The field of late Chosŏn studies thrives on a diversity of viewpoints. No scholar, including myself, likes being labeled, but arguably one may recognize three distinct approaches. Dominant in Korea, the oldest perspective privileges the nation and finds class useful for explaining Korea's transition to modernity. In the West, an alternative approach critiques teleological paradigms and instead stresses the stability of late Chosŏn society dominated by Confucian yangban. More recently, a third way has rejected rigid Marxian categories of class while recognizing fundamental similarities shared by late Chosŏn Korea, late imperial China, Edo Japan, and other sedentary societies of early modern Eurasia.
Though not exclusively, Sun Joo Kim's book strongly reflects the second approach. This study argues that the 1812 Hong Kyŏngnae Rebellion embodied factors that are better understood when they are distanced from considerations of nation or class, especially the center's discrimination against northerners while exploiting local resources (pp. 40–85), competition among local notables as well as among various local groups (pp. 72–88), and subversive prophetic beliefs (pp. 98–104). Older studies generally portrayed the event as a peasant rebellion in the context of long-term socioeconomic changes that signaled the final phase of Korean history's feudal or medieval period. In contrast, Kim explains the rebellion as a regional event that encapsulated the north's unique place in late Chosŏn society.
The argument stands on careful, creative scholarship. First of all, Kim's analysis is impressively multidimensional. Presenting a more nuanced narrative, she aptly refers to European and Chinese historical analogues in conjunction with relevant social and cultural theories (pp. 172–80). Second, she stresses the historical agency of local residents, offering varied reactions to the rebellion. Her sympathetic treatment of the life and career of Paek Kyŏnghae—a scholar-official who maintained dignity and remained loyal to the Chosŏn dynasty despite the center's discriminations against his native region—helps readers to better grasp the northern elite's hopes and frustrations (pp. 42–53). Because the rebellion was not just about the elite, Kim also elucidates how potentially subversive ideas such as geomancy appealed to more ordinary people (pp. 89–104). Third, I detect not a single factual or editing error in this book. This is not a small feat.
The book's only major weakness is that the author's effort to overcome old nation- or class-based analyses of the rebellion falls short because of her inadequate scrutiny of northern genealogies and resulting misidentification of the northern elite as yangban (pp. 25–26, 183–84). Of course, if they were, then this would significantly decrease the importance of class as an analytic concept laden with implications on the modernity issue. When cross-checked against other primary sources, written genealogies of yangban families show remarkable accuracy and reliability that even outshine their counterparts produced by the contemporaneous European aristocracy. Virtually by definition, a late Chosŏn yangban patrilineage boasted a well-documented pedigree going at least as far back as late Koryŏ, though no further than late Silla. In contrast, the genealogies of up-and-coming families, such as Seoul's specialist chungin and the northern elite, tend to show easily demonstrable contradictions, ultimately discrediting claimed late Koryŏ–early Chosŏn links to the central elite. Of course, historians can trace reliable genealogies of the aristocratic families of early modern Europe at least to the High Middle Ages (but no further than late antiquity), whereas this generally is not the case for rising middle-class families. Thus, while certainly not suggesting that various evidently secondary-status groups formed a discrete middle class, I still find that the Hong Kyŏngnae Rebellion was not entirely devoid of implications for changing class formations in early modern Korea. The locals themselves were divided over issues such as hyangan membership (pp. 28–34), but the social or class barrier separating the northern elite from the central elite was no less significant. Moreover, although Kim's evidence on the wide circulation of prophetic beliefs is strong, they do not appear to have been much more than expedient tools for rebel leaders rather than a powerful, unifying “ideology” (pp. 9–10, 175–77).
Overall, even though the treatment of the northern elite as yangban is problematic, Kim sets an admirable example of a persuasive multidimensional analysis of a major historical event. In all fairness, her misidentification of the northern elite as yangban is not so much attributable to any oversight on her part as to the Korean studies field's underdeveloped state of genealogical and prosopographical research; for western Eurasia, centuries of foundational work—more recently coupled with genetic genealogy—is now fueling the Descent From Antiquity project, which seeks to trace a living person's ancestry beyond the medieval period. Undaunted by the limitation, Kim still presents a careful, meticulous scholarship on the rebellion. Important not only for Korea historians but also for comparativists of rebellions in the context of larger social change in world history, I expect this well-researched book to remain a classic for many years to come.
