In recent years, a wealth of new scholarship on alcohol in East Asia has appeared, ranging from studies of the rapid rise of the beer industry in Japan to the evolving role of alcohol as an intoxicant used to demarcate new notions of modernity, gender, and class in Republican-era China and Manchuria. Hyunhee Park's Soju: A Global History adds to this growing literature by focusing on the clear, highly distilled liquor soju, which over the course of the twentieth century came to be known as the “National Liquor of Korea,” a beverage now recognized and consumed worldwide, thanks to its ubiquity in globally popular Korean media and cuisine.
While Park devotes considerable space to documenting the evolution of the modern soju industry as well as the beverage's newfound global popularity, her work differentiates itself from previous studies of alcohol in the region by forefronting premodern Afro-Eurasian exchanges and connections...
