| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 331 words from this article are provided below; about 696 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Woong Joe Kang. The Korean Struggle for International Identity in the Foreground of the Shufeldt Negotiation, 1866–1882. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America. 2005. Pp. vii, 225. $33.00.
The foreign relations of Korea's ChosÎn dynasty (1392–1910) became quite muddy and fraught with serious risks in the late nineteenth century, when the monarch, his advisers, and other leaders of the country gradually entered the uncharted and often treacherous territory of modern diplomacy. Their arena of action was now enlarged beyond the steady and predictable routines of a close and trusted interaction with a relatively benign, "elder brotherly" China—since 1644, China's Qing rulers had exercised only a ritualistic and nonmeddlesome supervision over Korea—and a more guarded, limited, and intermittent relationship with Japan, toward which the ChosÎn rulers generally maintained a stance of ritual and cultural superiority. As a result, between 1644 and 1866 (a period of 222 years) Korea suffered no significant external threat to its territorial security. After the years 1866–1871, during which relatively small but violent Western attempts to undermine this framework were repulsed by Korea, the traditional pattern continued for five more years.	1
Then, in 1876, came the persistent and more aggressive actions of Meiji Japan to "open" Korea to its own brand of the "modern" world. Japan wrested from a weak and vulnerable Korea a treaty marked, inter alia, by unilateral privileges such as extraterritoriality and unfair trade concessions. The treaty was modeled after those that several Western powers had earlier imposed on China and Japan. With the post-1876 Western scramble to get into Korea, more treaties of a similar kind followed later, beginning with the Korean-American treaty of 1882, a major focus of Woong Joe Kang's monograph. In this way, the Korean government and society came face to face with new meanings of armed might, predatory imperialism, nationalism-driven pursuits of profit, territorial aggrandizement, racism, religious zeal, "international law," and assorted other issues and symptoms of modernity.	. . .

There are about 696 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.