It’s time to get my industrial strength can opener out and open the can of worms labeled ‘Japan’s colonial domination of Korea and modern interpretations thereof’ (a bit of a mouthful to fit on any normal sized can I admit). There have been a couple of interventions touching on this subject recently that have prompted me to think about this a bit. Most recently Frog in a Well’s own Jonathan Dresner has stepped into this discussion with a thought-provoking piece on the need for a ‘colonialogy’ – a study of the forms of imperialism and colonialism.

Korea blogger Oranckay wrote about this article (reg. required) from the Japan Times a short while ago. It is titled “Another side to Japanese-Korean history” and could perhaps best be described as the softer end of the rightwing Japanese view of history. Interestingly, it focuses on a Japanese article detailing recent research on the colonial period in English – research which is noted approvingly for its more ‘nuanced’ approach to the period:

What Akita does in it is to list, with a few comments, some of the more notable books and dissertations on various aspects of the Japanese rule written in English in recent years, some by people of Korean ancestry, to suggest that, if you take a less than overtly nationalistic stance, the Japanese-Korean relationship during those 35 years may not have been a simple one of oppressor and oppressed but one that was “ambiguous and nuanced.”

So, on Japan’s contribution to Korea’s modernization — a subject that I understand only creates anger in Korea — Akita tells us that Carter Eckert in “Offspring of Empire: The Ko’chang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism” (University of Washington Press, 1991) and Gi Wook Shin in “Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea” (University of Washington Press, 1996) argue that Japan helped agricultural reform and capital formation in Korea, although it did so out of necessity. Eckert is a professor at Harvard University and Shin a professor at Howard University.

This is the sort of thing that is likely to set off once again the ‘modernization’ debate between Koreans and Japanese over the colonial legacy. No doubt it will also give rise to discussions in the blogosphere and elsewhere between non-Korean and non-Japanese supporters of one or other side in this polarised debate.

The two sides of this debate (if it can be called that) tend to line up as follows:

In the blue corner: rightwing Japanese historians and politicians who say “ok, so you didn’t like Japanese colonialism that much, but it wasn’t all that bad and we did bring modernity to Korea after all. It’s time to just get over it and accept that you wouldn’t have become a modern country without our help.”

Meanwhile in the red corner: Korean nationalists (in other words a very large proportion of the Korean population covering the whole left-right spectrum) and leftwing Japanese intellectuals who say “Japanese colonialism was awful and brutal, it brought no benefits for the Korean people, only oppression and exploitation. It did not bring modernity to our country – we did that ourselves after liberation.”

Of the two positions (which admittedly I have caricatured rather severely) I find the rightwing Japanese neo-nationalist one the most disturbing and most in need of challenging. This is largely because of the racist assumption that underlies it: the Koreans were incapable of becoming part of the modern world independently.

However, I think there is a problem with this whole debate. The common premise that underlies both of these apparently polarised arguments is the liberal view of history, the idea that history is basically about progress with a few bumps along the way. The goal of history in this paradigm is so obvious that it often doesn’t need to be mentioned: the capitalist nation state. The argument therefore always concerns the means of reaching this goal: independent development toward capitalist modernity (a rarity outside of Europe) or colonialist development as a subjugated nation (for at least some portion of the development period). Now, of course, much work can be done and has been done to assess the actual impact of any particular case of colonialism/imperialism. Recent research, for example, has indicated that India’s total productive output at the end of British colonial rule was about the same as it had been at the start of colonialism.

I don’t want to get into a debate about whether Japanese colonial rule emprically left Korea more ‘modern’ or ‘developed’ (although it may be a worthwhile debate for another time). What worries me is that both sides in the Korea-Japan barney basically agree that it is the quantifiable ‘fruits’ of modernity that matter (railways, factories, roads, plumbing, consumer goods etc) and that these are to be traded off against its ills (exploitation, poverty, one-sided development, cultural and environmental destruction on a massive scale etc). If Korea had been an independent country for those 36 years would it have escaped the horrors of the 20th century, would progress have happened without exploitation?

The problem for me here is the lack of a critique of modernity itself. Whatever the path to capitalist modernity, it seems that brutality and exploitation has gone hand in hand with progress. The slave trade, the gulag, genocide, imperialist war, environmental devastation and the nuclear bomb have been as much part of the path to modernity as the consumer society, cultural interchange, liberal democracy and good plumbing.

I suppose what I’m arguing for here is the need for historians to reject the fetishism of modernisation and attempt to step outside of the paradigm of capitalist society. Perhaps we can conclude: primitive accumulation is never pretty, but when (or rather if) it occurs under colonial domination insult is added to injury.

PS: I’m sure everyone can guess who wrote this:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”

A few weeks ago I attended the conference organised by Historical Materialism journal at SOAS on the theme ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Marxism’. There was one session in particular that I wanted to attend: one of my favourite historians, Neil Davidson, discussing the theory of uneven and combined development with Colin Barker. The session didn’t disappoint. Neil Davidson’s paper looked at the intellectual history of the idea of uneven development going back to enlightenment thinkers such as Leibniz and tracing it through to its more developed form in the writings of Trotsky, such as his History of the Russian Revolution (although even here it is not really systematically developed as a theory). Here is the classic passage from the introduction to that book, quoted by Davidson:

The privilege of historic backwardness – and such a privilege exists – permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages.

And here is Trotsky’s passage on combined development:

From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which for want of a better name, we may call the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms.

Colin Barker on the other hand asked whether it might be possible to extend the theory in two directions: into the study of pre-capitalist history and beyond the national level to an understanding of global combined development. I won’t deal with the latter idea here, but the idea of the application to the history of pre-capitalist societies did give rise to some thoughts that I’d like to jot down here.

Specifically, it made me think about the interesting question of the divergence of the Korean and Japanese states/polities in two radically different directions over the last two millennia. If we can, as Colin Barker suggests, extend the usefulness of this theory into the pre-capitalist past, then could uneven and combined development be helpful in understanding this particular historical trajectory? Clearly, one of the central ideas of uneven development applies to the situation of the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago at the time of their respective reception of ‘continental’ influence in the form of institutions, language, politico-religious thought and so on. In other words, both the early Korean states and the early Japanese states did not have to go through the same long process of development of centralised bureaucratic state institutions, the development of ideological systems to back them up (Buddhism, Confucianism) or the development of a writing system that was indispensable to such states. They could instead adopt these things wholesale (of course with some adaptations and some traumas too) from the continent, without many of the intervening processes, taking advantage of their backwardsness (as Trotsky might put it).

Plenty of arguments have been put forward for the divergence between Japan and Korea, for example, John Duncan provides a good list of factors that inhibited the fragmentation of political power on the Korean peninsula in his book The Origins of the Chosŏn Dynasty. And at our recent SOAS seminar on the history and culture of premodern Korea, James Lewis provided a sweeping overview of Korean-Japanese history in which he also dealt with some of these issues (his paper was quite mind-blowing in its scope, perhaps I will have to deal with it in another post). I also think that Samir Amin’s idea of tributary centres and their peripheries in the premodern world could be very useful here. He places the Korean peninsula within the Chinese/continental tributary centre and the Japan islands on its periphery, somewhat like the relationship of Europe to the Mediterranean/Middle Eastern tributary centre. This is really a way of systematising factors such as the earlier introduction of continental culture to the Korean peninsula and the closer geographical proximity of Korea to the Chinese states, it certainly shouldn’t be read as making Korea politically part of ‘Chinese’ history.

I’m not proposing to supersede these arguments – I just wonder whether the idea of combined development might help here on a more theoretical level, in synthesising and systematising these factors and analyses? What were the specific ways in which the new institutional and ideological technologies from the continental culture combined with the ‘archaic’ forms already in existence on the peninsula and the archipelago?

I don’t want to offer any real hypothesis here, mainly because I’m too ignorant about the actual facts of history (particularly Japanese). All I can say is that every time there was a dynastic-political crisis on the Korean peninsula it was resolved toward greater centralisation and a firmer embedding of the continental institutions, whereas in the Japanese islands the story seems to have been one of successive fragmentation, at least until the Tokugawa regime imposed a sort of compromise between centralised authority and political fragmentation. Can we achieve a more theoretical, analytical and less contingent explanation for this process?

As an afterthought, I also wonder about Colin Barker’s idea of theorising inter-societal development (he borrows heavily here from the work of Justin Rosenberg) and its application to ancient East Asia. I think some Korean historians have recently been talking about a sort of maritime polity around the peninsula and Japanese islands and there has been much talk of ‘interaction spheres’ too (for example in Hyung Il Pai’s book Constructing “Korean” Origins). But perhaps this is material for another post.