Articles & Book Chapters
Criminals in Nagasaki, Japan c. 1667
This paper takes a network analytic approach to investigating crime in seventeenth-century Japan. In 1667, the Nagasaki magistrate’s office conducted the largest documented smuggling crackdown in Tokugawa Japan (1603–1867), busting a ring of 87 arms traffickers who had been shipping contraband to Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). I use the office’s “criminal investigation records” (hankachō 犯科帳) to build a dataset of the 94 suspects from ten Japanese towns who were interrogated about their involvement at the time.
Cooking Niter, Prototyping Nature
Across the 17th-century world, new methods of investigating nature evolved in dialogue with saltpeter (potassium nitrate). This essay argues that the problem of making saltpeter invited a mode of early modern science that emphasized espionage and experiment, especially in regions of low-yield like Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910)…. By tracing the dialectics of espionage and experiment, I also show the formation of a new vernacular science around saltpeter, whose nature challenges existing notions of how non-elite knowledge about the material world forms and operates in early modern societies.
Reverse Engineering as History and Method
How does one reverse engineer a technical artifact, let alone build a system of knowledge, use, and production around it? I investigate the Korean artisans and practitioners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and their efforts to understand and rebuild the Portuguese espingarda (matchlock musket) on their own terms. What emerges, first, is a hitherto untold story of how a global artifact became reconstituted in Korea... In telling this story, however, a second, methodological contribution is made: a hands-on approach that investigates the material objects through the very act of reverse engineering, defined here as mechanical dissection.
Nature of Narye
This paper examines a ritual known as narye (“rite of exorcism”), the centerpiece of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910)’s New Year celebration… I argue that the nature of narye is best understood as a constant dialogue between ritual and play, solemnity and humour, and exorcism and entertainment. Historicizing this dialogue shows, moreover, that narye was a seminal political affair in the Chosŏn court, where kings and officials disputed intensively about the hermeneutics of performance. In appreciating both the hybrid nature of narye and its politics, this study recognizes performance as a central mode of Confucian statecraft.
Difference in an Age of Parity
Much recent work on global military history has argued against the Military Revolution—a world-historical paradigm that emphasized Europe’s innovations in warfare and technology during the early modern period (1550–1850). The new research shows that this period was instead an age of military and technological parity: East Asians in particular maintained comparable levels of developments vis-à-vis Europeans. But this research has yet to engage with rich scholarship in Japanese and Korean language, which still posits a fundamental divergence between Europe and East Asia. I resolve this tension with new comparative data and by focusing on one central facet of the debate: musketry. This study also challenges global military historians to engage more deeply with the field of the history of technology and to consider anew the role of society and material culture in shaping the use of technological artifacts.
A Korean Military Revolution?
(Co-authored with Tonio Andrade and Kirsten Cooper)
Drawing on recent work in East Asian military history that argues that guns also wrought deep changes in non-European ways of war, we use the Korean military of the Chosŏn dynasty, a fascinating nexus of Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch influences, as a case study to compare East Asian tactics with European ones. Using military manuals from the seventeenth century, we show that European drilling regimes—centered around musketry units—had striking analogues in Korea (as they also did in China and Japan). The very fact of these similarities in such far-removed societies should point us toward caution in making pronouncements about a “Western way of war,” making clear that there is a need for a truly global military history.
Big Heads and Buddhist Demons
Boosted by superior firearms and competent riverine transportation, Cossack explorers of the Muscovite empire encountered little resistance in their eastward expansion across Siberia until they reached the Amur frontiers. The Cossacks arrived in 1643 and gained notoriety as Buddhist demons (luocha 羅剎) for plundering the Mongol-Tungusic tribes of the region during the latter half of the seventeenth century. There ensued an effective military counterthrust by continental East Asians, including the Manchus, a new rising power in North China; Amurian natives such as the Daurs, Juchers, and Nanais; and Korean musketeers hailing from the Chosŏn dynasty…