Post-Liberation Korean Historiography: Nationalism, Marxism, and the Cold War Divide

For intellectuals who resisted Japan’s imperialist project, liberation in 1945 presented a critical opportunity to reshape Korea's historical narratives and political discourse. However, this moment was immediately complicated by the division of Korea along the thirty-eighth parallel, a geopolitical reality enforced by American and Soviet occupation. This new dichotomy forced figures like An Chae-hong and Paek Nam-un to navigate an ideologically polarized landscape. In the U.S.-occupied South, Paek Nam-un adopted a more overtly nationalist stance, advocating for a ‘New Democracy’ and a united front that explicitly excluded former Japanese collaborators from the nation-building process.

In the immediate post-liberation period, Paek Nam-un focused on building independent academic institutions. He helped organize the Chosŏn haksul-won (Korean Academy of Sciences) to overhaul higher education. He strongly criticized the US Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) plan to create Seoul National University from the former Keijō Imperial University, arguing it would lack autonomy and retain pro-Japanese faculty. Consequently, with conservative control of education, the Chindan Society positivists, including Yi Pyŏng-do, secured dominant academic posts, marginalizing progressive historians.

Meanwhile, An Chae-hong pursued a moderate right-wing strategy of a left-right coalition excluding communists. As the political center collapsed, he served as Director of the Interim South Korean Government under USAMGIK. By 1948, escalating anti-communist repression in the South and opportunities in the North led many Marxist intellectuals, including Paek Nam-un, to move north. This exodus, combined with U.S. backing, cemented the dominance of the positivist, “non-political” Chindan Society scholars in Southern academia until their grip was challenged after the 19 April 1960 student revolution.

The Rise of Nationalist Historiography (1960-1980). The brief democratic opening after the 1960 revolution allowed a new generation of historians to challenge colonial narratives. In his 1961 textbook ‘Kuksa sillon’ (A New History of Korea), Yi Ki-baek—a student of Yi Pyŏng-do—systematically critiqued four pillars of colonialist historiography: common ethnic origins, inherent Korean factionalism, historical stagnation, and external determinism. His work aimed to dismantle these prejudices and introduced the concept of ‘kundaehwa’ (modernization), aligning Korean history with U.S.-promoted modernization theory.

This created a dominant, ‘safely postcolonial’ narrative that was anti-Japanese but uncritical of American influence, effectively sublimating questions of neocolonialism into a story of developmental progress. However, under the cover of this ‘nationalist’ historiography, closet Marxists began to push ideological boundaries. Historians like Kim Yong-sŏp and Kang Man-gil strategically drew upon the forbidden work of Paek Nam-un, recasting him as a nationalist to resurrect his Marxist framework of internal socioeconomic development and class struggle.

Kim and Kang’s work, focusing on land tenure, merchant capital, and commodity economy in late Chosŏn, revived Paek’s analysis of Korea’s internal dynamism. While sharing with modernizationists a Korea-centred history, their conclusions radically diverged. They argued for ‘two paths to modernity’: an egalitarian, autonomous ‘modernity from below’ driven by peasant rebellions, and an exploitative, dependent ‘modernity from above’ led by elites whose collaboration with Japanese and later American power led to colonization, division, and dependent capitalist development in South Korea.

This historiographical divide was not merely academic but reflected a profound political schism. The ‘modernization from above’ narrative legitimized the South Korean state and its Western-aligned elites, tracing a progressive lineage from 18th-century reforms to the modern republic. Conversely, the ‘modernity from below’ thesis offered a radical critique, framing South Korea’s development as rooted in a legacy of elite collaboration and structural dependency. This debate provided the historical underpinnings for the oppositional minjung (people’s) movement that would challenge military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s.

Thus, South Korean historiography from the 1960s to the 1980s was a contested field where the struggle to ‘overcome colonial historiography’ masked a deeper conflict over the nation’s modern identity. The positivist-modernizationist school, backed by the state, served a nation-building project within the U.S.-led Cold War order. In contrast, the nationalist-Marxist synthesis forged by Kim Yong-sŏp and Kang Man-gil provided a potent historical framework for criticizing that very order, linking past class conflict with contemporary struggles against dictatorship and foreign hegemony. This period established the foundational narratives that would later be challenged by postnationalist and New Right historians from the 1990s onward.