“Problems of the Far East”: Imperial Geopolitics Reflected in the Korean Travelogues of British Officials, 1889–1900

Abstract:At the end of the nineteenth century, western incursions into Korea had gradually opened the peninsula to the outside world, and by the 1890s foreigners were not only permitted to reside in the country, but becoming commonplace in treaty ports and in the capital. At the same time, Britain, Russia, and increasingly, Japan, were engaged in a contest for geopolitical supremacy in the northern Pacific; Great Power contestation over access to trade in north China centred on the Korean peninsula as a major point of tension for the international balance of power. In this period a number of British official visitors came to Korea, and three prepared reports on the characteristics of the Korean people, society, economy, and geography. They were all politicians or colonial functionaries: Charles W. Campbell, a naturalist and consular official stationed in Seoul, George Nathaniel Curzon, a Conservative member of Parliament, who would later become Viceroy of India, and Joseph Walton, a Liberal member of Parliament from Yorkshire with a consuming interest in East Asian affairs. These men’s narratives provided a great deal of the information on Korea available to the British official mind as it formulated its East Asian policy. This article assesses the underlying motivations behind these visits, and examines the effect of British regional geopolitics on these men’s attitudes to encounter in Korea.