The late historian JaHyun Kim Haboush claimed that the Korean kingship of the Chosŏn era is critically understudied in English-language research. Christopher Lovins's King Chŏngjo: An Enlightened Despot in Early Modern Korea is therefore a welcome addition to the scholarship. Lovins observes that South Korean scholars of the post-liberation period (1945–), too, largely avoided the investigation of the eighteenth-century monarchy, as they were deeply influenced by the Japanese colonial historiography that had depicted the Chosŏn era as one of stagnation and decline, thereby justifying Japan's imperial ambitions (p. xxii). In response to these years of neglect, nationalist scholars from the 1980s onwards began to praise what they perceived as the “progressive” reforms of Chŏngjo's rule, even adding grandiose claims about his level of “consciousness” (p. xvi). Since the appearance of these revisionist histories, interest in Chŏngjo and his rule has exploded, and his kingship has even become the subject of...

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