A History of Korea is a translation of Professor Hatada Takashi's Chosenshi, undoubtedly the best known survey history of Korea ever written. For almost two decades this work, which surveys developments on the Korean peninsula from the prehistoric period to the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, has been standard reading for students of Korean history throughout the world. The translators remark that they were attracted to Hatada's work by ". . . the skill with which the author revealed the interrelationship between political history and social and economic development" (p. vi). The focus of Hatada's work on selected aspects of Korean socio-economic history, an area in which he has made major contributions through his publications, is at once strength and a weakness. Hatada's concentration upon the socio-economic position of the Korean peasantry and outcaste groups and the control of the agricultural foundations of the state by the Korean elite led him to ignore the entire cultural dimension, the book's most serious flaw, and to deempha-size other economic factors such as international trade and domestic commerce. At the same time, this socio-economic emphasis proved to be the book's greatest strength, so much so, that despite weaknesses, e.g., the sketchy and often erroneous character of the final chapter covering pOst-I945 events, which would have led to the early demise of a lesser work, the book has gone through sixteen printings since it first appeared in late I95I. A second strength of Hatada's work, regrettably but understandably omitted in the translation, was provided by the bibliographies ap-pended to each of the book's fifty-eight sections, and the selected bibliography at the end which together provided an overview of Japanese scholarship on Korean history. -- from http://www.jstor.org (June 13, 2011).