Early Modern East Asia Research Articles

Migration and Technological Dialogue in Early Modern East Asia: A Historiographical Review

ABSTRACTBy reviewing historiographical trends within existing scholarship on migration and movement, and knowledge and technological dialogue in early modern East Asia, this article demonstrates how these bodies of work have become increasingly interdisciplinary and inclusive, thereby challenging prior characterisations of the region. Recent trends within the field combined with considerations of embodiment are, however, laying the groundwork for more meaningful integration by examining how migrants actually transferred, adapted, and leveraged their knowledge and skills. This article concludes by pointing to the potential to fully bring to the fore the complex nature of both migrants and technological dialogue.

Legitimation Game: The Anti-Japanese Textbook Issue in Sino–Japanese Relations, 1914–1937

ABSTRACT This article examines the anti-Japanese textbook issue, a diplomatic controversy from 1914 to 1937 between Japan and China over whether the Chinese government was inciting hatred against Japan by promoting school textbooks with offensive and xenophobic content. I argue that the issue represents a legitimation process, whereby Japan’s concern about the content of these textbooks was determined by, and fluctuated with, its need to mobilise domestic and international audiences for its China policy in changing geopolitical contexts. Such an approach helps to explain why the anti-Japanese textbook issue persisted for more than two decades after 1914 and why Japan’s approach to the matter inconsistently oscillated between interventionist and non-interventionist principles. More broadly, the article illustrates the value of paying closer attention to the internal inconsistencies of Japanese imperialism rather than merely its expansionist tendencies, and of analysing education and the writing of textbooks in early modern East Asia not just as a means of nation-building but also as part of Japan’s efforts to build its empire in a broader, transnational context.

Human Trafficking and Piracy in Early Modern East Asia: Maritime Challenges to the Ming Dynasty Economy, 1370–1565

AbstractThis study asks how human trafficking in Ming China (1368–1644) became enveloped in the emerging global economy of the sixteenth century. Utilizing theoretical insights from the model of “slaving zones,” the essay examines recorded incidents of human trafficking along China’s littoral from 1370 to 1565 and contends that its presence and persistence were intertwined with the Ming court’s economic policies and problems. Here the history of human trafficking in early-to-mid-Ming China is viewed from the perspective of a series of challenges to the country’s economic well-being but also to its power to govern according to its own laws and norms. These challenges include the Ming regime’s efforts: to eradicate piracy and smuggling through their integration into the lawful framework of tribute trade; to support provincial requests for extra revenue to promote military security; to acquire Japanese silver but deny Japan mercantile access to China; to profit from Portugal’s Southeast Asian and Japanese commercial networks. This study argues that the increasing prevalence of human trafficking along China’s coastline was the result of competing forces anxious for power and riches that fused into the thrust of sixteenth-century China’s expanding economy, as well as the adaptability of those in authority to ignore the consequences of allowing safe havens for persons bartering and selling human beings. These factors turned the status of Ming China’s littoral from a “no slaving zone” into an “imperfect no slaving zone.”

Literati of the Garrisons

Conventionally characterized as a perfunctory exercise established to bolster the ranks of Manchu officials, the Qing dynasty civil service translation examination, and its accompanying curriculum of literary and classical training, played a major role in the development of literary-intellectual values among members of the Eight Banners. This article demonstrates how it contributed to the emergence of a multiethnic population of Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese bannermen possessing high levels of Manchu literacy who would become consumers and producers of Manchu literature, translations, and textbooks, engendering a literati culture that extended beyond the administrative concerns of the court. While the Manchu language is commonly considered to have become moribund by the late eighteenth century, the translation examination highlights its continued, and in certain contexts growing, significance into the early twentieth century. These findings require a reexamination of Manchu cultural identity beyond imperial ideology and the role of non-Han peoples in literati culture more broadly. They also provide new insights into the classicizing potential of vernacular languages within the linguistic ecologies of early modern East Asia.

Introducing the Warring-States Japan Battle Data

This article introduces the “Warring-States Japan Battle Data,” a new dataset covering 2,889 battles occurring within Japan during its Warring-States period, from 1467 to 1600. The dataset contains fifteen variables covering various features of the battles, including the date, location, participants, initiators, and victors, among others. This article introduces the sources of the data, describes the collection procedures and coding rules, presents basic descriptive statistics of key variables of interest, and applies the battle data to an important question in the political violence and international relations literature: whether conflict “contagiously” diffuses across time and space. The data introduced here should be of interest to scholars of international relations, civil conflict, early modern East Asia, and Japanese history, among others.

Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia

The Chosŏn Border Defense Council’s Drifting Records of Chinese Vessels in Early Modern East Asia

Abstract This study aims at building a part-of-speech tagged corpus for all the drifting conversation records from Pibyŏnsa Tŭngnok, which is the official record of the daily affairs of the Border Defense Council of the Chosŏn dynasty, and conducting a quantitative analysis of the statistically salient place names and common nouns therein. The author also establishes a methodological framework and demonstrates how to conduct quantitative analysis when extrapolating patterned information in a vast corpus by using techniques like a word frequency table and co-occurrence analysis to uncover hidden patterns and correlations in a large dataset. Our results show that Fujian was the major source of the crew members and passengers of these sailboats, while some crew members were hired in Thailand. Beijing is the most frequently observed non-native place in the conversation records, since the officials were deeply interested in the distance between Beijing and other places in China. The Chosŏn officials appeared to grasp every opportunity to inquire about the physical geography, political institutions, military power, current maritime situation, newsworthy events, and the recent development of Qing China.

IWAI, Shigeki, Tribute, Sea Ban and Administered Trade: Trade and Order in Early Modern East Asia

IWAI, Shigeki, <i>Tribute, Sea Ban and Administered Trade: Trade and Order in Early Modern East Asia</i>

The Tribute System and the World Imagined in Early Modern East Asia

The field of international relations has long treated the Westphalian system and states in the territorial sovereign sense as the standard or ‘normal’ in IR. The World Imagined by Hendrik Spruyt boldly challenges this habit as the biases of our times and instead brings non-European historical international systems into their rightful place in our study of international order and international relations theorising more generally. Unpacking Spruyt’s discussion of ‘the East Asian interstate society’, the article argues that an in-depth examination of what is known as a ‘tribute system’ and early modern East Asian historical orders richly illuminates the book’s arguments on the heterogeneity and diversity of order-building practices. It also argues that from a practice-oriented approach, the experience of early modern East Asia presents a compelling case that legitimation holds the key to explaining order building processes at both the domestic and international levels, with legitimation at these two levels working in tandem.

미륵, 개벽, 요나오시: 동아시아 종교사에서의 위기와 혁세 인식

Religion in a crisis works as a system of imagination and techniques to manage the difficulties. In such conditions, existing religious symbols and concepts are reorganized into new meanings. This article deals with the transformation of religious symbols during socio-economic crises in early modern East Asia. (1) Maitreya, the future Buddha, had been a deity to prayer for reincarnation into paradise and good fortune in Buddhism and folk religions. However, rebels in premodern China and Korea, who resisted state power, imagined that Maitreya would immediately appear and bring an end to the world. (2) In classical literature, Kaebyŏk was a concept to describe the creation of the world. Kaebyŏk as a radical cosmological transformation in the future, which have been generally accepted by new religions in Korea until the present, gradually emerged during political crises after the 18th century. (3) The concept of Yonaoshi, which had initially meant to pray for the abundance of agriculture, extended its meaning to demanding a radical renewal of the existing world in the period of natural disasters and political upheaval in the 19th century.

Pax Sinica or Confucian Peace? The Implications of the "Long Peace" in Early Modern East Asia for Contemporary Sino-Korea Relations

The traditional paradigms proposed by American or Chinese IR scholars cannot explain the true interactions between Imperial China and its neighboring countries, in particular Korea and Japan. Both Western-centrism and Sinocentrism should be abandoned when analyzing ancient China s foreign relations if we want to establish implications for understanding contemporary Sino-Korea relations. The Long Peace indeed existed in early modern East Asia for nearly 500 years, but we cannot find any causal mechanism verifying that it was based on Confucian culture. The theory of realism can be supported by process-tracing the history based on Chinese-language literature. Confucian culture was simply an effective instrument of Imperial China s foreign relations which could institutionalize the hierarchical system already established by Chinese power. However, it did not always effectively reduce or avoid war and could hardly be internalized into the Sinic state s recognition of China-centrism but rather weakened the China-centered hierarchical system.

Writing-Mediated Interaction Face-to-Face: Sinitic Brushtalk (漢文筆談) as an Age-Old Lingua-Cultural Practice in Premodern East Asian Cross-Border Communication

Abstract In Western societies, speaking is construed as an interactive social activity while writing is widely perceived as a solo or private endeavor. Such a functional dichotomy did not apply to the “Sinographic Cosmopolis” in premodern East Asia, however. Based on selected documented examples of writing-mediated cross-border communication spanning over a thousand years from the Sui dynasty to the late Ming dynasty, this paper demonstrates that Hanzi 漢字, a morphographic, non-phonographic script, was commonly used by literati of classical Chinese or Literary Sinitic to engage in “silent conversation” as a substitute for speech. Except for a “drifting” record co-constructed by Korean maritime officials and Chinese “boat people,” all the other examples featured Chinese–Japanese interaction. While synchronous cross-border communication in written Chinese has been reported in scholarly works in East Asian studies (published more commonly in East Asian languages than in English or other Western languages), to our knowledge no attempt has been made to examine such writing-mediated interaction from a linguistic or discourse-pragmatic point of view. Writing-mediated interaction enacted through Sinitic brushtalk (漢文筆談) is compatible with transactional and interactional language functions as in speech. In premodern and early modern East Asia, it was most commonly conducted using brush, ink, and paper, but it could also take place using a pointed object and a flat surface covered with a fluid substance like sand, finger-drawing using water or tea on a table, and so forth. Such an interactional pattern appears to be unparalleled in other regional lingua francas written with a phonographic script such as Latin and Arabic. To facilitate research into the extent to which this interactional pattern is script-specific to morphographic sinograms, a “morphographic hypothesis” is proposed. The theoretical significance of writing-mediated interaction as a third or even fourth known modality of synchronous communication—after speech and (tactile) sign language—will be briefly discussed.

Information: A Historical Companion ed. by Ann Blair et al. (review).

Reviewed by: Information: A Historical Companion ed. by Ann Blair et al. Marc Kosciejew (bio) Information: A Historical Companion Edited by Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 904. In Information: A Historical Companion, historians Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton, as editors, situate the phenomenon of information at the center of historical focus. Illuminating the variegated ways in which information has shaped and been shaped by societies from antiquity to the present, they show how new kinds of information challenges—sociocultural, managerial, organizational, political, and economic—at different times and places often necessitated new approaches to, technologies for, and understandings of, information. Compiling interdisciplinary contributions from distinguished historians and theorists, the book outlines a continuous, information-focused historical landscape and narrative of this complex phenomenon. The scale and scope of coverage is ambitious. The sociocultural settings are global, and historical eras are extensive. The book covers the ancient Roman Empire; the medieval Islamic world; early modern East Asia and Europe; the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution; the British Empire and other nineteenth-century colonial powers; the two World Wars; twentieth-century globalization; and today's late-capitalist knowledge society. The technologies examined, meanwhile, are heterogeneous in kind and myriad in format, ranging from early writing tools and scrolls, codices, and books to more recent innovations, from computers and digital devices to algorithms and artificial intelligence. Moreover, the associated or required technological infrastructures enabling information creation, transmission, and storage presented are also broad, including postal services, telegraph cables, radios, televisions, computers, internet connections, and wireless communications. By tracing information's trajectory, this book is noteworthy for encapsulating the complex history of an already complicated phenomenon within the confines of one, albeit hefty, tome of over 900 pages. To this end, it simultaneously functions as an in-depth scholarly volume and a utilitarian reference tool. Arranged into two main parts of long chapters and short entries, the book achieves both continuity and diversity in approach and analysis. Although the long chapters and short entries can stand alone, together, they paint a rich portrait of information's longue durée, technological inventions, instantiations, processes, and wide reach from assorted angles. Comprised of thirteen long chapters, the book's first part builds a chronological narrative of information's history, from the premodern and early modern periods to the twentieth century and today. Each chapter supplies detailed overviews of, and interesting insights about, information within its particular sociocultural and historical purview, then concluding [End Page 1276] with substantial further-reading lists of resources germane to the topic. Every chapter makes references to other chapters, establishing connections between topics and facilitating dialog between contributors. Additionally, the editors have marked specific words with an asterisk on first mention within the chapters, facilitating convenient cross-referencing with a detailed glossary, placed near the book's end, which defines terms and clarifies their usage within the book. Containing 101 short entries, the book's second part concentrates on specific issues of special importance to the history of information. Alphabetically arranged, the entries extend the conversations from the preceding chapters by directing attention to or narrowing focus on specific aspects, topics, or themes. They also showcase further reading lists and draw connections between each other and the chapters by featuring "see also" cross references. The editors supply a user-oriented navigation aid at the beginning of the book in the form of two lists, the first an alphabetical list and the second a thematic list organized by concepts, formats, genres, objects, people, practices, processes, systems, and technologies. Through these internal cross-references, connections, and dialogs within and between the chapters and entries, the editors construct a seemingly unwieldly history. As a topic, technology traverses most chapters and entries, and even serves as the main theme or focus of multiple entries. This book should therefore appeal to historians of technology and specifically attract scholars and students interested in the intersections between technology, information, and history. Its interdisciplinary approach might also introduce some historians to ideas and literature beyond their disciplinary concentrations and, in turn, help them forge new or previously unknown or unexpected relationships between their work...

Processing Method & Distribution of Medicinal Plant Ginseng in Early Modern East Asia -Focusing on Ginseng as a Tribute Item of Joeseon to the Ming Dynasty.

Ginseng started to emerge as an international medicinal material during the Joseon Dynasty. This paper examines ginseng as a tribute presented to the Ming royal family by Joseon Dynasty. Joseon Dynasty presented peeled and dried ginseng (white ginseng) to the emperor. The Ming Dynasty demanded chosam (natural ginseng) with no peeling in 1602. By the request of Joseon Dynasty during the period of Lord Gwanghae, the presented ginseng was again changed to pasam (boiled and dried ginseng). Although Nurhachi of the Jurchen is known to have invented this method of processing pasam, Joseon was exporting pasam to the Ming Dynasty earlier than that. As such, the Nurhachi theory of the invention of the pasam should be reexamined. Joseon Dynasty presented ginseng to each emperor and heir to the throne through its envoys. The total amount of ginseng sent to the royal family of the Ming Dynasty during the Joseon Dynasty is estimated to be approximately 664 to 880 geuns per year in the fifteenth century, 300 to 500 geuns in the sixteenth century, and about 160 to 360 geuns in the 17th century. When the Japanese Invasion of Korea occurred in 1592, the Joseon government informed the Ming Dynasty of the miserable situation of the Joseon people and chose to reduce the tribute. However, even after the war, the amount of tribute ginseng in Joseon continued to be small. This is because the medical industry in the Ming Dynasty grew significantly, and medical books prescribing Joseon ginseng increased, and the rich people of the Ming Dynasty loved ginseng so much that they imported Joseon ginseng at high prices. Local residents of Guangdong, China, a major customer base of Joseon ginseng, also used ginseng as a preventive medicine for JangGi. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the amount of ginseng that Joseon tributed to the Ming Dynasty continued to decrease, and the ginseng processing method also moved in the direction of reducing the burden of processing. This was caused by changes in the environment surrounding the use of ginseng, including changes in the international situation at the time, growth of the medical industry, increasing interest in ginseng by the people of the Ming, and economic considerations of the Joseon government. The two countries sought changes in the ginseng tribute through an agreement.

A Buffer against Whom? Rethinking the Qing-Chosŏn Border Region

ABSTRACT As a social institution, a border simultaneously divides and connects. When thinking about state borders, or borderlands, scholars tend to view them as either linear or zonal spaces, distinguishing as well as linking one state with another. My article argues for an alternative interpretation and explores the geopolitical and cultural meanings of a historical border region from both domestic and inter-state perspectives. The border of China and Korea along the Yalu and the Tumen Rivers, is arguably one of the oldest state boundaries that is still effective today. The history of the border river region as a “buffer space” can be traced back to the seventeenth century when Qing China and Chosŏn Korea established the border along their northern frontiers. However, the geopolitical function of this border went beyond considerations of defence or communications. From the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, both the Manchu-Qing court and the Chosŏn court implemented strict laws to control domestic population flows to their northeastern and northern frontiers. Such policies, I argue, must be understood in the context of domestic politics in the two courts. Internal anxiety over preserving Manchu and Korean identity, coupled with strategy to control the border against an external power, contributed to the making of this borderland. Hence, the Qing-Chosŏn border region served as a “dual buffer”. Employing historical records and local gazettes in the two countries, my article reveals a subtler layer of “buffer” from a case study in early modern East Asia.

‘Chinese’ hegemony from a Korean shi perspective: aretocracy in the early modern East Asia

Abstract The study of pre-modern Chinese hegemony is crucial for both theorizing hegemony and envisioning a new global order. I argue the pre-modern Chinese hegemony was a reciprocal rule of virtue, or aretocracy, driven by the transnational sociocultural elites shi. In contrast to the prevailing models of Chinese hegemony, the Early Modern East Asia was not dominated by the unilateral normative influence of the Chinese state. The Chinese and non-Chinese shi as non-statist sociocultural elites co-produced, through their shared civilizational heritage, a hegemonic order in which they had to show excellence in civil virtues to wield legitimate authority. In particular, the Ming and Chosŏn shi developed a tradition of envoy poetry exchanges as a medium for co-constructing Chinese hegemony as aretocracy. The remarkable role of excellent ethos for world order making in Early Modern East Asia compels us to re-imagine how we conduct our global governance.

Silent conversation through Brushtalk (筆談): The use of Sinitic as a scripta franca in early modern East Asia

AbstractLiterary Sinitic (written Chinese, hereafter Sinitic) functioned as a ‘scripta franca’ in sinographic East Asia, which broadly comprises China, Japan, South Korea and North Korea, and Vietnam today. It was widely used by East Asian literati to facilitate cross-border communication interactively face-to-face. This lingua-cultural practice is generally known asbĭtán筆談, literally ‘brushtalk’ or ‘brush conversation’. While brushtalk as a substitute for speech to conduct ‘silent conversation’ has been reported since the Sui dynasty (581–619), in this paper brushtalk data will be drawn from sources involving transcultural, cross-border communication from late Ming dynasty (1368–1644) until the 1900s. Brushtalk occurred in four recurrent contexts, comprising both interactional and transactional communication: official brushtalk (公務筆談), poetic brushtalk (詩文筆談), travelogue brushtalk (遊歷筆談), and drifting brushtalk (漂流筆談). For want of space, we will exemplify brushtalk using selected examples drawn from the first three contexts. The use of Sinitic as a ‘scripta franca’ seems to besui generisand under-researched linguistically and sociolinguistically. More research is needed to unveil the script-specific characteristics of Sinitic in cross-border communication.

Climate Shocks, Political Institutions, and Nomadic Invasions in Early Modern East Asia

While a large literature argues negative climate shocks can trigger conflicts, recent findings suggest moderate climatic conditions lead to war. This article proposes a conditional theory by incorporating political institution as a moderating variable. I argue that, under the impact of negative climate shocks, centralized societies can mobilize more resources for war, compared to decentralized societies. Thus, the former is more likely to resort to well-organized plundering to address the scarcity problem caused by detrimental climate shocks. Besides, centralized societies have little incentive to plunder when the climatic conditions are moderate, as they can collect taxes regularly through centralized institutions. A comparison between the more centralized Manchurian and the less centralized Mongols on their conflictual behavior serves as an empirical test. I find that temperature was negatively associated with the probability of Manchurian invasion after they embraced centralization but had a positive effect on the likelihood of Mongol invasion.

Gift-giving as a Source of International Authority

Abstract This article discusses the diplomatic practice of gift-giving in the Ancient Near East and Early Modern East Asia. In both cases, gift-exchange served to consolidate the dominant polity’s international authority. The causal relation between gift-giving and authority is typically rendered in terms of generosity inspiring gratitude, but a different mechanism connects diplomatic gift-giving and the consolidation of international authority. Diplomatic gift-giving is a ceremonial form of gift-exchange and it as a ritual practice helps maintain international authority. By means of ritualization, diplomatic gift-exchange renders international authority palatable. Ritualization enables both dominant and subordinate actors to come to terms with the ambiguity of the experience of authority. Subordinate actors are at once entranced and frightened by the authority of the dominant actor. The dominant actor feels both pride and insecurity. By defining an identity as participants in a shared ritual, by orchestrating their demeanor during ritual, and by identifying an external source of the dominant actor’s authority, diplomatic gift-giving contributes to the maintenance of international authority. The ambiguity of the experience of authority is probably irreducible. It is therefore to be expected that any case of ‘international authority’ will feature the performance of similar ritualizing practices.

How to Read a Sinographic Text in Eighteenth-Century Chosŏn Korea:Liuxi Waizhuanand Yi Tŏngmu's Compilation ofNoeroe Nangnak Sŏ

This paper examines the transnational literary interactions in the early modern Sinographic sphere by examining the late Chosŏn writer Yi Tŏngmu's reading of an early Qing text,Liuxi Waizhuan,and its resonance in his compilation ofNoeroe Nangnak Sŏ. Reconsidering the unmediated communicability of the Sinographic text, it demonstrates the ways in whichNoeroe Nangnak SŏdecoupledLiuxi Waizhuanfrom its local conditions of production and circulation and relocalized it to fit Chosŏn Korea's agenda of repositioning itself in the changing Sinocentric order after the downfall of the Ming. Between delocalizing and relocalizing the Sinographic text, the compilation ofNoeroe Nangnak Sŏparticipated in the constantly shifting meanings of loyalty to the fallen Ming, thereby diversifying the repertoire of the shared civilization in early modern East Asia.