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Editors’ Preface
- Ku Daeyeol
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- Book:
- Korea 1905-1945
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 04 May 2022
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2021, pp xi-xii
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- Chapter
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Summary
IN THE LATE nineteenth century, then again at the outset of the Cold War, Korea stood at the epicentre of great power conflict. But as Ku Daeyol demonstrates, the peninsula continued to attract intense diplomatic attention during the intervening period of Japanese colonial rule. Building on meticulous archival research, and interweaving Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Western sources, Ku's volume explores the civilizational lens through which British and American officials viewed Korea in the decades after the Russo- Japanese War, and analyses how that lens helped to frame postwar partition. Casting the ‘Korean question’ in an international light, and showing that its origins long predated the U.S. entry into World War II, Ku reveals how diplomats in Seoul and Tokyo tried to make sense of Japanese colonialism, East Asian geopolitics, and the emergence of anti-colonial nationalism, as they measured whether Koreans had the ‘maturity’ to govern themselves.
As a carefully crafted work of diplomatic history, Ku's book identifies and explains the key events that drove this tumultuous period in Korea's past. Deprived of the right to conduct its own foreign relations by the Protectorate Treaty of 1905 (and more forcefully by its annexation in 1910), the decades at the heart of this book have heretofore been neglected by scholars of Korean foreign affairs. But, more broadly, Ku also provides us with a thoughtful examination of the nature of ‘international politics’ in a polity subject to the rule of another. In exploring the ‘Korean question’ within the wider ebb and flow and imperial visions and forces within and beyond the region, it sheds light on the entangled politics of competing empires and nationalisms in the making of modern East Asia.
Editors’ Preface
- Andrew Hillier
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- Book:
- Mediating Empire
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 30 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2020, pp ix-x
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Summary
THE YEARS BETWEEN 1815 and 1920 were ones of profound change in Britain, in China, and in the relationship between them. As the three generations of one family at the centre of this book knew only too well, the recently established British presence in China became increasingly involved in the politics, economics and finances of China's faltering imperial regime. The British presence and consequence peaked during the Boxer crisis, but was eclipsed within decades by the rising force of Chinese nationalism.’
Andrew Hillier's book covers this remarkable period of change in the relations between China and Britain, but is also a welcome addition to the literature on empire and the family. In this book, family emerges as something greater than the sum of its parts – as a body of knowledge and, in the context of British informal empire in East Asia, of ‘best practice’; an interface between Britain and China, public and private, interests and ideals, and commerce, faith and diplomacy. In the case of the Medhurst/Hillier family, that interface worked to promote three traits in particular: evangelism (and its ‘underlying tenets of commitment and diligence’); an aptitude for the Chinese language; and what the author terms ‘the development of a cultural sensitivity towards China’. As Hillier explains, these particular family traits (just as much as family connections) – acquired and relayed through experiences and memories – proved to be particularly conducive to getting on amidst the compromises and veiled sovereignty of informal empire and the treaty port world.
At the same time, Mediating Empire makes it plain that the relationship between family and empire was never instrumental, and seldom neat, tidy or convenient. It could invite accusations of nepotism, and closed minds. Family is about building connections (the author offers us glimpses of the role of ‘calling’ in deepening and extending family networks), but it is also about the drawing up of lines – most obviously, in this case, between Britons and Chinese. And empire could be brutal to families: separating couples, exacerbating risks, refusing permission for a diplomat and brother to travel to console a bereaved sister, instructing a husband to cut short attempts to resolve a failing marriage, and even, at the end, exacerbating sibling rivalries.
‘The common aim of the Allied Powers’: social policy and international legitimacy in wartime China, 1940–47
- Tehyun Ma
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- Journal:
- Journal of Global History / Volume 9 / Issue 2 / July 2014
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 May 2014, pp. 254-275
- Print publication:
- July 2014
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- Article
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This article examines why Western programmes of social security became a topic of interest for Chinese Nationalist (Guomindang) policy-makers during the early 1940s. It traces a generation of sociologists and civil servants, often trained abroad, who used wartime exigencies to make the case for New Deal-style reforms. While offering a route to professional advancement, social insurance was primarily intended to serve the needs of the government. Embedded in, and dependent on, the Anglo-American alliance, Nationalist party planners embraced the internationalist social agenda of the Atlantic Charter – advanced by institutions such as the International Labour Organization and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration – to solidify their nation's status as an aspiring great power, and to legitimize to foreign sponsors their hold on the state. In this regard, fascination with the likes of the Beveridge Report and the Social Security Act was a performance, intended to show how China was in keeping with the spirit of the age.
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