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"Relations between the Chosŏn and Qing states are often cited as the prime example of the operation of the “traditional” Chinese ”tribute system.” In contrast, this work contends that the motivations, tactics, and successes (and failures) of the late Qing Empire in Chosŏn Korea mirrored those of other nineteenth-century imperialists. Between 1850 and 1910, the Qing attempted to defend its informal empire in Korea by intervening directly, not only to preserve its geopolitical position but also to promote its commercial interests. And it utilized the technology of empire—treaties, international law, the telegraph, steamships, and gunboats. Although the transformation of Qing–Chosŏn diplomacy was based on modern imperialism, this work argues that it is more accurate to describe the dramatic shift in relations in terms of flexible adaptation by one of the world’s major empires in response to new challenges. Moreover, the new modes of Qing imperialism were a hybrid of East Asian and Western mechanisms and institutions. Through these means, the Qing Empire played a fundamental role in Korea’s integration into regional and global political and economic systems."
Remaking the Chinese Empire examines China's development from an empire into a modern state through the lens of Sino-Korean political relations during the Qing period. Incorporating Korea into the historical narrative of the Chinese empire, it demonstrates that the Manchu regime used its relations with Chosŏn Korea to establish, legitimize, and consolidate its identity as the civilized center of the world, as a cosmopolitan empire, and as a modern sovereign state. For the Manchu regime and for the Chosŏn Dynasty, the relationship was one of mutual dependence, central to building and maintaining political legitimacy. Yuanchong Wang illuminates how this relationship served as the very model ...
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE The extraordinary and essential story of how China became the powerful country it is today. Even at the high noon of Europe's empires China managed to be one of the handful of countries not to succumb. Invaded, humiliated and looted, China nonetheless kept its sovereignty. Robert Bickers' major new book is the first to describe fully what has proved to be one of the modern era's most important stories: the long, often agonising process by which the Chinese had by the end of the 20th century regained control of their own country. Out of China uses a brilliant array of unusual, strange and vivid sources to recreate a now fantastically remote world...
On October 26, 1909, the Korean patriot An Chunggŭn assassinated the Japanese statesman Itō Hirobumi in Harbin, China. More than a century later, the ramifications of An’s daring act continue to reverberate across East Asia and beyond. This volume explores the abiding significance of An, his life, and his written work, most notably On Peace in the East (Tongyang p’yŏnghwaron), from a variety of perspectives, especially historical, legal, literary, philosophical, and political. The ways in which An has been understood and interpreted by contemporaries, by later generations, and by scholars and thinkers even today shed light on a range of significant issues including the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings for both imperial expansion and resistance to it; the ongoing debate concerning whether violence, or even terrorism, is ever justified; and the possibilities for international cooperation in today’s East Asia as a regional collective. Students and scholars of East Asia will find much to engage with and learn from in this volume.
One of the largest political protests in contemporary Korean history, the May 1980 Kwangju Uprising still exerts a profound, often contested, influence in Korean society. Through a deft combination of personal reflections and academic analysis, Contentious Kwangju offers a comprehensive examination of the multiple, shifting meanings of this seminal event and explains how the memory of Kwangju has affected Korean life from politics to culture. In keeping with the book's title, the essays offer competing interpretations of the Kw.
Sovereignty Experiments tells the story of how authorities in Korea, Russia, China, and Japan—through diplomatic negotiations, border regulations, legal categorization of subjects and aliens, and cultural policies—competed to control Korean migrants as they suddenly moved abroad by the thousands in the late nineteenth century. Alyssa M. Park argues that Korean migrants were essential to the process of establishing sovereignty across four states because they tested the limits of state power over territory and people in a borderland where authority had been long asserted but not necessarily enforced. Traveling from place to place, Koreans compelled statesmen to take notice of their movemen...
In the last few years, issues related to human rights, including encouraging the democratization of Muslim societies from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, have acquired great importance in shaping the character of U.S.-Muslim relations and U.S. policy toward Muslim countries. An important impetus behind this development were the tragic events of 9/11, which demonstrated the destructive potential of militant groups that use a distorted interpretation of Islam as justification for their actions. These events also led to a greater realization by the United States--and the West--that a lack of democracy and lack of respect for human rights have been contributory factors to the rise of militant...
In the heyday of empire, most of the world was ruled, directly or indirectly, by the European powers. Unconquered States explores the struggles for sovereignty of the few nominally independent non-Western states in the imperial age. It examines the ways in which countries such as China, Ethiopia, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Siam managed to keep European imperialism at bay, whereas others, such as Hawai'i, Korea, Madagascar, Morocco, and Tonga, long struggled, but ultimately failed, to maintain their sovereignty. The chapters in this book address four major aspects of the relations these countries had with the Western imperial powers: armed conflict and military reform, unequal treaties and capitulations, diplomatic encounters, and royal diplomacy. Bringing together scholars from five continents, this book provides the first comprehensive global history of the engagement of the independent non-European states with the European empires, reshaping our understanding of sovereignty, territoriality, and hierarchy in the modern world order.
In An Chunggŭn: His Life and Thought in his own Words, Jieun Han and Franklin Rausch provide a complete translation of all of An’s writings and excerpts from his trial and appeal. Though An is most famous for killing Itō Hirobumi, the contents of this volume show that there was much more to him than that. For instance, far from being anti-Japanese, An thought deeply about how China, Japan, and Korea could work together to build a regional peace that would eventually spread throughout the world. Now, for the first time, all of An’s extant writings have been assembled together into an English translation that includes annotations and an introduction that places An and his works in their historical context. This translation was funded by the Institute of Korean Studies, Yonsei University.
"This study revolves around the career of Kobayashi Hideo (1902–1983), one of the seminal figures in the history of modern Japanese literary criticism, whose interpretive vision was forged amidst the cultural and ideological crises that dominated intellectual discourse between the 1920s and the 1940s. Kobayashi sought in criticism a vehicle through which to rhetorically restore to the artistic work an aura of concreteness that precluded interpretation and instead inspired awe, to somehow recover a literary experience unmediated by intellectual machinations. In adhering firmly to this worldview for the duration of World War II, Kobayashi came to assume a complex stance toward the wartime re...