Defamiliarizing Bureaucracy

The concept of bureaucratic knowledge, as developed by the “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge” working group, presented an ideal opportunity to pursue this question in a comparative perspective. Though Chosŏn’s court and its interpreters are often and without question contextualized within bureaucracy as a system, here, we sought to understand bureaucracy – Korean or otherwise – as knowledge.

Confucian statecraft, as widely adopted in early modern East Asia, is often hailed as an exceptionally sophisticated bureaucracy. Anyone trained to work with Chosŏn period sources will be acquainted with the vast body of compilations, chronicles, histories, literary works, and other materials published under court auspices. Thus, examinations, regular evaluations, ranks, roles, all governed by explicit rules and protocols that derive their authority from routine – or, in early modern East Asian parlance, guided by “precedent” (Korean: sŏllye/ Chinese: xianli) and conforming to “established models” (Korean: sŏngsik/ Chinese: chengshi) – are often viewed as consequences of this form of bureaucracy. For us specialists working within the field of Korean history, such characteristics often warrant no further explanation. Sometimes, however, this familiarity leads us to overlook important things. All the more so, because nothing comparable existed prior to the modern era. Here, then, the comparative lens given by the framework of bureaucratic knowledge, helped defamiliarize some of these once self-evident features of Chosŏn statecraft.

Looking Beyond Confucianism

Besides the Confucian statecraft tradition, there are some structural factors that may have helped such an institution to thrive and its bureaucratic mechanisms to persist. For instance, for about seven centuries, the period spanning the late Koryŏ (1200s–1392) and much of the Chosŏn period, Korea existed in a unipolar geopolitical environment. With one dominant power, whether the Mongol empire, the Chinese Ming dynasty (1368–1644), or the Manchu Qing empire (1644–1911), the bulk of Korea’s diplomatic attention could be dedicated to one large neighbor – a situation conducive to investing in a corps of specialists, who could devote their energies to managing that relationship.

Another important reason was the fact that Korea had to maintain a finite number of bilateral relations. In contrast, the complex, entangled mess of principalities, city-states, fiefdoms, and aspiring empires that characterized the Concert of Europe demanded flexibility from its many actors. In turn, they could not afford the deep, rigid institutionalization that we see in Korea. Thus, hasty arrangements to deal with the shifting political sands were not so much due to cultural preference as necessity: They were required for managing the vicissitudes of a multilateral system. That said, it would be a mistake to see bureaucracy simply as a result of geopolitical stability. Enduring bilateral relations, especially one exhibiting such extreme asymmetry as that between Korea and its imperial neighbor, come with their own volatility. And it is this volatility that Korea’s diplomatic bureaucracy was conceived to navigate and stabilize.

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