IN THE LATE nineteenth century, then again at the outset of the Cold War, Korea stood at the epicentre of great power conflict. But as Ku Daeyol demonstrates, the peninsula continued to attract intense diplomatic attention during the intervening period of Japanese colonial rule. Building on meticulous archival research, and interweaving Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Western sources, Ku's volume explores the civilizational lens through which British and American officials viewed Korea in the decades after the Russo- Japanese War, and analyses how that lens helped to frame postwar partition. Casting the ‘Korean question’ in an international light, and showing that its origins long predated the U.S. entry into World War II, Ku reveals how diplomats in Seoul and Tokyo tried to make sense of Japanese colonialism, East Asian geopolitics, and the emergence of anti-colonial nationalism, as they measured whether Koreans had the ‘maturity’ to govern themselves.

As a carefully crafted work of diplomatic history, Ku's book identifies and explains the key events that drove this tumultuous period in Korea's past. Deprived of the right to conduct its own foreign relations by the Protectorate Treaty of 1905 (and more forcefully by its annexation in 1910), the decades at the heart of this book have heretofore been neglected by scholars of Korean foreign affairs. But, more broadly, Ku also provides us with a thoughtful examination of the nature of ‘international politics’ in a polity subject to the rule of another. In exploring the ‘Korean question’ within the wider ebb and flow and imperial visions and forces within and beyond the region, it sheds light on the entangled politics of competing empires and nationalisms in the making of modern East Asia.