2025 “Korea and Early Modernity.” In The Routledge Handbook of Early Modern Korea. Edited by Eugene Y. Park. Routledge
Chapter 1 by Sixiang Wang problematizes understanding Chosŏn as Korea’s early modern. Wang notes two rival conventions in the historiography of Korea. A “short convention,” which refers to precolonial Korea’s Open Port Period (1876–1910) as early modern (Ko. kŭndae), is out of line in the sense that historians working on all other regions generally speak of the early modern era from the fifteenth to nineteenth century. A “long convention,” which places Korea on the same temporal scale as other regions, raises the question of how to situate Korea within a larger story of global early modernity. The problem with “early modernity” as a Eurocentric concept is its presumption that history follows a universal trajectory as understood in liberal positivism and Marxist teleology, according to which each stage has distinct characteristics. While arguing that the global early modern tropes of, among others, commerce, connection, and cosmopolitanism do not apply neatly to Chosŏn, Wang urges readers to view global periodization as a tool for drawing connections and making comparisons rather than a proxy for essentialization.