses not to engage with this debate, and firmly pitches her tent in the Mongol camp with Allsen (Reference Allsen2019) and Timothy May (Reference May2012). Park admits that evidence for Korean peninsular interaction beyond China before Koryo is sparse, and that seems to lead to a Korean globalization during Koryo. However, what the instance of Koryo and soju masks, then, is that globalizations are not experienced evenly, geographically or temporally, as pointed out by Holmes and Standen (Reference Holmes and Standen2018). Choson, in the book, demonstrates that the globalization of soju somewhat hemorrhaged in domestic veins before flowing out again.
Ultimately, Soju: A Global History is a study in possibilities for how to think about global history as well as how to reframe Korean and northeast Asian history therein. Foregrounding material exchange and technology as the chief lens for Korean globalisms allows not only an escape from the myopia of ethno-centric nationalism, but also a clear glimpse at the dynamic interplay of material mobilities, technological acculturation, and identity (re)formations. That dynamic at the heart of Soju is both proof of Korea's global entanglement and a clarion to excavate the bedrock of this cultural powerhouse's globalism.
