Wŏnhyŏng kwa pyŏnyŏng: hanguk kyŏngje kaebal kyehoek ui kiwon 원형과 변용: 한국 경제개발계획의 기원 (Archetype and Metamorphosis: The Origin of Korea's Economic Development Plans), and: Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy (review)

Park Tae Gyun 박태균, Wŏnhyŏng kwa pyŏnyŏng: hanguk kyŏngje kaebal kyehoek ui kiwon 원형과 변용: 한국 경제개발계획의 기원 (Archetype and Metamorphosis: The Origin of Korea’s Economic Development Plans). Seoul: Seoul Taehakkyo Chulpanbu, 2007. ISBN. 978-89-521-0816-6 pp. 418 Gregg Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8078-3120-5. xii + 311 pp. John DiMoia Received: 6 December 2009 /Accepted: 6 December 2009 /Published online: 2 October 2010 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2010 1 From South Korea to Minnesota? In January 2004, I traveled to Minneapolis to visit the special collections at the University of Minnesota’s main campus, where the majority of the papers associated with the vast American aid project between that university and Seoul National University (1954–1962) are housed, an effort administered through the International Cooperation Administration, one of the predecessors to USAID. One of the archivists informed me that the papers had gone untouched for nearly a decade, the previous party of researchers having consisted of a group of South Korean graduate students assembling materials in the mid-1990s, just prior to their university’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. Although it would be several years before I learned that one of these students was Park Tae Gyun, now a professor of international studies at Seoul National University, I might have expected as much, as this kind of relentless quest for research materials, particularly new documents involving the diverse international actors who helped to transform the peninsula after 1945, characterizes both of the projects under review here. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (2010) 4:461–466 DOI 10.1007/s12280-010-9150-1 J. DiMoia (*) Department of History, National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore, Singapore e-mail: hisjpd@nus.edu.sg J. DiMoia STS Cluster, National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore, Singapore Indeed, Park Tae Gyun and Gregg Brazinsky begin their projects by placing the Korean–American relationship itself under investigation, using this device as a means to address two of the most influential works on modern Korean history, respectively, Carter Eckert’s Offspring of Empire (1991) and Bruce Cumings’s Origins of the Korean War (1981). Such an approach highlights the audacious scope of the inquiry, and both works draw upon a wealth of documents from a range of Korean and American archives. The “special relationship” between the two countries, with the United States replacing imperial Japan as the senior partner after 1945, thereby becomes the key to a re-examination of the process of liberation and division (1945–1948)—as well as rebuilding, which began nearly simultaneously. If neither of the works belongs to science and technology studies, together they remain valuable for scholars in the field by establishing the tentative outlines for a new economic and cultural history of Cold War East Asia. Park’s book was clearly inspired by a need to take another look at a wellestablished theory. For all of its persuasive force, Eckert’s work cannot account for the dramatic growth of the entire postwar period, nor should it. After all, the building of an independent polity required not only intensive work and assistance from numerous partner nations but also careful planning, something more typically associated with the government of Park Chung Hee. Park Tae Gyun does not take up a project of recovery for the government of Rhee Syngman, but he certainly hopes to offer a more nuanced picture of Rhee’s period of rule (1948–1960) than is generally presented. When we read of the state’s role in sifting through economic plans and establishing new long-term priorities, we are not witnessing a vindication of the Rhee state, but we must set aside the stock portrait of a senior figure simply waiting for the April Revolution of 1960 so that he can hasten from the stage. Like Park, Brazinsky begins with the assumption that only a diverse set of actors can convey the story of modern Korea, while he never casts any doubts on the central role played by Koreans in the making of their own state. Brazinsky is a historian of American...