A shift of perspective offers the opportunity for new insights into a familiar topic. Try a different standpoint, turn the map into a different orientation, and new patterns emerge. This is what Sheila Miyoshi Jager aims to do for East Asian history in The Other Great Game, by moving Korea from the margins of the narrative of the 19th century to its center. Jager argues that the question of Korea’s position in the new regional order was one of the most significant questions of the period. Indeed, as the title suggests, she positions it as the counterpart to the original “Great Game”—a roughly contemporaneous rivalry between the United Kingdom and Russia across Central Asia. She goes further to stress that Korea was not just a prize to be fought over, but that Korean politics too was an important part of this story.
The Other Great Game charts the question of Korea’s place in Asia from the 1850s up to 1910, a 60-year period that saw several wars and a series of more minor conflicts and uprisings. Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom are key protagonists in this story, but so too are China and Japan (as well, of course, as Korea). The comparison to Central Asia is illuminating in its differences as well as its similarities: this great game was not a struggle between two Western powers across an Asian chessboard, but between Asian and Western nations, established and rising powers, alike. The book is detailed, handling well a rotating sequence of negotiations and negotiators, alongside troop movements and strategic blunders, over almost 500 pages of text. Nevertheless, it could have been longer still: the decisive battle of the Russo-Japanese War, at Mukden, merits a chapter to itself, but its counterpart at sea, the battle of Tsushima, is afforded only a single sentence.
The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia, Sheila Miyoshi Jager (Harvard University Press, May 2023)
The 19th-century diplomatic wrangles show evidence of competition between different ideas of how international relations should be. In the language of the scholarship, this is a competition between an established East Asian “sinocentric tribute system”—asymmetric and hierarchical – and the spread of the “Westphalian” system from Europe—multilateral and based upon a firm conception of (at least in principle) equal, sovereign states. The first half of Jager’s book demonstrates how, in a series of treaty negotiations between China and the major Western powers, those from the West sought to discern whether Korea was an independent nation or not. The Qing government at once disavowed any responsibility for Korean actions and yet still argued for a privileged position, on the basis that Korea was a shubang¸ a dependent or subordinate territory. By the early 20th century, the Western model was clearly dominant, yet the Koreans discovered that principles of independence and equality were of questionable concrete value: two Korean envoys to an international conference in The Hague in 1906 were denied a hearing on the grounds they were a protectorate of Japan.
Jager’s innovation lies perhaps less in bringing Korea into the story of 19th-century East Asian politics, than it does in bringing in Koreans. At least since its centenary, scholars have recognized the Russo-Japanese War (“World War Zero” in the title of one book) as pivotal, as well as the regional instability caused by perceptions of Korean weakness. But The Other Great Game demonstrates that these diplomatic conflicts were mirrored within Korean domestic politics. At the start of the 1860s, the Korean king died unexpectedly and with no heir. His successor was a distant relative, young, and with hitherto little expectation of influence or power. Many years later, King, or later Emperor, Kojong, would be seen as a symbol of Korean nation and independence, his death helping to spark the March the First movement—the largest uprising against Japanese colonial rule of Korea. However, coming to the throne at the age of twelve, he sat, largely powerless, at the middle of a series of struggles between domestic and foreign players to seize control of the government. Korea was wracked by court politics—coups, counter-coups, and assassinations—at the same time as different religious and political movements swept the country. Kojong’s wife, Queen Min, and his father, the Taewōn’gun, emerged as two of the most important domestic players (and rivals) despite unorthodox positions within the conventional hierarchy. In the end it was the father who emerged victorious in their struggle, as Min was murdered in a Japanese raid on the Korean palace in 1895.
In retrospect, the most striking thing about the period is indeed the rise of Japan. Through a series of violent and risky clashes, from small ones like this raid, to the full-scale wars against China and Russia, Japan went from backward outsider to a major player in East Asia and the Pacific. As Jager’s book demonstrates, it was the victory in this struggle over and with Korea which allowed Japan’s rise to take place.