Lecture by John S. Lee

Abstract: For five centuries, Korea’s Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910) maintained the longest continuous state forestry system in world history, largely around the protection of a single type of tree, the pine. How did this system work for so long within the confines of a pre-industrial agrarian polity? This presentation answers this question by focusing on how the Chosŏn government dealt with problems of labor recruitment and administrative oversight that became especially problematic in the mid-seventeenth century. In response, the Chosŏn government empowered naval garrisons in coastal zones to use soldiers as loggers, wardens, and impressers of corvée labor. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the state also cooperated with and accommodated local forms of forest management – ironically, local institutions that had originally arisen in response to government encroachment. Overall, I offer a particularly well-recorded case of pre-industrial state forestry that further highlights the sylvan foundations of the early modern world, an era when rising demand for timber and fuelwood across Eurasia synchronized with the expansion of government capacity to manage forest usage. Moreover, the presentation asks historians, environmental humanists, and social scientists to consider the diversity of conservationist states and their ability to exist - and prosper - devoid of modern environmentalist ethos and outside of European zones of knowledge production. Far more important to long-term conservation, perhaps, is a sustained bureaucratic and social commitment to a particular ecology. 

Bio: John S. Lee is Assistant Professor in East Asian History in the Department of History at Durham University in the United Kingdom. Before he came to Durham, he was Presidential Fellow in Environmental History at the University of Manchester and a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. He received his Ph.D in History and East Asian Languages in 2017 from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. This presentation is part of his current book project, Kingdom of Pines: State Forestry and the Making of Korea, 918-1910.

IISH Seminar: This lecture is part of the monthly IISH Seminar series. This seminar is open to the public online only.