JIE-HYUN LIM
The Configuration of the National and the Global
Marc Bloch’s saying that “all history is comparative history” hints at the transnationality of the nationalist imagination, for comparative history throws into relief the peculiarities of a given national history and thus helps to essentialize it. Indeed a nationalist imagination can be fed only in the transnational space. National history is also a product of worldwide cultural interactions and transnational discourses, which demand “an attempt at a globalized (not total) description” (Said 1994: 233). It would be more appropriate to stress the configuration of national and world history rather than an either/or rivalry. This configuration helps to position national histories sequentially in a linear developmental trajectory of historicism. In the sequence of national histories, at least as these came into being in academic history-writing during the nineteenth century, Western countries occupy the higher positions, to be followed and taken as models by backward Easterners.1 Thus, making national histories in East Asia was not conceivable without referring to a world history based on the dichotomy of “normative” Western History and a “deviated” Eastern variation. (See Pomeranz and Segal, this volume.)
A history of cultural encounters between “East” and “West” shows how non-Europeans have been obliged to respond to the conceptual categories brought into play by “Western” modernity. Conscripted to modernity at large, willingly or unwillingly, “Easterners” rendered themselves the objects and agents of Western modernity, which was thought to become global over time. East Asian historians have tried to evidence their civilizational potential by finding European elements such as rationalism, science, freedom, equality, and industrialism in their own national histories. Any national history that suggested a lack of “Western” modernity could be branded as the history of “history-less people.” Modern historiography in Japan and Korea was thus partly a struggle for recognition of the national raison d’être by showing up their national potential for modernist development against skeptical Westerners. This struggle for recognition could be successful only when it was written in a way that was intelligible and appealing to Western readers. In order to satisfy their expectations, the East and the West, the Orient and the Occident had to be configured and structured into a grammar familiar to European history.
The struggle for Western recognition gave rise to a consequential Eurocentrism in the East. Writing national history in East Asia was a voluntary act of inscribing Eurocentrism on its own past (Lim 2008). Even in search of anti-colonial nationalist agendas and historical peculiarities, East Asian historians have turned the European past into a hegemonic mirror reflecting their own national past. The trajectory of modern historiography of and in East Asia is imprinted with the traces of “the attempt to posit the identity of one’s own ethnicity or nationality in terms of the gap between it and the putative West, that is, to create the history of one’s own nation through the dynamics of attraction and repulsion from the West” (Sakai 1997: 50). The configuration of norm and deviation, of East and West, and of the national and the global is crucial to understanding the historicist complicity of national history and world history. Paradoxically, therefore, world history functioned as a nationalist rationale in East Asia. However, the accommodation of national history or even the promotion of nationalist agendas through world history is hardly unique to East Asia.
The question of “why wasn’t Germany England,” posed by Ralf Dahrendorf in the German Sonderweg debates, originated in the same schematic configuration: English history of a universal/normal/democratic path had been posited as a yardstick against which to measure German history of a particular/abnormal/fascist path. Viewed from a “problem space” rather than a geopositivistic sense, the demarcation of normative modernity in England and deviated modernity in Germany overlaps the boundary of “West” and “East” (Lim 2010). “Western Civilization,” designed as a part of the core curriculum of many American universities, is another good example. The “Western Civilization” course was created to encourage the national integration of massive numbers of new immigrants of diverse nationalities during World War I. The history of “Western Civilization” presented the United States as the culmination of a civilized “Western” tradition and imprinted the American national identity with more “Western” than European identities (Dunn 2007). This “patriotic world history” to highlight and celebrate American political and ideological values and its parochial understanding of humankind’s history has a century-long tradition (Bentley 2005).
In parallel with Eurocentric world history, Asia-centric world history also contributed to consolidating a nationalist rationale in East Asia. Confronted by the dilemma of a consequential Eurocentrism in making national histories, East Asian historians appealed repeatedly to the historico-political slogans of anti-Western Occidentalism, perhaps best represented by Asiatic internationalism. (Examples include the pre–World War II discourses of “pan-Asianism” and a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” and the postwar discourses of an Asiatic value-system and East Asian Community.) From the beginning, discourses of an internationalist Asia have been loaded with nationalist repugnance, impulses, and aspirations. What is most revealing in the trajectory of regional histories is the discursive complicity between the Eurocentric Orientalism of “Western Civilization” and the anti-Western Occidentalism of “Asian Civilization” in promoting the idea of civilization as a self-regulating entity. This reflection suggests the urgent task of problematizing the trilateral complicity of national, regional (Oriental) and world (Western) history in abusing history for a nationalist rationale.2 This chapter thus explores world history as a domain of both scholarship and education in Japan and Korea in conjunction with their respective national histories.
From World History to National History
World history came to Japan in the 1870s with the Meiji Ishin (Meiji Regeneration). The Japanese government took the initiative to introduce world history in the name of Bankokushi, meaning “the history of all countries of the world.” The stress was laid on providing information about current world affairs rather than on studying the histories of others. Its aim was to introduce Western things to Japan in order to help the Japanese nation adapt to new conditions and enter the gate of civilization as quickly as possible. Among the various books of “world history” and “universal history,” the most popular one initially was Bankokushi (1876), a Japanese translation of Samuel Goodrich’s Universal History on the Basis of Geography (1870). This book was a simple compilation of many histories, dealing with every region on Earth, like a travel guidebook. Other Bankokushi books carried the Eurocentric messages more explicitly than Goodrich’s book. For example, William Swinton’s Outlines of World History viewed world history as the histories of the European people (Aryan races) that led the progress of civilization. (See Liu, this volume.) The Swinton line ofBankokushi was called “Civilization History” and its Eurocentric interpretation of world history became dominant in Japan during the 1880s (Minamizuka 2007: 190–191).
These world history textbooks thus preceded the first national history textbooks. It was at the request of the bureau of the Paris International Exhibition that the first national history of Japan, Nihonshiryaku (A brief history of Japan), appeared in 1878. The finalized version of the text,Kokushigan (View of national history), was adopted as an official history textbook in 1888 by the newly created history department of Tokyo Imperial University. Thus, the first Japanese national history and official history textbook had “Western readers” as its primary target. The first book on the history of Japanese art, Histoire de l’art Japon, was actually published first in French, at the request of the International Exhibition bureau in 1900 (Takagi 1989: 74). The motivation was to glorify the Japanese state by highlighting its national heritage and encouraging “our own artistic spirit” to keep abreast of European standards. The cognitive sequence from the world to the nation was demonstrated also by the work of Fukuzawa Yukichi. This champion of modernity in Meiji Japan uttered the famous dictum that “knowledge of oneself develops in direct proportion to the knowledge of others: the more we know about them (the West), the more we care about our own destiny” (Kondo 2007: 117).
The Japanese scholar Kuroita Katsumi personifies this idea. Contrary to his contemporary reputation as the founder of positivist scientific history in the 1880s and 1890s, he was not afraid to declare that if historical sites can stimulate the people’s patriotic emotion, then they deserve to be protected as historically important sites – regardless of their historical value. (See Witz, this volume.) In his opinion it was just as important to encourage national sentiments and patriotism as it was to promote objective historical study. Kuroita’s encounter with the European way of making nations drove his passion for national history. What impressed him most during his visit to Europe in 1908–1910 was the story and historical sites of William Tell. Kuroita was not concerned with whether this reflected the historical truth or not. He believed that insofar as it inspired patriotism among the common people in Switzerland, this history could serve the state (Lee 2004). Japanese positivistic historiography, influenced by the methods of Leopold von Ranke, would develop in parallel with this sort of political commitment to the nation-state. The myth of an “objective truth” in history, in other words, presumed that the nationalist inclination was real.
Japanese intellectuals of the Enlightenment thus found themselves in a dilemma: the more they became familiar with European history, the wider the gap grew between Japan and Europe. The more they tried to find symmetrical equivalents to the history of the West, the more they had to suffer from the sense of a lack. When historicism changed vertical evolutionary time into the horizontal space of an “imaginative geography,” for example, Japan discovered that it lagged behind the unilinear development scheme of world history, and it had to be placed in the Orient in comparison with Europe. To escape from this dilemma, Japanese modern historiography adopted its own Orientalist strategy of highlighting the Japanese differences from the rest of Asia. Inventing its own “Orient” – of Asian neighbors – was a way to make up for that lack. By inventing Japan’s own Orient, Japanese historians let China and Chosǒn (a historical name of Korea between 1392 and 1897) take the place of Japan (in Western views), and allowed Japan to join the West in the imaginative geography of the period. Thus, toyoshi (history of Orient) was established as a Japanese version of Orientalism. It aimed at removing the Japanese image of the invented Orient by capturing European elements in Japanese history and inventing its own Orient of China and Chosŏn.
Toyoshi as a regional history was intended to mediate between national/Japanese and world/Western history, but in fact it was Japan’s own formulation of the “Orient.” In 1894 Naka Michiyo proposed a division of world history into Occidental and Oriental history in the middle school curriculum, and the Ministry of Education accepted this proposal in 1896. Perhaps not coincidentally, the establishment of toyoshi had the Sino-Japanese War as its historical background, an episode which served to enhance Japanese national pride because of the victory over a traditional Great Power. Following the subsequent victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), historical pedagogy came to be divided into three departments: national, Asian, and Western history (Tanaka 1993). This tripartite structure of history helped to elevate the strategic location of Japan into closer connection with the “West.” That noble dream of de-Asianizing and Europeanizing Japan could be well imagined through a trilateral discursive complicity of national (Japanese), regional (Oriental/Asian), and world (Occidental/Western) history. This tripartite structure still dominates the institutions of historical research and education in Japan and Korea today.
World history was also thriving in late nineteenth-century Korea, but here it was based on the crisis, not the surge into prominence, of the nation. The first world history textbook written in Korean was The Short History of the World, published in 1896. Many other works of Western history were published in translation, including The Outline of English History (1896), A Short History of Russia (1898), History of American Independence (1899), History of the Fall of Poland (1899), A History of Modern Egypt (1905),History of the Independence of Italy (1907), World Colonial History (1908), and biographies of Napoleon, Otto von Bismarck, and Peter the Great. World history was promoted as a way to inspire patriotism and justify “civilization and enlightenment” (munmyŏng kaehwa). In this regard, Korea stands as a predecessor to America in creating a “patriotic world history.” The dual historical tasks of modernization and independence urged Korean intellectuals to study world history in the belief that the joint advancement of globalism and nationalism would define their path toward “civilization.” (See McKeown, this volume.)
The newly acquired knowledge of world history provoked comparisons between Korea and the Great Powers, and between East and West. From a Korean point of view, world history (with its Western accent) signaled the deconstruction of the traditional Sinocentric world order and repositioning of East Asia in the new international order. Korean Enlightenment intellectuals adopted the Japanese approach to Orientalist thinking in order to decenter and provincialize China. For Korean nationalist intellectuals, making China an Asian province was an appealing means of appropriating the Western concept of civilization in the interest of national sovereignty. The repositioning went so far as claims by Korean journalists that China would soon be shamed even by Denmark. Contrasts with the West were inherent in these representations of China. By shaking the Sinocentric world order, world history helped to promote the national sovereignty of Korea. In both Korea and Japan, public history – civic history-writing – was much more active than official, or professionally written, history in decentering China. Writing world history was a very political project.
World history, however, simultaneously served to reinforce a Eurocentric definition of a historically inferior East by replacing the traditional Sinocentrism with Eurocentrism (Schmid 2002: 32–36, 56–59, 80). The configuration of Korea and the West underscored Korea’s potential for following and catching up to the West, but also presented Korea as lacking or backward. Korea was frequently compared to Western countries of two or three centuries ago by a temporalization of space into a homogeneous and unified time of “History.” Compared to a generic “Western farmer,” for example, a Korean peasant was depicted as 500 years behind. Here we see the cognitive sequence from the world to the nation as present in Korean historical thought. The sequence of “first world history, then national history” reflects the “first in Europe, then elsewhere” structure of global historicist time that accommodates the Eurocentric diffusionism of a unilateral flow from Europe to the “Rest” (Chakrabarty 2000: 7). This explains why Korean national history based on the configuration of East and West gave rise to a consequential Eurocentrism. Furthermore, the dichotomy of world history and national history was soon to be complicated by the advent of pan-Asianist regional history.
Overcoming Western History
Along with the Japanese Orientalist discourse of toyoshi (Asian History) discussed above, visions of peace and unity within a racially defined Asia were intermittently heralded by “East Asian” intellectuals. Influenced by social Darwinism, the struggle for national survival was translated into a racial struggle between “white people” and “yellow people.” The ideal of pan-Asianism as an antithesis of the European imperialist racism was shared by some enlightened intellectuals in both China and Korea. (See Zhang, this volume.) They supported pan-Asianism as an ideology to assure their own national independence and regional security against Western imperialism. Upon the colonial conquest of Taiwan and annexation of Korea, however, pan-Asianism revealed what some observers took to be its hidden agenda of Japanese regional hegemony, seeming to serve the multinational integration of colonial subjects into the Japanese empire. Later, it proved to be a stepping stone towards the transnational ideal of the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” to bring colonial subjects more fully into a total war system of “voluntary mobilization.”
One obviously peculiar aspect of historical discourses in imperial Japan, then, was the cohabitation of these notions of pan-Asianism and Japanese Orientalism. In parallel with pan-Asianist regional history, “studies of colonial policies” (shokuminji seisakugaku) represented the vulgar version of Orientalist toyoshi discourse. If toyoshi focused mainly on China, Chosǒn-Korea was the main target of Japanese “studies of colonial policies.” While historians elaborated on toyoshi, however, social scientists led the “studies of colonial policies,” armed with the framework of the German historical school of national economy. Fukuta Tokujo, a pioneer of social policies in Japan, argued that Japan had developed along a historical path formulated by Karl Bücher and had now reached the final stage of economic progress: the stage of national economy. As in other historical discourses, “studies of colonial policies” was also based on the configuration of East and West. In this schema, Fukuta foregrounded the contrast between East and West with the presupposition that Japan stood outside the East (Kang 1997: 94–95). Interestingly, in Japan, the German historical school of national economy became a seedbed for a Marxist vein of developmentalist history. Thus, the concept designated for the Sozialpolitik to forestall the emerging socialist movement in Germany played a very different role when transferred to Japan.
Japanese nationalist discourse in the colonial era fluctuated between multicultural nationalism and exclusive ethnic nationalism, which foreshadowed the tension between transnational and national historiographies. However, the transnational variant in imperial Japan differed from the first iteration of world history as written in the late nineteenth century. Transnational history during the imperial period could be accommodated insofar as it served the kokuminka-kominka (nationalization of colonial subjects) policy in the colonies. World history tended to be supplanted by a pan-Asianist regional history in colonial Korea, and to a lesser extent in imperial Japan, but the grand narrative of pan-Asianist regional history was oversimplified and one-directional. Petty actors, everyday practices, minor events, and historical ambiguities all escaped from this grand narrative. The reciprocal relations between colonizers and colonized, and between the colonies and the Japanese metropole were simply disregarded for abstract pan-Asianism. (See Sinha, this volume.) Pan-Asianist regional history could not articulate that the empire (Japan) was also made by its imperial projects (Stoler and Cooper 1997).3
The structure of the history department at Keizo (Seoul) Imperial University, the only university in colonial Korea (opened on May 1, 1926), indicates this problem. In his inaugural speech, Hattori Unokichi, the first president of the university, emphasized the academy’s duty to serve the state. In parallel with the basic policy line of the imperial university, he announced a blueprint to make Keizo a center for Oriental studies. Based on this Orient-centered research strategy, the history department was composed only of three Oriental history tracks: national (Japanese) history, Chosŏn (Korean) history, and Oriental history. Kaneko Kosuke taught Western history at the university from 1928, but there was no official Western history track in the history department. What distinguished Keizo from other imperial universities in the Japanese archipelago was that Western history had been replaced by Korean history. Of its 80 history graduates between 1929 and 1941, 18 students majored in Japanese history, 34 in Oriental history and 28 in Korean history (Park 2009: 217–234). In fact, Seoul National University (the postliberation successor to Keizo Imperial) had no professor lecturing on Western history until 1962.
The outbreak of World War II in the Pacific hastened the decline of world history in East Asia. As the war against the West began, Japanese national “modernists against modernity” stopped looking to “Western Civilization” as a model for Japan’s future. Under the brash philosophical slogan of “overcoming modernity,” the West became an object to be overcome by Japanese national culture (Harootunian 2000). “Asian Civilization,” as represented by Japan, was thought to deserve much more serious investigation than Western history. National history, under the slogan of pan-Asianism or “overcoming modernity,” simply overwhelmed Western/world history. World history was thus diagnosed with infection by the Western disease. Japanese intellectuals who supported this idea of “overcoming modernity” lamented the distortion of the Japanese spirit by Western modernity and sought opportunities to remedy the perceived ills of Westernization. The Kyoto school postulated an alternative world history based on a new “Asian” world order, through which European dominance could be overcome in world history. This alternative approach to world history meant one that emanated from the Japanese empire. The intellectual project of “overcoming modernity” was the theoretical lever devised to lift Asia into the context of world history, yet to make a world history of “overcoming Western history.” An Asia-centric new kind of world history was much discussed, but never fully articulated, structured or written.
Alongside the discourse of “overcoming modernity,” another potential resource for alternative world history was Marxist historiography, with its criticism of capitalist modernity. A history of the complex cultural transfers and interactions of Marxist ideas, in Asia and elsewhere, shows clearly that a vast range of movements and ideologies have been developed and invoked in the name of Marx. When Marx’s Das Kapital was translated into Russian, for example, the Russian bourgeoisie was second to none in welcoming it, because they read from Marx the historical necessity of capitalist development in Russia. In other global peripheries, socialism under the slogan of “the creative application of Marxism-Leninism” became a development strategy of rapid industrialization to catch up and overtake advanced capitalism, even at the cost of the working masses. To many East Asian intellectuals suffering from the schizophrenia between Westernization and the national identity, socialism came as a two-birds-with-one-stone solution. Socialism could solve the historical dilemma of anti-Western modernization through its vision of an anti-imperialist national liberation and rapid industrialization from above (Lim 2001). In search of an alternative modernity, however, Marxist historiography in imperial Japan and colonial Korea remained also the offspring of Eurocentric world history.
What distinguished Marxist historiography was its comparative history of capitalist development on a global scale. Consider the well-known Marxist controversy over the Meiji Ishin of 1868 and subsequent capitalist developments, specifically the debate between the Kōza-ha (Lecture’s faction) and the Rono-ha (Labour-Peasant faction). While the Kōza-ha saw the “Meiji Restoration” as the transition to an absolutist state, the Rono-ha interpreted it as a bourgeois revolution. Thus Rono-ha Marxists insisted that the socialist revolution in Japan was imminent, given the universal interwar crisis of world capitalism. The Kōza-ha Marxists, on the other hand, emphasized Japanese backwardness and the peculiarities of military and semifeudal capitalism in Japan as indications that Japanese Marxists should first complete the bourgeois democratic revolution. Caught by the Marxist unilinear schema of socioeconomic development, both factions presumed that every country must experience a bourgeois revolution. The Kōza-ha’s definition of Japanese capitalism closely resembles Lenin’s description of the “Prussian path” of capitalist development. The contrast between Japan’s supposedly distorted and crooked capitalist development, on the one hand, and English autogenous capitalism, or the similar contrasts between the Prussian and American paths, were also imprinted with historicist Eurocentrism.
Marxist historiography in colonial Korea was also not free of the Eurocentric vision of world capitalist development in a unilinear schema, despite its creative attempts to combine a nationalist agenda with the Marxist history of world capitalism. Among the various Marxist views, Paik Namwoon periodized Korean history as corresponding exactly with the Marxist model of development stages: primitive commune → slave economy → Asiatic feudalism → capitalism. In his book, the most influential historical study from a Marxist perspective written in colonial Korea, Paik vehemently opposed any particularistic interpretation of Korean history and instead located Korean history within the universal history of Marxism (Bang 1992). By relying on the unilinear schema of world capitalist development, Paik also invoked a consequential Eurocentrism. But the Eurocentrism inherent in his universalist conception of history was a “weapon of criticism” to be wielded against red Orientalism, which argued for a view of Korea as stagnant (as characteristic of the “Asiatic mode of production”). It is intriguing to witness how the Eurocentric unilinear development model in the end undergirded this view of autogenous capitalist development of the colonized against the colonizer’s theory of stasis and stagnancy. Confronting red Orientalism under colonial circumstances, in other words, Marxist universal history and its consequential Eurocentrism was able to accommodate the nationalist rationale.
Overcome by Western History
The end of World War II was a watershed historical event in both Japan and Korea (and of course for the rest of the world). World history as a form of both scholarship and pedagogy went through a sea change that was most visible in the postwar school curricula, influenced most directly by the American military government. Korea was much more receptive to this change than Japan because the new school curriculum was deemed to be a departure from the Japanese colonial legacy. World history was introduced in 1946 to the new school curriculum of postcolonial Korea. World history was integrated into “Social Studies” along with geography, politics, economics, ethics, etc., in Korean primary (grades 1–6) and middle school (grades 7–9). James Harvey Robinson’s conception of the “New History,” aligned with the educational reform of American Progressivism, was the force behind this change. (See Bain, this volume.) History as a form of education stopped being “art for art’s sake” and became a subject self-consciously intended for promoting democratic citizenship. History also remained a part of the “Social Studies” program in high school (grades 10–12) (Cha 1988: 138–152).
Within this new field of “Social Studies,” however, history courses in middle school retained the colonial legacy of the Japanese tripartite structure of “Oriental history,” “Occidental history,” and “national history.” The division of world history and national history, into two parts rather than three, was introduced only in the high school curriculum. Notably, there the terms “world civilization” and “Korean civilization” were used instead of world history and Korean history.4 In the postcolonial turbulence immediately following liberation, too, Koreans could not produce their own world history textbooks. They had to translate and adopt a modified version of “World Civilization,” a text originally written for American GIs.
In postwar Japan, despite the peculiar tripartite structure of professional historiography and education at the university level, middle and high school history education kept the division of “world history” and “Japanese history” in line with American military government after 1949. Education reforms in Japan took more time after the Supreme Command of Allied Powers (SCAP) issued an order on December 31, 1945 for a complete “blacking out” of textbooks in history, ethics and geography (Nozaki 2008: 3).
World history thus came back to postwar East Asia as an educational project at the implicit behest of American military authorities. It became a required subject at the middle and high school levels in Japan, and part of the required high school curriculum in Korea, during the educational reforms that took place immediately after World War II. Although world history’s status did shift periodically in Korea (as later curricular reforms meant it was sometimes optional, and sometimes required) it remained a consistently required subject in Japan. Overall, stress was laid on world history as part of a history education, but it was still conceived as a very West-centered history. Some world history textbooks in the late 1940s and early 1950s clearly show these unbalanced proportions: Western history overwhelms Eastern history with a ratio of about three to one. Course periodizations were also based on European historiography: the progression of stages from ancient → medieval → modern → contemporary. Liberalism, democracy, bourgeois revolution, industrial revolution, nationalism, etc. were singled out as the most popular problematics in world history textbooks, which in turn reinforced a Eurocentric understanding of world history. And this framing emphasis did not stop at the textbook level: research and education about world history were, and have remained, entangled in bilateral cause–effect chain relationships.
The shift of emphasis from national history to world history in Korean and Japanese postwar school curricula were the results, respectively, of historical reflections on the colonial past in Korea and the wartime defeat in Japan. The dominant discourse in the historical evaluation of Japanese modernity was that Japanese militarism and colonial expansion could be attributed to pathological factors of an immature civil society, semifeudal backwardness and authoritarian political culture, all seen as inherent in its “premodern residues.” Postwar Japan thus had to be reformed to eliminate premodern irrationality and complete the democratic revolution. This diagnosis was the partial convergence of the SCAP’s official view of the “Pacific War” and the Kōza-ha Marxist faction’s interpretation of Japanese modernity (Koschmann 1998: xi–xii).
Democratic liberals joined in this interpretation mainly through the work of Ōtsuka Hisao, who bridged the gap between Kōza-ha Marxists and modernization theory. Around 1960 Walter Rostow’s theory of “modernization” was introduced in Japan, and postwar Japan’s rapid economic growth seemed to provide evidence for Rostow’s argument. Contrary to any view of sharp ideological antagonisms, Rostow’s theory of the stages of historical growth was similar to a Marxian concept of unilinear history. Developmental historicism explains why world history books in Japan, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, were full of tropes necessitating the “follow and catch up” strategy of the peripheries (Geto 2006: 166).
This peculiar amalgam of Marxist historicism and the Rostovian take-off model of economic growth was also influential in postwar Korean historiography. The cohabitation of the stubborn Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution of 1789 and the ardent advocacy of Rostow’s modernization theory could even sometimes be seen in the same person, such as Seok-Hong Min, who was the first professor of Western history at Seoul National University (Yook 2009: 331–348). The desire for modernity – in both of these ways – was a locomotive to drive the study and education of world/Western history. In this context, though, world history meant exclusively Western history, because the apparently failed project of modernization in Asia could not at the time be used as a development model. Its underlying assumption was to find a reasonable model to serve postwar Korean development.
As a result, the field’s research subjects concentrated heavily on Western history, and specifically on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Issues such as the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, German peasant wars, the English Revolution and gentry debates, the American Revolution and slavery, Enlightenment and the French Revolution, agrarian reforms in Prussia, and the Industrial Revolution were among the most popular topics for Western-oriented world historians. Eurocentric world history was promoted to accelerate the historical process of industrialization, political democracy and modern nation-building in East Asia. Japanese historians, relatively free of Cold War imposition, could also expand their research frontiers to Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s, and since then leftist critical historiography has been quite strong in Japan.
Conversely, Korean historians, deprived of academic freedom under the anti-Communist dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, struggled to pursue “history from below.” The postcolonial generation, born in the 1950s and attending university in the 1970s, were eyewitnesses of a typical process of primitive accumulation of capital under the South Korean developmental dictatorship. A sort of enclosure movement, not by force, but by a market manipulation of keeping low prices for agrarian products, a massive migration of peasants to the city as a reserve army of labor, the misery of the working masses, the mobilization of worker-peasants to the project of modernizing the fatherland and social patriotism – all these phenomena of nineteenth-century European social history seemed to recur in twentieth-century South Korea. In these circumstances, it is not surprising to see the emergence of Korean narodniks and their concern for “history from below” (in Europe).5 By transposing the national epic from the field of high politics to that of everyday life, however, “history from below” contributed to the making of national history within Korea (Lim 1990).
Indeed, Marxist historiography has never been an exception to this configuring of East and West in historical thinking and writing. When Marx said in Das Kapital that the “country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future,” he proclaimed the manifesto of Marxist historicism. If Marx is viewed as a theorist of modernity, it can easily be found that “Marx’s account of modernisation was inextricably a description of Westernisation, and therefore that his view of global history was a general history of the West” (Turner 1994: 140). At the moment when Korean and Japanese Marxists began to stress universal history or the universal laws of world history, they became dependent on Eurocentric historical narratives and plunged into the discursive pool of “red Orientalism.” Yet the location of Korean history in Marx’s Eurocentric, universalist scheme was also the result of a desperate effort by Asians to deny the stagnancy of an “Asiatic mode of production.”
It is not surprising that the dominant Marxist historical narrative in Korea focuses on the thesis of “sprouts of capitalism” and an “endogenous development of capitalism.” New national historiography in postcolonial Korea tried very hard to locate the polarization of the rural population and the emergence of “enlarged scale farming,” a historical process that produced an agrarian bourgeoisie and proletariat in the premodern Chosŏn period. They then sought a blueprint for utopia in historical phenomena such as the development of commercial production of specialized crops, the development of wholesale commerce, handcraft industries that relied on merchant capital in the putting-out system, mercantilism, and modernist thought. Along with emerging capitalist relations of production, this line of historical inquiry looks back to ancient and medieval history to find a slave and feudal society. The major currents in Korean Marxist historiography preferred the Marxian universalist scheme to the Asiatic mode of production, precisely to avoid justifying Japanese colonialism. However, neither the “Asiatic mode of production” nor the Eurocentric universalist scheme could escape from the charge of “red Orientalism.”
The landing of dependency theory in Korea in the late 1970s signified a rupture in the intellectual milieu dominated by Eurocentric discourses of both right and left. It stressed the unrequited transfer of capital from the colony to the metropole and the additional transfer of surplus to the metropolis through the process of unequal exchange between the center and periphery. Dependency theorists approached colonial history with the basic premise that at the heart of colonialism lay surplus appropriation from the colony to the metropolis. In Korean historiography, dependency theory became entangled with postwar Japanese historiography of the total war system in blaming the backwardness and catastrophe on “premodern” residues and “deviated modernity.” Ōtsuka Hisao’s economic history of Kōza-ha Marxism and modernization theory heavily influenced this postliberation Korean Marxist historiography.
Dependency theory and its aftermath did not shatter the dichotomy of the normative West and the deviated East, or of model modernization and deviated modernization, in historical scholarship. With its sharp criticism of the unequal exchange and unilateral surplus transfer between center and periphery, dependency theory and its historical arguments were often based on an oversimplified opposition between East and West, and essentialized regional differences represented by the concept of the “Third World.” Thus, they failed to notice the historical tensions inherent in any historical unit of either peripheries or centers. They tend to essentialize the homogeneity and heterogeneity among historical units, whether of the nation-state or the region. In the final instance, dependency theory and its worldview also came to serve world history as a nationalist rationale, by justifying the accumulation of capital by the nation-state for rapid industrialization. Once again both modernist and Marxist world history had been overcome by Western history in postwar East Asia.
Decentering World History
Since its introduction to Japan and Korea in the late nineteenth century, world history has fluctuated between Eurocentric world history and an Asia-centric world vision. This swinging pendulum of world history pedagogy and scholarship can be located within the intellectual history of competing ideas of “overcoming modernity” and being “overcome by modernity.” Eurocentric world history was dominant in the intellectual milieus that favored Western-oriented modernization during the Meiji Ishin, Enlightened Reformism and the post–World War II era. The focus was on Western rather than Asian history in this period, but an Asia-centric world vision can be found in the various discourses of “pan-Asianism” in the late nineteenth century, through “overcoming modernity” in the colonial period, and into contemporary discussions of the “East Asian Community.”
These versions of world history have been in conflict, but both have also been complicit with visions of national history. The antagonistic stance between Eurocentric and Asia-centric world history evaporates on this point, and in fact they are different forms of the same nationalist agenda: a European path or an Asian (peculiar) path of modernization in the capitalist world system. Both versions of world history presuppose that capitalist development is inevitable on a worldwide scale. In fact “the appeal to world history emphasized not a spatial but a temporal category” (Conrad 2010: 171). The emphasis on uniform historical time and a unilinear development of world history was shared by Marxists and nationalists, which led to the Eurocentric diffusionism of a unilateral flow from Europe to the “Rest.” This configuration of national history and world history gave rise to what I have called a consequential Eurocentrism in postwar Japan and Korea.
Pluralizing world history demands deconstructing the historicist scheme to temporalize spaces and to locate them in a unilinear historical time. Rather than criticizing historicism per se, Korean historians’ efforts to pluralize world history were concentrated on criticizing Immanuel Wallerstein’s single capitalist world-system and its Eurocentric connotation. (See Chase-Dunn and Hall, this volume.) Various other discourses that sought to pluralize and decentralize world systems in human history were of course also introduced by non-Korean scholars in the first decade of the twenty-first century: Andre G. Frank and Barry K. Gills’s “five thousand year world system,” Janet Abu-Lughod’s arguments about proto-capitalist systems in the thirteenth century, Patrick Manning’s multipolar world system with a focus on West Africa, and David Ludden’s focus on South Asia can all be included on this list. Many of the Korean writers who introduced (and popularized) these recent trends in world or global history were not trained especially in the field, but began their academic careers as researchers of Western history (Hankook Sŏyangsahakhoi 2009).
Historians of Asian history joined them by introducing the California School’s works, such as the writings of Kenneth Pomeranz and Bin Wong. Among their many revealing arguments, Pomeranz’s and Wong’s demonstrations of the Chinese economy’s preponderance over the European economy as late as the eighteenth century provoked a serious interest among many historians across different fields of research. If contemporary Chinese nationalist historians and intellectuals have appropriated these arguments for their own purposes, some Korean nationalists read the California School as evidence of the wider superiority of Eastern civilization over Western civilization – which confirms these nationalists’ Occidentalist worldview. At the same time, scholars of history education have been concerned about world history or global history for pedagogical reasons. They have written about worldwide new trends in global history and introduced contemporary debates on how to write world history. The urgent task of writing world history textbooks inclined them to keep abreast of the newest trends in world history. In this regard it is particularly noteworthy that a “Big History” course has been taught by David Christian at the summer session at Ewha Women’s University. (See Spier, this volume.)
The influence of these path-breaking studies in world history on Korean historiography is not yet clear. Korean historians are on the threshold of a brand new world history, one that is neither Orientalist nor Occidentalist. From the perspective of the Korean academy, world history looks double-edged. Any critic of Eurocentrism risks Occidentalism as a reversed form of Orientalism, which justifies nationalist politics (Chen 1995). The trend that currently looks most impressive is a transnational history project run by RICH, the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture based at Hanyang University in Seoul. If world/global history in Korea focuses on the introduction and translation of recent studies from overseas, RICH’s transnational history has produced innovative studies within Korea, of the mass dictatorship as a working hypothesis for comprehending the twentieth-century dictatorships on a worldwide scale (Lim and Petrone 2011). The “Flying University of Transnational Humanities,” organized by RICH, is also an important new academic structure, and a matrix for transnational history scholars and graduate students in search of a world history that is neither Orientalist nor Occidentalist.6
The Japanese historiography of world history has likewise been singularly productive: it is in global economic history that it has produced the most impressive work. The rise of the East Asian economy has been a driving force of the development of a new Asian economic history on the platform of global history. What distinguishes this new global economic history from preexisting comparative economic histories is its focus on relationships, linkages, encounters and various networks of merchants and migration. With a wider regional framework of analysis, it tries to locate each individual Asian country in the context of an integrated Asian regional economy and constructs the entangled history of empires (especially the British Empire) and the Asian regional economy. In one such study, the Sinocentric world system based on a tributary trade system has been used to explain the indigenous roots of Asian regional economies. As a criticism of the Eurocentric world system, a globally linked system of cotton supply and its final demand have also been explored fruitfully, and a unique chain of the global linkage comprising Japan, China, British India, Burma, the Dutch East Indies and Great Britain and other European countries has also been mapped (Akita 2008).
In line with the development of this new global economic history, Japanese world history textbooks, particularly since 1989, have begun to emphasize cultural interconnectedness and trade networks between different cultural spaces. World history textbooks in Japanese high schools now come in two varieties: one written for “World History A” (a course for students in the vocational system) and a second for “World History B” (intended for those headed toward university). “World History A,” although its textbook is shorter, has a more impressive structure and narrative, perhaps partly because it is not intended as part of a university entrance examination. What is most striking in both of these textbooks is that they disregard the conventional periodization of ancient–medieval–modern. Instead of a vertical chronological structure, this subject stresses horizontal networks as the historical space of cultural interactions and supraregional trade. Modernity stops being Eurocentric in this perspective. It is a global modernity that Europe, Africa, America and Asia coproduced through interregional networks and interactions (Shibata Michio et al.: 2007). (See Bright and Geyer, this volume.) The solid academic accumulation of global economic history written in Japan made this world history textbook possible – and remarkable.
In sum, world history is on the verge of blossoming in Japan and Korea. This brand new world history or global history has been freed in the last two decades from the bias of Eurocentric world history as a nationalist rationale to promote Westernization or modernization, although it may remain vulnerable to devolving into a particular kind of Asia-centric world history because of its regional accent. There arises a necessity of “worlding” instead of “regionalizing.” “Worlding” history would bring local, national and regional history into the world and bring the world into local, national and regional history (Dirlik 2007). (See Gerritsen, this volume.) But worlding history should also be followed by decentering world history. This sequential combination may give us a clue to finding an exit from the vicious circle of Eurocentric and Asia-centric world history and reconstructing world history per se.
Notes
1 It is noteworthy that Daguo jueqi (The rise of great powers), a popular Chinese history documentary on China Central Television to justify the contemporary modernization project, deals with nine foreign countries in sequence: Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and United States.
2 From context to context I will use the terms of “world history” and “Western history” alternately because world history has been often identified with Western history as a hegemonic discourse in East Asia.
3 This sentence is a paraphrase of Cooper and Stoler on imperial history.
4 This civilizational dichotomy was changed later, in 1955, into the division of “world history” and “national history.”
5 The original narodniks arose in mid nineteenth-century Russia, as populist intellectuals oriented toward the peasantry as a likely source of socialist revolution. Their name derives from the Russian word narod (“people,” “nation”).
6 See http://www.rich.ac/eng/fly/program.php (accessed Feb. 2012).
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