Periodic Reporting for period 3 - Aftermath (THE AFTERMATH OF THE EAST ASIAN WAR OF 1592-1598.)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2021-11-01 al 2023-04-30
Aftermath is a European Research Council Starting Grant project run by ICREA professor Rebekah Clements at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. 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 is 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 is pooling 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.
1.The movement of people and demographic change;
2.Environmental and economic impact:
3.Diffusion of technology as a result of the invasions.
The following three main types of results have been achieved:
1. Publications. Highlights include:
* Baihui D & Clements R. 2022, 'Fighting for Forests: Protection and Exploitation of Kŏje Island Timber during the East Asian War of 1592 to 1598', Environmental History, vol.27 no.3 pp 415-440. Winner of a 2023 Vandervort Prize from the Society For Military History.
*Clements R. 2022, 'Alternate Attendance Parades in the Japanese Domain of Satsuma, Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Pottery, Power and Foreign Spectacle', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol.32 pp 135-158.
*Gonzalez, J. 2023. “La intromisión de los jesuitas en la política japonesa: el caso de la rebelión de Amakusa (1589-1590)”, Estudios de Asia y África, Vol. 58 Núm. 1, pp.34-64.
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 at the Autonomous University of Barcelona as part of the European Research Council Horizon2020 project “The Aftermath of the East Asian War of 1592-1598”. 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 to present their research results and receive feedback from the scholarly community. 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 now regularly attracts around 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. It has become one of the largest Asian studies research webinars in the world, and continues throughout the current reporting period.
1. Publications. Highlights include:
* Baihui D & Clements R. 2022, 'Fighting for Forests: Protection and Exploitation of Kŏje Island Timber during the East Asian War of 1592 to 1598', Environmental History, vol.27 no.3 pp 415-440. Winner of a 2023 Vandervort Prize from the Society For Military History.
*Clements R. 2022, 'Alternate Attendance Parades in the Japanese Domain of Satsuma, Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Pottery, Power and Foreign Spectacle', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol.32 pp 135-158.
*Gonzalez, J. 2023. “La intromisión de los jesuitas en la política japonesa: el caso de la rebelión de Amakusa (1589-1590)”, Estudios de Asia y África, Vol. 58 Núm. 1, pp.34-64.
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 at the Autonomous University of Barcelona as part of the European Research Council Horizon2020 project “The Aftermath of the East Asian War of 1592-1598”. 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 to present their research results and receive feedback from the scholarly community. 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 now regularly attracts around 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. It has become one of the largest Asian studies research webinars in the world, and continues throughout the current reporting period.
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, is 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 will bring 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, Korean, and European languages.