A Concise History of Korea: From the Neolithic Period through the Nineteenth Century, and: Everlasting Flower: A History of Korea (review)

Book Reviews135 A Concise History ofKorea: From the Neolithic Period through the Nineteenth Century by Michael J. Seth. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 257 pp. Maps. Includes bibliographical references and index. $29.95 (paper) Everlasting Flower: A History ofKorea by Keith Pratt. London: Reaktion, 2006. 320 pp. Illustrations, maps. Includes bibliographical references and discography. $27.00 (paper) How does one work up the nerve to try to encapsulate the history of a country and a people? The dangers are multiple, but Michael Seth and Keith Pratt took the plunge. Most of us need what these two books offer, both for ourselves and for our students. We need paperback textbooks that summarize recent scholarship , and we need thematic, general views that highlight the history of Korean art. Michael Seth offers the former, and Keith Pratt offers the latter. Seth has produced a comprehensive survey useful forlecture courses on Korean history or as an adjunct text for lectures on East Asia. His nine chapters extend from prehistory to the 1870s and seek to offer something on almost everything. The book begins with a chapter on "origins," followed by chapters on the emergence ofthe Three Kingdoms, United Silla, Koryö, and the military and Mongol interlude, then three chapters on Chosön, and finally a chapter on Korea in the nineteenth century. He supplies a glossary (without Korean or Chinese characters ) and an annotated bibliography. The text runs breathlessly across swathes of information, giving little indulgence to readers who might want to know why this topic, or why that, but such can be the nature ofa survey. As one proceeds, however , a few topics reappear regularly, in recognition of their recently acquired importance in the academy: the status of women, nobi ("slaves"), regional connections , ethnicity, and identity. Aside from featuring female writers (p. 197), another useful way to introduce women into historical narrative is to make the female socioeconomic position an indicator ofsocial structure. Mark Peterson and Martina Deuchler pioneered this approach, and Seth follows their lead. Seth begins his mention of women with their position in the ninth century and sets up the historical trajectory of women from sharers in power, wealth, and authority to their decline over the "next one thousand years" into segregation and oppression under a patrilineal order (p. 58). The problem is that evidence is still slim and is usually distorted by misogynistic prejudice from later periods. We still have few or no studies in English of marriage, divorce, family, child-rearing, childhood, and even inheritance (pp. 92-93) from before 1900. What we do know about women from more recent centuries is generously provided in summary form in chapter 7 in subsections devoted to "The Family" and "Women During the Yi Dynasty" (pp. 152-58). What is important about Seth's treatment is not that he tells us something we do not already know, but that he has made these matters 1 36The Journal ofKorean Studies an important part of a survey history, putting them front and center for a neophyte , twenty-something reader. Similar to the recurring theme of women's history, Seth's treatment of nobi, whom he calls slaves, summarizes existing English-language scholarship (e.g., Chong Sun Kim) and begins with Silla by mentioning the treasured census documents that survived in Japan. Seth does the reader a service by trying to make sense ofthe socioeconomic standing of nobi. A briefmention ofKoryÖ-era nobi hypothesizes that "[fjheir living conditions probably resembled that ofpoor tenant farmers" (p. 91). Again, for the more data-rich Chosön period, he sets aside an entire subsection—"Slaves and Outcastes" (pp. 161-65)—to address the matter. While saying that Korean society seems to have had a larger proportion of "slaves" in its population than "its East Asian neighbors," he makes it clear that we should not read too much into the use of the word slave, particularly for oegö nobi: "Out-resident slaves often possessed their own property and paid rents to their owners, and were little different than tenant farmers or commoners " (p. 161). Seth goes on to argue that the disappearance ofoegö nobi from the eighteenth century was probably because landowners could make just as much income...