Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Korea. By David Fedman. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. ix, 292 p [ISBN: 9780295747453]

Abstract

Environmental histories of Korea and the Korean landscape remain scant in the English-language scholarly corpus. Studies like David Fedman’s Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea represent some of the first book-length contributions (in English) to this emerging field. Fedman’s first monograph makes interdisciplinary contributions that will appeal to scholars across disciplinary frameworks who study forestry, colonialism, the environment, the Japanese Empire, and Korea. The book not only draws attention to imperial forestry in a region that is frequently overlooked in conversations of global environmental history and colonial forestry, but it also reframes conservation as a tool of imperialism, expanding understandings of colonial violence in the Japanese Empire to include silvicultural rhetoric and policy. While Seeds of Control focuses on the Korean peninsula geographically, Fedman’s insights about Japanese forestry ideology also inform environmental histories of the “green archipelago” in his exploration of colonial policies of reforestation and assimilation. The arguments made in Seeds of Control