Without doubt Salvation through Dissent will be for decades the standard work on the formative stages of the Tonghak movement and its emergence as a new religious tradition in Korea. Tonghak (later called Ch’ŏndo-gyo) is the first of the new religious movements of modern Korea and is deeply connected with the tumultuous political events of the late nineteenth century and the rise of modern Korean nationalism. This work provides a detailed description of the rise of a charismatic movement in the mid-nineteenth century, its institutionalization as a religious tradition, and ends the story in 1907 when the religion divides into different formal traditions. George Kallander's work is not a history of the whole religious tradition down to the present day, but a critical new look at and a corrective review of its early and formative years.

For both Korean and non-Korean historians, the Tonghak (Eastern Learning) movement is most frequently discussed in the context of the rise of modern Korean nationalism, as a reaction to the geo-political events swirling around the Korean peninsula in the late nineteenth century. There is no doubt that the Tonghak “rebellion” of the mid-1890s was a direct contributor to the Sino-Japanese War, and that in the second decade of the twentieth century its descendant Ch’ŏndo-gyo (Teaching of the Heavenly Way) played a critical role in the movement for independence from Japanese colonial rule. It is Kallander's view that to understand the movement and its successors solely in terms of its political effects is to overlook the fact that it was and is principally a religious movement. He does not neglect the political effects of the rise of this new religious tradition, but he elucidates the importance of its religious thought and practice in the history of early modern Korea. This, to my mind, is the key contribution of this book.

The great strength of Kallander's approach to this “new religion” is in placing its rise in the geo-political context of both East Asia and Korea, and also within the history of the religio-cultural context of Korea and its region. This broad overview helps the reader unfamiliar with modern Korean history to grasp the reasons for the rise of the movement and the way in which it developed. This comparative method is also applied to the particularities of religious history in the nineteenth century, when he compares Tonghak with the other “new religion”, Roman Catholicism – a particularly illuminating comparison. References to other new religious movements in Asia and a discussion of millenarianism enrich the whole discussion.

The book is divided into an introduction, providing a solid historical background for the history of the group and of scholarly engagement with it, five chapters of substance, and a conclusion drawing together the various threads of the book's argument. In chapter 1, Kallander considers the question of neo-Confucian philosophical and ritual dominance in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) and issues of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the rise of the Tonghak movement and the work and thought of its founder Ch'oe Cheu (1824–64), his success in spreading his ideas, the fears for social instability in the minds of the governing elite, and Ch'oe's execution. Chapter 4 considers the generation between the death of the founder and the Tonghak “rebellion” in the mid-1890s. This chapter considers how the movement survived suppression and became institutionalized as a “religion”. The final chapter discusses the split of the movement, its relation to nationalism and the creation of the movement's principal successor, Ch’ŏndo-gyo.

Kallander's work, however, is more than a “revisionist” view of modern Korean history. For the first time in English, there are translations of five major documents, including two written by Ch'oe Cheu which have become the equivalent of “scripture” for Ch’ŏndo-gyo – the Tonggyŏng taejŏn (Eastern Scripture), and the Yongdam-ga (Songs of Yongdam). There are also translations of Ch'oe's successors, and an in-house history of the movement, the Towŏn kisŏ (Account of the Origin of the Way). The inclusion of these materials is a major contribution to comparative scholarship. Given the importance of these documents, it would have been helpful to have had a brief discussion of each of them immediately preceeding the translation, setting out the history of the document and its themes. These matters are discussed in the text, but researchers would have benfited from having this information in one place rather than to have to tease it out from the main body of the work.

The book contains four maps, an extensive set of critical notes, a Chinese character glossary, a bibliography and an index.

This book will be of interest to comparative researchers in the history and religion of modern East Asia as well as to scholars of modern Korea itself. It should be included in the collection of any library of East Asian studies.