| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Kyung Moon Hwang. Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern Korea. (Harvard East Asian Monographs, number 243.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center. 2004. Pp. xiv, 481. $50.00.

Kyung Moon Hwang's book focuses on "social status as determined by birth and manifested in the bureaucracy" (p. 1) as a lens through which to examine how a unique social stratification system motivated and structured Korea's emergence as a modern society. He is particularly concerned to show that universalistic, value-laden definitions of modernity, or universalistic notions of the historical stages through which modernity must be achieved, hinder scholarly understanding of the uniqueness of the historical development of societies like Korea. While Korea, like all societies, has been incorporated "into the global process of transmitted modernity" (p. 330), Hwang sees Korea's road to modernity as "paved more by internal than by external demands" (p. 330).

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