Soju

Hyunhee Park offers the first global historical study of soju, the distinctive distilled drink of Korea. Searching for soju's origins, Park leads us into the vast, complex world of premodern Eurasia. She demonstrates how the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries wove together hemispheric flows of trade, empire, scientific and technological transfer and created the conditions for the development of a singularly Korean drink. Soju's rise in Korea marked the evolution of a new material culture through ongoing interactions between the global and local and between tradition and innovation in the adaptation and localization of new technologies. Park's vivid new history shows how these cross-cultural encounters laid the foundations for the creation of a globally connected world.
The first global study of the distinctive Korean soju, tracing cross-cultural exchanges and Korea's place in Eurasian history.
Hyunhee Park is Associate Professor of History at the City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the CUNY Graduate Center.
'Hyunhee Park shows how Korea's soju arose in the global context of a Mongol world, how it developed as a local and national liquor, and how it has become global itself in a new globalization. Brilliant and interdisciplinary, the volume explores the deep and dynamic roots of a popular liquor.' Dongwon Shin, Jeonbuk National University
'Soju is a very useful addition to the field of early modern alcohol studies. The depth and breadth of the evidence is extraordinary and Hyunhee Park's easily accessible style makes the work valuable to audiences well beyond Asian specialists. Ultimately, the book may help to shift the gaze away from sixteenth-century Europe and toward early modern Asia when discussing the origins of globalization.' Gina Hames, Pacific Lutheran University
'This is a thorough, scholarly, excellently researched study of the origins and rise of soju, Korea's distinctive distilled alcoholic drink, which extends our knowledge of food and of technology significantly, by putting the rise of soju in global context over a thousand years of history. Providing unique documentation of a beverage world otherwise almost unknown outside Korea, it is a welcome addition to global food studies.' Eugene N. Anderson, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Riverside