ABSTRACT
Evidence from the war of 1592–1598 points to potent and pervasive identities centred around China, Korea, and Japan: communities imagined as at once political, cultural, and territorial, with long and unbroken histories. This chapter explores how we should situate such identities in the broader context of East Asian and world history, by considering their relationship with ‘national’ identity. It finds that the identities of 1592–1598 shared substantial common ground with ‘nations’, but that the Euro-centric discourse around the ‘nation’ limits the term’s utility. Historical experience in China, Korea, and Japan challenges the conventional focus on the nineteenth century as the birthplace of entirely new modes of thinking about community, pointing to the need for further reflection on when and how collective identities came into being, and in precisely what ways ‘modern’ iterations differed from earlier ones.
