In 2007, the textbook entitled Tong Asiasa (East Asian History ) was introduced for use in a newly established high school elective course in history in South Korea. The course was offered to high school students starting in the first semester of the 2012 school year, and through the establishment of the Tong Asiasa textbook, high school history programs adopted a curriculum composed of three components, “Korean History,” “East Asian History,” and “World History.” However, whether or not the textbook successfully bridged the existing gap between “Korean History” and “World History,” and whether it presents unbiased perspectives of the controversial “East Asian History” remains unclear and requires reevaluation.
This study seeks to re-evaluate the contents of the “East Asian History” textbook. Of the 26 content topics, the chapter entitled “Silver Trade and Its Networks” was selected for additional analysis and evaluation. This chapter did not merely contain a list of historical events from South Korea, China, and Japan. Rather, it was more focused on the transnational production, distribution, and consumption of silver viewed from both an East Asian perspective and a global perspective. The inclusion of such a novel topic in the “East Asian History” textbook could be attributed to two principal explanations: the uncommon urgency in the introduction of the “East Asian History” textbook and the growing research interest in global history.
Upon examining two textbooks, the “Silver Trade and Its Network” chapter was found to effectively portray the locality of East Asia. However, the chapter failed to adequately explain the role and the importance of Joseon in the period from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century in the barter system for silver in East Asia.
In terms of Korea as an East Asian country, this chapter should highlight the limitations and the potential associated with the silver network in Korea’s foreign trade, which had been mainly constricted by China for a long time, but which, at the same time, extended to Japan and Southeast Asia, and ultimately to the rest of the world. If the goal of “East Asian History” is to depict a balanced viewpoint between “East Asian history inside world history” and “Korean history inside East Asian history,” additional research and positivistic approaches from the Korean perspective are required on the topic of the silver trade and its networks as related to history from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century.