Tradition, Treaties, and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Choson Korea, 1850-1910

"So this one comes right at the tail end of imperial developments in eastern Asia, just when the Qing empire is collapsing in China and Korea goes from being firmly associated with China to being attacked and then colonized by Japan. So it’s a pretty dramatic story and Larsen tells it really well. It’s a very well written book but he also has some really important points to make. The first one is that what happens in East Asia at the end of the 19th century is not just the story that we generally hear, about Western imperialism, and then the weakness of the Qing empire that gets gradually weaker, and then collapses. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Larsen’s story is different from that. He sees these empires, Western and Asian, very much as robbers in the same market. What the Qing tried to do, and did quite successfully for a while, was to remake itself into an imperialist power much more along Western lines. By looking at Korea, he shows that what the Qing leaders wanted to do was to transform that imperial relationship with Korea into a kind of colonial relationship, not colonial in terms of settler colonialism, but in terms of Korea having the same kind of subservient relationship to China, as say, Algeria had to France or Ireland had to Britain. And they failed in that, in part because they came up against another imperialism that was more powerful than they were—the Japanese. But the Koreans resisted it as well. This was not what they had bargained for in their relationship with Qing China. They saw themselves as vassals of the Qing empire, but not a colony. I think it was because both Japan and the Western empires were in conflict with the Qing at that point. That was seen as threatening, and the fear was that if these empires were able to get a hold on Korea, then it would be wrested away from any kind of Chinese influence. And the only way of moving this in the direction that the Qing empire wanted was to use the same instruments as the western empires—economic and administrative subservience, which had not existed in the past in the relationship between China and Korea. Larsen describes it as part of defensive moves by the Qing, which in the end was pretty successful. It didn’t work well in Korea, but it did work in a number of other regions that were on China’s edges, such as Tibet and parts of Central Asia, which is Xinjiang today. They stayed within the empire and became increasingly incorporated into the empire, in part because the Qing were able and willing to use the same methods of colonization as the West had been using in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere."