ABSTRACT
Compared with China and Japan, modernity entered Korea relatively late. Whereas for China defeat in the Opium War in 1842 began a sustained process of Western penetration, and for Japan the Perry mission in 1853 likewise announced the beginning of Western challenge, Korea did not sign its first modern treaty until 1876. The Treaty of Kanghwa with Japan in 1876 provided the basis for the subsequent opening of Korean ports to Japanese and Western ships. In the years that followed, Korea was never a major focus of Western imperialism, and in fact the Western powers were largely quiescent in the steady growth of Japanese diplomatic and military power on the peninsula. This resulted in the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, from which it emerged after the Japanese defeat in the Pacific War in 1945 as a would-be independent nation, under interim US and Soviet occupation. This occupation and the resultant Korean War (1950-53) established a lasting division into two hostile Korean states which after sixty years shows no sign of ending soon. Such turbulent political change has been accompanied by economic, social and cultural transformation. Western missionaries and businessmen, Japanese colonisers, Soviet political and military cadres, US soldiers and, of course, legions of Koreans returning home after foreign study have all acted as spearheads in the modernisation process, during which Korean leaders and would-be reformers have laboured amid, and often against, the defining currents of political, economic and intellectual life in the twentieth century – capitalism, Marxism-Leninism, colonialism, nationalism, hot and cold war, the rise and collapse of global communism, and Asia-Pacific economic dynamism.
