The Foreign Influence on Early Modern History Development: Interpreting North Korean Textbook Narrative

Abstract

The end of the 19th century was a turbulent time for Korean society. Constant struggles between the political fractions, the corruptness of the officials, introduction of new religions, ideas and inventions after the ports opened to foreign trade; all of the above and many more aspects of the state and society were influenced by the soon ubiquitous foreign influence.

However, nowadays history textbooks focus mostly on the national aspect of the history, and the influence from the outside is often diminished, criticized, or on the contrary overly emphasized, and in some cases even used for ideological purposes by the ruling government. That is most notable in North Korean textbooks.

Since even after the 1948 the Soviet influence was dominant not only in politics, but also in other aspects of the society, including education, in the first textbooks published in the DPRK we can expect narrative influenced by Marxism-Leninism and its theory of the historical materialism. This paper will present only one part of my wider research on the impact of Great Powers on the events of Korean early modern history in high school history textbooks: a study on a single North Korean textbook from 1952 (Chosŏn inmin haebang t'ujaengsa (kyojae).

DPRK: Naegak chiksok chungang chidokanbu hakkyo). I will qualitatively and quantitatively analyze the contents between the years 1876 and 1910, with focus on the foreign influence on the main events of that time.

It will allow an insight into historiographical discourse aimed at the next generations during the Korean War (1950-3), before the implementation of the cult of personality and the juche ideology. Since the history education influenced by Marxism-Leninism was more focused on telling the socialist world history, rather than the national, we can expect more importance to be given to the foreign countries - not only their assaults on Chosŏn, but the Russo-Japanese and Sino-Japanese wars as well.

The socialist history also stresses out the role of common people, in this case the peasants, nongmin. Big importance is therefore also given to the "Peasant war of the year 1894 (tonghak uprising)" (1894 nyŏn nongmin chŏnjaeng (tonghaknan)).

For the liberation of the people, Korea had to abolish the rotten incompetent feudal rulling class (munŭngnyŏk pup'aehan ponggŏnt'ongch'igyegŭp), fight against Japanese capitalistic aggression (ilbon chabonjuŭi ch'imnyak) and unite to achieve socialist revolution, which it fails in this period.