Life as a Peninsula, Part I: The Five Korean Wars

By John Lee

The following is part of an occasional series where we will analyze the history of the Korean peninsula as a geographic space. Part One takes a look at the peninsula’s position between the Asian continent and the western Pacific and how wars have shaped Korea’s position therein.

Geography does not make its own history, but it shapes history’s contours and colors in its definitions. Belgian historian Henri Pirenne famously argued that the Mediterranean Sea had existed as a single cultural and economic unit from Roman times onward until two seismic events in the eighth century – the rise of Islam on one side of the Sea and Charlemagne’s consolidation of Christendom on the other – split the Mediterranean into two distinct civilizational zones for rest of history. Though Pirenne’s thesis has been critiqued from multiple angles, his work helped lay the roots of the Annales School of historical analysis that emphasizes long-term perspectives into oft-overlooked structures such as geographic space.

The Korean peninsula can attract a similar line of analysis. Ever since the thirteenth century, the peninsula has lain between two distinct geographic zones. On one side was the Asian continent, which over time included not only the dominant tropes of Chinese civilization but also the nomads of Central Asia and later the eastward shift of the Russian Empire. On the other was the western Pacific Ocean, which included not only Japanese civilization but also the specter of piracy and later the oceanic movements of Western Europe and the United States.

Korea’s position between these zones was shaped by a series of five conflicts that I term the “Five Korean Wars.” A disclaimer: by no means am I subscribing to geographic determinism. Koreans living on the peninsula decided their own destinies and developed Korean society along lines of their choosing. Geography does not choose a people’s fate, but it does structure the choices available. My emphasis on foreign invasions likewise is not meant to disparage the richer, more essential story of the ways Koreans responded to and internalized the outside world. I am merely highlighting Korea’s fascinating position between two crucial geographic zones and how that particular position helped shape what the peninsula was and came to be. In other words, I am purposefully taking a bird’s eye view of the peninsula’s history, a view that will inevitably overlook key details in favor of observing the long-term forces shifting around this particular geographic space.

The First Korean War (1231-1259) was the Mongol invasion of Korea. The invasion forced Korea into the Mongol Empire, the largest continental empire in world history and a dynamic force that straddled Eurasia for over a century. Moreover, the Mongols’ subsequent failure to conquer Japan ensured that the Japanese archipelago would lie outside the Mongol continental empire. For the next seven hundred years to the late nineteenth century, the Korean peninsula’s major political and cultural interests would point north and west to the continent, not south and east to the Pacific.

The Second Korean War came in 1592 with the Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea. The war began a pattern we will see thrice repeated. From the Pacific came a force trying to pull the peninsula (and more) into an oceanic orbit; from the Asian continent came a response. In the ensuing Imjin War (1592-1598), the continental power, Ming China, succeeded in foiling Hideyoshi’s attempt to dominate the Asian continent and the western Pacific trade routes.

The Third Korean War (1894-1895) is conventionally called the First Sino-Japanese War. The war’s pattern eerily repeated that of Hideyoshi’s invasion three centuries prior. Once again, Japanese troops, now following the modernizing mantra of the Meiji Restoration, marched up the Korean peninsula; once again, Chinese troops, now under the Manchu Qing banner, marched south to meet them. This time, the result was different: superior Japanese military technology and organization succeeded in pushing Chinese influence out of Korea. The resultant Japanese Empire would succeed where Hideyoshi did not. For the next sixty years, Japanese interests would continuously expand in East Asia and the western Pacific.

The Fourth Korean War (1904-1905) arrived just a decade after the Third. Commonly known as the Russo-Japanese War, it followed the same pattern of the two previous iterations. A Japanese force moved up the peninsula and northward; a continental force, this time the Russians, strove to block it. Japanese forces were again victorious, thus solidifying their hold on Korea. For the next half-century, the Korean peninsula would serve as a hub between the western Pacific and the Asian continent.

Finally, the Fifth Korean War (1950-1953) is what we are most accustomed to as “The Korean War”. Yet again, a Pacific power, now represented by the United States, moved into one side of the peninsula. On the other side were the continental powers of the Soviet Union and Communist China. No clear victor emerged, and Korea went from being a hub between the western Pacific and the Asian continent to a divided peninsula mirroring the ideological pillars of the Cold War. South Korea embraced a capitalist model of development sponsored by the new Pacific power, the United States. North Korea adopted the command economics of a Communist bloc led by the peninsula’s previous continental influences, Russia and China.

Contemporary South Korea is sustained by the western Pacific trade routes and the oceanic flow of goods to and from the United States, China, the Middle East, Europe, the whole globe. On the other hand, North Korea has experienced a steady decline since the collapse of the Communist bloc and its largely Eurasian continental economy. The opposing forces of continent and ocean helped shape the peninsula’s history for a thousand years, and the consequences seem even more magnified today.

References:

Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996

Duncan, John. The Origins of the Chosŏn Dynasty. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000  

Paine, Lincoln. The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World. New York: Knopf, 2013

Pirenne, Henri. Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969

Yi, Taejin. The Dynamics of Confucianism and Modernization in Korean History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia series, 2008