London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

In the Service of His Korean Majesty: William Nelson Lovatt, the Pusan Customs, and Sino-Korean Relations, 1876–1888

From the publisher’s website: In this book, Wayne Patterson examines the recently found correspondence, journals, and photographs of William Nelson Lovatt, Korea’s first commissioner of customs in Pusan. These materials significantly advance our knowledge of a critical time in the late Chosŏn period. The study’s main theme is the transformation of China’s policy toward Korea … [Read More]

Peacemaker: Twenty Years of Inter-Korean Relations and the North Korean Nuclear Issue

From the publisher’s website: More than two decades after the cold war ended elsewhere, it continues undiminished on the Korean Peninsula. The division of the Korean nation into competing North and South Korean states and the destructive war that followed constitute one of the great, and still unresolved, tragedies of the twentieth century. Peacemaker is the memoir … [Read More]

Service Economies: Militarism, Sex Work, and Migrant Labor in South Korea

Service Economies presents an alternative narrative of South Korean modernity by examining how working-class labor occupies a central space in linking the United States and Asia to South Korea’s changing global position from a U.S. neocolony to a subempire. Making surprising and revelatory connections, Jin-kyung Lee analyzes South Korean military labor in the Vietnam War, domestic … [Read More]

Truman and MacArthur: Policy, Politics, and the Hunger for Honor and Renown

From the publisher’s website; Truman and MacArthur offers an objective and comprehensive account of the very public confrontation between a sitting president and a well-known general over the military’s role in the conduct of foreign policy. In November 1950, with the army of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea mostly destroyed, Chinese military forces crossed the … [Read More]

Min Yŏnghwan: The Selected Writings of a Late Chosŏn Diplomat

From the publisher’s website: This book contains selected writings of Min Yŏnghwan, a statesman and reformist of late-Chosŏn Korea. Min’s detailed descriptions of his journeys to Russia to attend Czar Nicholas II’s coronation and London for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee produce vivid images of the world at that time while also revealing Min’s perceptions from … [Read More]

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

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 … [Read More]

Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War

From the publisher’s website: Ranging from Geneva to Pyongyang, this remarkable book takes readers on an odyssey through one of the most extraordinary forgotten tragedies of the Cold War: the “return” of over 90,000 people, most of them ethnic Koreans, from Japan to North Korea from 1959 onward. Presented to the world as a humanitarian … [Read More]

Frontier Contact Between Choson Korea and Tokugawa Japan

East Asia from 1400 to 1850 was a vibrant web of connections, and the southern coast of the Korean peninsula participated in a maritime world that stretched to Southeast Asia and beyond. Within this world were Japanese pirates, traders, and fishermen. They brought things to the Korean peninsula and they took things away. The economic … [Read More]

Min Yong-hwan: A Political Biography

From the publisher’s website: The diplomat and scholar-official Min Yông-hwan (1861-1905), described by one contemporary Western observer as “undoubtably the first Korean after the emperor,” is best remembered in Korean historiography for his pioneering diplomacy at the courts of Tsar Nicholas II and Queen Victoria in the late 1890s. Furthermore, he is considered to be … [Read More]

Korea’s Future and the Great Powers

From the publisher’s website: The eventual reunification of the Korean Peninsula will send political and economic reverberations throughout Northeast Asia and will catalyze the struggle over a new regional order among the four great powers of the Pacific—Russia, China, Japan, and the United States. Korea’s Future and the Great Powers addresses the vital issues of how to … [Read More]

Korea On The Brink: A Memoir of Political Intrigue and Military Crisis

In October 1979, a series of potentially catastrophic events was set into motion: President Park Chung-hee was assassinated, South Korean officers staged a coup d’état, and South Korean troops brutally suppressed civilian demonstrators during the controversial Kwangju uprising. Any one of these incidents could have sparked another major conflict on the Korean Peninsula. General Wickham … [Read More]

Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis

From the publisher’s website: Using extensive documentation, this book examines how President Jimmy Carter’s troop withdrawal and human rights policies—conceived in abstraction from East Asian realities—contributed to the demise of Korean President Park Chung Hee. The author suggests that some lessons are relevant beyond Korea, for example, in our treatment of human rights problems in … [Read More]

Korean-American Relations 1866-1997

From the publisher’s website: Leading historians and Asian-specialists explore key aspects of United States-Korean relations. Built upon the highly successful volume One Hundred Years of Korean-American Relations, 1882-1982, this book describes Korea’s importance to the United States and the development of the current relationship. The ramifications of this relationship are evident by the facts that South Korea … [Read More]

The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895-1910

What forces were behind Japan’s emergence as the first non-Western colonial power at the turn of the twentieth century? Peter Duus brings a new perspective to Meiji expansionism in this pathbreaking study of Japan’s acquisition of Korea, the largest of its colonial possessions. He shows how Japan’s drive for empire was part of a larger … [Read More]

A Substitute for Victory: The Politics of Peacemaking at the Korean Armistice Talks

After more than two years of bitter negotiations during which combatants & civilians continued to suffer casualties, the Korean armistice was concluded in July 1953. Focusing on the Americans formulation of negotiating positions & on their attempts to coordinate political goals with military tactics, Rosemary Foot here charts the tortuous path to peace & offers … [Read More]

The Japanese Seizure of Korea, 1868-1910: A Study of Realism and Idealism in International Relations

From the publisher’s website: This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press’s distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship … [Read More]