Reform and modernity in the Taehan empire

책 소개

Editors Preface This book is the result of a collaborative effort between Yonsei Universitys Institute of Korean Studies and UCLAs Center for Korean Studies. Yonsei University and UCLA have worked together closely in the field of Korean Studies over the past several years. Large numbers of UCLA graduate students have studied at Yonsei University, conducting research and participating in graduate seminars, some as recipients of fellowships provided by Yonseis Institute of Korean Studies. During the same time, Yonsei University faculty and postdoctoral fellows have been at UCLA as visiting scholars where they have conducted research and team-taught courses with UCLA faculty. Yonsei and UCLA have also jointly sponsored academic conferences on such topics as Korean Identities and Education in Korean Language and Culture, held in Los Angeles in 2003 and 2004 respectively. In an effort to further their cooperative relations, the two universities began to plan a joint research project that would include both established scholars and advanced Ph.D. students. Professors Kim Do-hyung and Kim Dong-no of Yonsei and John B. Duncan of UCLA met several times to discuss this issue and eventually decided to engage in a joint research project on reform efforts and modernization in the Taehan Empire in the belief that such a project would be helpful to the study of Korean history in both Korea and the U.S. The Taehan Empire witnessed the culmination of Korean government efforts at modernizing reforms that had begun after the opening of the ports in 1876, but at the same it also saw the colonization of Korea by Japan. Hence we felt that clarification of the Taehan Empires modernizing reform projects is important for both understanding the nature of the modern reform movement that began after 1876 and resolving the question of the nature of colonial society that has become an issue among scholars in both Korea and the U.S., as well as for illuminating continuities and discontinuities in Koreas modernization process. Furthermore, we noted that although the nature and content of the Taehan Empire reforms have been the focus of intense debate among historians in Korea over the past 10-15 years, the Taehan Empire has, until quite recently, been almost entirely ignored by scholars in the Western world. Having decided on the general topic, we made determinations on various subtopics and recruited researchers working in those areas. From Korea, we selected established specialists on the Taehan Empire while from the U.S. we focused primarily on younger scholars, including a number of Ph.D. students working on dissertations related to the Taehan Empire. We gathered to discuss our findings on two occasions: first at workshop held at UCLA in June 2004; and second at a conference held at Yonsei University in May 2005 with the support of the Korea Research Foundation. We then had each of the authors revise her/his chapter, translated chapters written in Korean into English, and then edited each of the chapters for publication in this book. We believe that this book is of scholarly value for a number of reasons. First, whereas research in Korea has been limited largely to analysis of the Taehan Empires reform projects or else to attempts to clarify the nature of the Taehan Empire through analysis of the civil sector Independence Club movement. By contrast, this book deals with both the nature of governmental reform efforts and with the processes of modernization in various areas of society. Second, this book will introduce English-language readers to the controversies that have arisen among Korean scholars over how to understand the process of modernization in Korea while also providing valuable information on the changes Korean society was undergoing at the turn of the twentieth century. The chapter by Kim Do-hyung gives an overview of the reform projects and provides a critical introduction to the controversies over how to interpret this period. The…

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