Life as a Peninsula, Part Two: The Case of the Missing Warlords

by John Lee

Warlordism, the armed consolidation of personal control over subnational territory, is prevalent in world history, particularly in times of crisis when central authority breaks down and authorities in violence rise in its stead. Such was the case of Dark Age Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, medieval Japan during the Sengoku period, and twentieth-century China after the collapse of the Qing dynasty.

In Korea however, the last spate of widespread warlordism was during the Later Three Kingdoms, a period of disorder that befell the Silla dynasty at the end of the ninth century. One warlord, Wang Kŏn, succeeded in subjugating his rivals, and the Koryŏ dynasty (918-1392) was born. For the next one thousand years, centralized administration would grow to become the norm on the peninsula. Coups would pass and go, rebellions would rise to be crushed, but Korea would never again descend into endemic warlordism.

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