THE AFTERMATH OF THE EAST ASIAN WAR OF 1592-1598.

Project Information

Aftermath

Grant agreement ID: 758347

DOI

10.3030/758347

Project closed

EC signature date 26 September 2017

Start date 1 November 2018

End date 31 October 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 444 980,00

EU contribution

€ 1 444 980,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT AUTONOMA DE BARCELONA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - Aftermath (THE AFTERMATH OF THE EAST ASIAN WAR OF 1592-1598.)

Reporting period: 2023-05-01 to 2024-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Aftermath was a European Research Council Starting Grant project run by ICREA professor Rebekah Clements at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, with part of the action hosted by the University of Oxford. The project seeks to understand the legacy of the East Asian War of 1592-1598, also known as the Imjin War and Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea. This massive conflict is not part of standard narratives about the early modern world but it was the largest conflict of world of the 16th century and was unparalleled in East Asia until the 20th century. Over a six year period, as Hideyoshi attempted to pass through Korea and conquer China, the war entangled as many as 500,000 combatants from Japan, China, and Korea, as well as Southeast Asian and European subjects. Civilian casualties were high. It was followed by a period of instability, culminating in the rise of the Manchu forces who formed the Qing dynasty in 1644. The memory of the Imjin conflict reverberates throughout East Asia today, kept alive in Korea by museums and the school curriculum, and thanks to strategic concerns that are still relevant for the modern nations of Japan, China, and Korea. Yet the daunting array of primary source languages means that a regional vision of the war and its implications remains elusive. To address this, Aftermath was a team-based project that combines Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and European sources in order to understand, not the war itself, but something which is arguably even more important: the aftermath and its implications for early modern East Asia. Our research team pooled language skills to investigate the following three themes:

1.The movement of people and demographic change;
2.Environmental and economic impact:
3.Diffusion of technology as a result of the invasions.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The following four main types of results have been achieved:

1. Publications. E.g.:

Rebekah Clements. (2025) "Hegemony, Hunting, and Human Trophies in the East Asian War of 1592-8." Past and Present. In production, expected January 2025.

Baihui Duan. (2024) “Climate, diseases and medicine: The welfare of soldiers during the East Asian War of 1592–1598.” Medical History, vol. 86(3), 1–17 (Awarded the William Bynum Essay Prize, from Medical History, 2023).

Baihui Duan and Rebekah Clements. (2022). “Fighting for Forests: Protection and Exploitation of Kŏje Island Timber during the East Asian War of 1592–1598,” Environmental History, vol.27 (3) (Winner, 2023 Vandervort Prize, The Society for Military History).

Barend Noordam. (2023). “Chinese Volley Fire and Metanarratives of World History” Journal of World History 34 (3), pp. 329-368.

Rebekah Clements. (2022). “Alternate Attendance Parades in the Japanese Domain of Satsuma, 17th-18th Centuries: Pottery, Power, and Foreign Spectacle”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol.32 pp. 135-158.

Sangwoo Han. (2021). "The marriage market for immigrant families in Chosŏn Korea after the Imjin War: women, integration, and cultural capital." International Journal of Asian Studies, vol.18 (2):247-269.

2. Virtual Exhibition/Digital History Project.

Stories of Clay (https://aftermath.uab.cat/stories-of-clay/) was launched on 7th Feb 2022 and is co-authored by Rebekah Clements and Seung Yeon Sang. Stories of Clay combines the study of heirloom ceramic pieces and sherds, together with documentary evidence, to trace the experiences of Korean potters who were captured by Japanese troops and brought to Japan during the Imjin War (1592-1598).


3. Seminar/Webinar Series

A monthly seminar series for the AFTERMATH project was launched on 23 October 2019, providing a forum for the AFTERMATH team and invited guest speakers. The seminar series reflects the cross-over nature of the project, with experts from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and European history backgrounds participating. During the COVID-19 lockdown, we took the seminar online, making it a webinar series. The webinar series regularly attracted 30-50 participants from all corners of the globe and has considerably raised the profile of the AFTERMATH project, as well as allowing us to connect with other scholars despite COVID-19 related travel restrictions.

4. Project Conference

“Mastering of Materialities: Resources and Technology in Post-Imjin East Asia (1598-1650).” Autonomous University of Barcelona, 4-5th September 2023

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Modern ideas of the nation state have shaped disciplinary boundaries and separated Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Studies. The project’s comparative approach across China, Korea, and Japan, however, was premised on the contention that despite the rupture of diplomatic relations between Japan and its neighbours after the war, the interconnection of people, environments, and technologies that had characterized East Asia throughout premodern history continued in the postwar period. The project also remedies the lack of studies of the war’s aftermath, since in so far as this has been studied, it has mainly been from the perspective of diplomatic, and occasionally, literary history. The project will broaden our understanding of the early modern world, and push back the boundaries of current discussions of war legacy by exploring the meanings of “aftermath” in the early modern East Asian context. The project, which brought together scholars from the EU and East Asia, will make a lasting contribution to the continued regional study of the war by producing ground-breaking research monographs and journal articles using the full spectrum of linguistic sources, and by compiling the first annotated, online bibliographic tool in English of research on the war in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean languages.

An additional outcome of the project that went beyond the current state of the art, resulted from the incorporation of Iberian materials into the source base with a postdoctoral researcher and a PhD student trained in Iberian literature and philology, working on Jesuit accounts of the war. E.g:
Giuseppe Marino, and Jaime González Bolado. (2022). “De cómo vio Taico los embajadores de la China: Una historia de intrigas, conspiraciones y terremotos durante las negociaciones de paz de la Imjin waeran (1592-1598).” Revista De Humanidades, (47), 11–34. https://revistas.uned.es/index.php/rdh/article/view/33874.

Giuseppe Marino and Rebekah Clements. (2023). “Iberian Sources on the Imjin War: The Relação do fim e remate que teve a guerra da Corea (1599)” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 23(1), pp. 27–48.
https://doi.org/10.1215/15982661-10336282.

This novel approach combining East Asian and Iberian accounts of the war revealed new qualities in the Jesuit documents written in Japan in the late sixteenth century. Previously, these sources (annual letters, and ad hoc reports about the war) had been overlooked because their contents were secular and not of interest to scholars of church history. Japanese historian had similarly overlooked their usefulness due to a combination of language barriers, and a concern with accuracy, fearing that such sources would be mostly hagiographic and not historiographic. The work of project members detailed above revealed that there was a concern for historical accuracy in the Jesuit accounts of the war, and that, when combined with East Asian primary sources, could shed new light on gaps in the East Asian materials.

Image of Stories of Clay online exhibition

Image of project themes