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The introduction establishes the need to examine Korean history, including that of the modern state, as a long-term process from the late nineteenth century to the end of Japanese colonial rule. It presents five characteristics of the state-making process—imperializing, reifying, civilizing and colonizing, socially embedded, and fragmented—and shows how these themes converge into the book’s central argument: the emergence of the modern state was driven by a multiplicity of often conflicting rationalizations, including legitimation. The introduction then discusses the relevant theory, reviews the historiography and history of the era under study, and presents a brief road map of the book.

This chapter deepens our knowledge of a decolonizing and divided Korean peninsula in the violent interregnum between the fall of the Japanese empire and the outbreak of the Korean War. What did it mean to collaborate in a empire? How are collaborators to be judged? When should justice rule? When political expediency? This chapter deepens our understanding of the contradictions and ambiguities at the heart of the early post-1945 Korean state’s attempts to address colonial-era collaboration through legislation and law. In so doing it reveals much about the postimperial afterlives of Koreans who served the Japanese empire, their relationship to the post-1945 politics, how many evaded punishment, and the grey areas of nationalism in a colonial empire. In so doing it shows how the politics of collaboration unfolded in a postcolonial and transnational key, delving through the records of the United States military government and into the heart of the high politics and judicial arguments of Korean post-1945 leaders.

This chapter investigates Tonghak's founding and organization in the last half of the nineteenth century. Its founder, Ch'oe Che-u, started preaching his new religious ideas among peasants and marginalized members of the educated classes in southeastern Korea after a profound experience with the divine in 1860. The popularity of this new doctrine quickly drew the attention of local officials, who were concerned about the appeal of this unorthodox teaching. Hence the chapter looks at the reasons why the new religion proved appealing to a large number of rural people in southern Korea. It then discusses the internal issues within Tonghak connected to the 1894 rebellion in order to assess the impact of the uprising on Tonghak, its role in the conflict, and the historical impact of the rebellion on modern Korean history.