Research Agenda

The Question

Does technology drive history? It’s a laden question, and recently historians have debated the Military Revolution, a model that posits gun technology as the cause behind the advent of “modern” states in Europe.^[1] A critical aspect of this model is that guns didn’t just revolutionize the military – to adopt drill and standing armies, but triggered deep societal changes such as the birth of the centrally governed nation-state. My project, drawing on a revised notion of this model, interrogates the Korean case in the 17^th century with the following question: when after two bloody wars Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) adopted firearms warfare, did that also change its society?

Literature Review

To date, while there is a revisionist history that recognizes East Asia as on par with Western Europe in gun technology, a comparable study of how guns altered East Asian societies is lacking.^[2] In my previous research and award-winning articles, I documented Korea’s own revolution around musketry technology in the 17^th century.[3] In this project, I now propose to write a social history of this revolution. My hypothesis is as follows: although the nation-state didn’t emerge in Korea, the adoption of a musket-based military stimulated Korean statecraft, commerce and urban society in a way that curiously parallels yet permutes from the case of Europe. There are rich archives in South Korea to test my hypothesis, and I plan to spend a year sifting through the Garrison Records, a newly discovered corpus of military logs that were kept daily for three centuries.[4] Ultimately, my study will bring greater resolution to world-historical debates still mired in West-centrism, and recognize the neglected value of Chosŏn as a unit of global military history.

More needs to be said about the Military Revolution. Geoffrey Parker, the doyen of this model, holds that the spread of firearms in early modern Europe (1400-1800) led to effective, centralized states and eventually to the rise of the West. In 17^th century Europe, the theory goes, mobile artillery toppled medieval walls, and the new walls that took their place required large standing armies to defend. Over time, this way of war – consisting eventually of mass infantry, artillery fortresses and gunboats – hastened the birth of the nation-state and conferred Europeans a technological and cultural edge in warfare around the globe.^[5]

The Military Revolution is widely-accepted, but not everyone agrees with it. Political scientists William Thompson and Karen Rasler, for example, reject the model’s core thesis that technology accelerated European state formation. Rather than guns, they argue, the impulse to war itself “grew” the state.[6] But above all, the model has been critically revised by a group of globalist scholars steeped in East Asian history. Using new data on non-European warfare, these revisionists argued that firearms were just as pervasive in East Asia as in Western Europe, and that the military revolution was in fact a Eurasia-wide phenomenon.[7] In my previous collaboration with the revisionists, I also published a comparative study of English and Korean drill manuals, evincing that Korean musketry tactics bore striking resemblances with their European counterparts.[8]

The revisionist model is robust and is likely to become a mainstay of world history. Yet, while addressing military tactics, the model didn’t puzzle out the original conundrum about guns and society, leaving behind the question: if firearms warfare pervaded both Europe and Asia, and European societies were transformed by it, what about Asian societies?

Research Proposal

My research doesn’t propose to tackle the whole question, but examines a crucial part of it, Korea. I emphasize Korea not simply because it’s a neglected unit of global military history, but because it approximates the ideal context for a case study: 1) Korea is roughly the size of England, and more amenable to compare with Western European states than China or Japan; 2) Korea had no major war soon after its adoption of muskets, which eliminates the independent variable – war – and isolates gun technology as a factor of social change; 3) Korean military archives are vast, comprehensive, and can bear on measuring the social impact of guns through varied indices, including state centralization, commercial growth and urbanization.

By way of further background, Korea faced a series of foreign invasions at the turn of the 17^th century, which triggered cascading changes in society at large. During these wars, Korea revamped its military around muskets, and this technological revolution created new standing armies in the capital. As a result, thousands of soldiers and their families flocked to Seoul from the countryside and set up shop in sectors as varied as trade, shipping, mining, and printing. These developments constituted, if you will, a process of military urbanism.

In my proposed study, I aim to examine this process of military urbanism by analyzing the Garrison Records, the primary focus of my dissertation research. A vast archive of 689 books spanning three centuries, the Garrison Records not only contains information on military duties such as drill and firearms production. It also holds rare data on social and economic issues related to the garrisons, including the abuse of violence by soldiers in urban spaces, monopoly of city markets by military enterprises, and class conflicts between aristocrats and lowborn musketeers.

Methodology

My approach to perusing this vast corpus is two-fold: 1) identifying and performing close reading on its most pertinent subset, and 2) using digital methods for distant reading. The first strategy is informed by my preliminary research last summer at the Jangseogak Archives, the largest repository of the Garrison Records. During a month-long workshop at this archive, I started sifting through the military logs with resident experts, and identified a subset of 142 books that pertain to the 17^th century. But even with this subset, perusing a century of military logs is a daunting task, at least without a systematic methodology. I propose to guide my close reading with a three-step thematic analysis, cycling through the following three topics that figure prominently in the corpus: 1) Korea’s adoption of a new musket-based military based on regular drill, standing armies and rural recruitment; 2) the impact of this system on urban migration, consumption, and social composition in the capital; 3) the economic activities of garrisons and military merchants under the new system. These topics are building blocks of my hypothesis that gun technology induced a process of military urbanism: the degree of causal relations between the first topic and the rest is a measure of the gun as a social catalyst.

I’ll also apply digital methods to perform a distant reading of the Garrison Records. Thanks to diligent archivists in Korea, a significant portion of the corpus has been and continues to be transcribed and uploaded on the Jangseogak Archives website. This fall, I solicited the Korean government based on a statute titled "Act on Promotion of the Provision and Use of Public Data,” and successfully procured all of the transcribed data (about 45,000 entries), including existing indices on biographical and spatial metadata (e.g., XML tags on people, name, places and offices). Using this data, I’ve begun building a relational database, which will not only facilitate my field research by creating a platform to enter and curate archival notes. It’ll also allow me to perform exploratory data analyses and ask questions such as the following. How frequently did the garrisons drill troops, promote officials, or disburse salaries? What is the content of the soldier petitions and the pattern of the state’s responses? This distant reading will, in turn, update my focus areas and themes for close reading.

To contextualize my findings from the Garrison Records, I’ll also collect a wide array of supplementary documents. This builds upon my previous publications and research trips to the archives: my accumulated bibliographical surveys amount to a total of 524 unique titles including drill manuals, military rosters, and defense maps in the two archives I propose to work in. For instance, the Kyujanggak Archives houses the Illustrated Record of the Firearms Manufacturing Agency, a gunsmithing manual with details on manufacturing procedures. Such a source would help contextualize my reading of military logs on arms production from the Garrison Records.

The vastness of Chosŏn’s military archives is enough to intimidate any student of history. However, with a focused question and codependent strategies of close and distant reading, I plan to make extensive and innovative use of the Garrison Records. This archival work, while focused on a small country on the eastern end of a vast Eurasian landmass, is a crucial piece of a globalizing discussion on the Military Revolution. In my prospective dissertation, I aim to bring granular insights from 17th century Korea to bear on global military history, and on our understanding of how technology impacts society.