Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919

Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919 PDF Author: Andre Schmid
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231125390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Turning from more traditional modes of historical inquiry, Korea Between Empires explores the formative influence of language and social discourse on conceptions of nationalism, national identity, and the nation-state.

Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919

Korea Between Empires, 1895-1919 PDF Author: Andre Schmid
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231125390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Turning from more traditional modes of historical inquiry, Korea Between Empires explores the formative influence of language and social discourse on conceptions of nationalism, national identity, and the nation-state.

Empire and Righteous Nation

Empire and Righteous Nation PDF Author: Odd Arne Westad
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 0674238214
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
From an award-winning historian, a concise overview of the deep and longstanding ties between China and the Koreas, providing an essential foundation for understanding East Asian geopolitics today. In a concise, trenchant overview, Odd Arne Westad explores the cultural and political relationship between China and the Koreas over the past 600 years. Koreans long saw China as a mentor. The first form of written Korean employed Chinese characters and remained in administrative use until the twentieth century. Confucianism, especially Neo-Confucian reasoning about the state and its role in promoting a virtuous society, was central to the construction of the Korean government in the fourteenth century. These shared Confucian principles were expressed in fraternal terms, with China the older brother and Korea the younger. During the Ming Dynasty, mentor became protector, as Korea declared itself a vassal of China in hopes of escaping ruin at the hands of the Mongols. But the friendship eventually frayed with the encroachment of Western powers in the nineteenth century. Koreans began to reassess their position, especially as Qing China seemed no longer willing or able to stand up for Korea against either the Western powers or the rising military threat from Meiji Japan. The Sino-Korean relationship underwent further change over the next century as imperialism, nationalism, revolution, and war refashioned states and peoples throughout Asia. Westad describes the disastrous impact of the Korean War on international relations in the region and considers Sino-Korean interactions today, especially the thorny question of the reunification of the Korean peninsula. Illuminating both the ties and the tensions that have characterized the China-Korea relationship, Empire and Righteous Nation provides a valuable foundation for understanding a critical geopolitical dynamic.

Historical Atlas of Northeast Asia, 1590-2010

Historical Atlas of Northeast Asia, 1590-2010 PDF Author: Narangoa Li
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231160704
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Four hundred years ago, indigenous peoples occupied the vast region that today encompasses Korea, Manchuria, the Mongolian Plateau, and Eastern Siberia. Over time, these populations struggled to maintain autonomy as Russia, China, and Japan sought hegemony over the region. Especially from the turn of the twentieth century onward, indigenous peoples pursued self-determination in a number of ways, and new states, many of them now largely forgotten, rose and fell as great power imperialism, indigenous nationalism, and modern ideologies competed for dominance. This atlas tracks the political configuration of Northeast Asia in ten-year segments from 1590 to 1890, in five-year segments from 1890 to 1960, and in ten-year segments from 1960 to 2010, delineating the distinct history and importance of the region. The text follows the rise and fall of the Qing dynasty in China, founded by the semi-nomadic Manchus; the Russian colonization of Siberia; the growth of Japanese influence; the movements of peoples, armies, and borders; and political, social, and economic developmentsÑreflecting the turbulence of the land that was once the worldÕs Òcradle of conflict.Ó Compiled from detailed research in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Dutch, German, Mongolian, and Russian sources, the Historical Atlas of Northeast Asia incorporates information made public with the fall of the Soviet Union and includes fifty-five specially drawn maps, as well as twenty historical maps contrasting local and outsider perpectives. Four introductory maps survey the regionÕs diverse topography, climate, vegetation, and ethnicity.

The Great Enterprise

The Great Enterprise PDF Author: Henry Em
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822353725
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
In The Great Enterprise, Henry H. Em examines how the project of national sovereignty shaped the work of Korean historians and their representations of Korea's past. The goal of Korea attaining validity and equal standing among sovereign nations, Em shows, was foundational to modern Korean politics in that it served a pedagogical function for Japanese and Western imperialisms, as well as for Korean nationalism. Sovereignty thus functioned as police power and political power in shaping Korea's modernity, including anticolonial and postcolonial movements toward a radically democratic politics. Surveying historical works written over the course of the twentieth century, Em elucidates the influence of Christian missionaries, as well as the role that Japan's colonial policy played in determining the narrative framework for defining Korea's national past. Em goes on to analyze postcolonial works in which South Korean historians promoted national narratives appropriate for South Korea's place in the U.S.-led Cold War system. Throughout, Em highlights equal sovereignty's creative and productive potential to generate oppositional subjectivities and vital political alternatives.

Christianity, the Sovereign Subject, and Ethnic Nationalism in Colonial Korea

Christianity, the Sovereign Subject, and Ethnic Nationalism in Colonial Korea PDF Author: Hannah Amaris Roh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000636402
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
One of the first philosophical approaches to the study of Korea’s ethnic nationalism, Christianity, the Sovereign Subject, and Ethnic Nationalism in Colonial Korea traces the impact of Christianity in the formation of Korean national identity, outlining the metaphysical origins of the concept of the sovereign subject. This monograph takes a meta-historical approach and engages the moral questions of Korean historiography amid the fraught politics of narrating colonialism and the postcolonial period. Indebted to Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction and his framework of "hauntology," this monograph unpacks the ethical consequences of ethnic nationalism, exploring how Western metaphysics has haunted imaginations of freedom in colonial Korea. While most studies of modern Korean nationalism and (post)colonialism have taken a cultural, literary, or social scientific approach, this book draws on the thought of Jacques Derrida to offer an innovative intellectual history of Korea’s colonial period. By deconstructing the metaphysical claims of turn-of-the-century Protestant missionaries and early modern Korean intellectuals, the book showcases the relevance of Derrida’s philosophical method in the study of modern Korean history. This is a must read for scholars interested in Derrida, historiography, and Korean history.

Crossing Empire's Edge

Crossing Empire's Edge PDF Author: Erik Esselstrom
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824887646
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
For more than half a century, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimusho) possessed an independent police force that operated within the space of Japan’s informal empire on the Asian continent. Charged with "protecting and controlling" local Japanese communities first in Korea and later in China, these consular police played a critical role in facilitating Japanese imperial expansion during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Remarkably, however, this police force remains largely unknown. Crossing Empire’s Edge is the first book in English to reveal its complex history. Based on extensive analysis of both archival and recently published Japanese sources, Erik Esselstrom describes how the Gaimusho police became deeply involved in the surveillance and suppression of the Korean independence movement in exile throughout Chinese treaty ports and the Manchurian frontier during the 1920s and 1930s. It had in fact evolved over the years from a relatively benign public security organization into a full-fledged political intelligence apparatus devoted to apprehending purveyors of "dangerous thought" throughout the empire. Furthermore, the history of consular police operations indicates that ideological crime was a borderless security problem; Gaimusho police worked closely with colonial and metropolitan Japanese police forces to target Chinese, Korean, and Japanese suspects alike from Shanghai to Seoul to Tokyo. Esselstrom thus offers a nuanced interpretation of Japanese expansionism by highlighting the transnational links between consular, colonial, and metropolitan policing of subversive political movements during the prewar and wartime eras. In addition, by illuminating the fervor with which consular police often pressed for unilateral solutions to Japan’s political security crises on the continent, he challenges orthodox understandings of the relationship between civil and military institutions within the imperial Japanese state. While historians often still depict the Gaimusho as an inhibitor of unilateral military expansionism during the first half of the twentieth century, Esselstrom’s exposé on the activities and ideology of the consular police dramatically challenges this narrative. Revealing a far greater complexity of motivation behind the Japanese colonial mission, Crossing Empire’s Edge boldly illustrates how the imperial Japanese state viewed political security at home as inextricably connected to political security abroad from as early as 1919—nearly a decade before overt military aggression began—and approaches northeast Asia as a region of intricate and dynamic social, economic, and political forces. In doing so, Crossing Empire’s Edge inspires new ways of thinking about both modern Japanese history and the modern history of Japan in East Asia.

Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea

Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea PDF Author: Carter J. Eckert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674973216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
This first volume in a two-part study examines the origins of South Korean authoritarianism as personified by the militant political leader. For South Koreans, the twenty years from the early 1960s to late 1970s were the best and worst of times—a period of unprecedented economic growth and of political oppression that deepened as prosperity spread. In this masterly account, Carter J. Eckert finds the roots of South Korea’s dramatic socioeconomic transformation in the country’s long history of militarization—a history personified in South Korea’s paramount leader, Park Chung Hee. In Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea, Eckert reveals how the foundations of Park’s leadership were established during the period of Japanese occupation. As a cadet in the Manchurian Military Academy, Park and his fellow officers absorbed the Imperial Japanese Army’s ethos of victory at all costs and absolute obedience to authority. When Park seized power in 1961, he applied this ethos to the project of Korean modernization. Korean society under Park exuded a distinctively martial character, Eckert shows. Its hallmarks included the belief that the army should intervene in politics in times of crisis; that a central authority should manage the country’s economic system; and that the state should maintain a strong disciplinary presence in society, reserving the right to use violence to maintain order. “A milestone in the literature of modern East Asia.” ―Bruce Cumings, author of Korea’s Place in the Sun

East Asia and the First World War

East Asia and the First World War PDF Author: Frank Jacob
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110745674
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
The First World War was a truely global event that changed the course of history in many participating as well as non-participating countries. In East Asia, the war stimulated the further rise of Japan as the leading power in the region during the war, yet also its radicalization and social protests after 1918. In China and Korea it stimulated nationalist eruptions, demanding freedom and equality for the (semi)colonized countries and the people living within their borders. All in all, the present book offers a consice introduction of the history of the First World War and its impact in East Asia.

Surviving Imperial Intrigues

Surviving Imperial Intrigues PDF Author: Sangpil Jin
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824889053
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
In Surviving Imperial Intrigues, Sangpil Jin explores how successful Korean neutralization could have radically transformed the balance of power equation in East Asia. He conducted multilocational archival work, analyzing documents from the Austro-Hungarian Empire Ministry of Foreign Affairs, British Foreign Office, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, German Foreign Office, Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russian Foreign Office, Russian State Naval Archive, and US State Department, as well as perusing private papers and newspapers. What surfaced in these readings were disparate voices of multiple actors and their agendas concerning Korean neutrality and dynamic international relations in modern East Asia. Jin argues that although never implemented, Korean neutralization had the potential to succeed during the British occupation of Kŏmundo (1885–1887). He further points out that neutralization has recently resurfaced as a possible option for a unified Korean state to preserve its strategic flexibility amidst the US pivot to Asia and China’s re-emergence as a potential hegemon in the region. While neutralization is the focal point of the book, Jin also analyzes Korea’s complex and layered relations with China, Japan, Russia, and the United States, within the overall framework of Sino-Japanese, Anglo-Russian, and Russo-Japanese rivalries. A periphery state in the contemporary international system, Korea was forced to navigate through intricate diplomatic relations with major imperial powers. Jin skillfully directs his academic lens toward understanding the stories behind Korea’s contentious relations and the rivalries among the powers. The timespan of his study stretching from 1882 to 1907 reflects his unique periodization that offers a groundbreaking view of Korean diplomatic history from a more regional geography paradigm. In recent years, contemporary South Korea has been learning to reassess its strategic position in the emerging Sino–US bipolarity in the Asia-Pacific region. This book serves as a historical guide for both specialists and policymakers who require a nuanced grasp of the new era of geopolitical shift, likely dominated by the two powers (China and the United States) that possess a distinct understanding of the norms and structure of the international order.

Korea at War

Korea at War PDF Author: Michael J. Seth
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 1462923658
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
An engaging history covering a century of conflict on the Korean Peninsula Korea at War recounts how two separate nations emerged on the Korean peninsula as the result of devastating conflicts involving provocative personalities and superpower intrigues. The topics covered in this fascinating book include: The brutal years of Japanese colonial rule which began with Japan's annexation of Korea and ended with its defeat in World War II--and which still dominate Japanese-Korean relations today The division of the country into a totalitarian North and a prosperous, democratic South North Korea's invasion of the South, motivated by Stalin, which led to the bloody Korean War--a conflict that is still not settled to this day The irascible General Douglas MacArthur, who was relieved of his command by President Truman when he disobeyed a direct order and attempted to expand the war into China The rise of the Kim regime in North Korea and the continuing threat of nuclear war today Historian Michael J. Seth explores these and other themes including the complete story of North Korea--a nation and a people who for three generations have lived under the world's most repressive regime. He also discusses how South Korea has made the incredible leap from one of the world's poorest nations to one its richest and most dynamic. Korea at War is the story of two nations with a shared past that could hardly be more different today. With over 50 color photographs and maps, this book is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand contemporary Asian politics and current affairs.