West Goes East: Paul Georg Von Möllendorff and Great Power Imperialism in Late Yi Korea (review)

196Journal ofKorean Studies West Goes East: Paul Georg Von Möllendorff and Great Power Imperialism in Late Yi Korea. By Yur-Bok Lee. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988. Pp. x, 295. Bibliography, index. Broadly speaking, when using imagination or speculation in their explorations historians tend to have one of two objectives: to enhance and clarify the known reality or to offer discreet, credible suggestions for filling in the missing details so as to render some tentative yet plausible wholeness to the narrative in question. The former use is aesthetic and artistic, the latter scientific in the way scientists apply hypotheses. Great historians are usually masterful in their judicious combination of these two methods. Historians with a strong diplomatic or political science background often cannot resist a third kind of speculation—that of offering entirely "creative" alternative scenarios for the past based apparently on their belief that ultimately the individual human will transcends other forces in society and can either by itself or in concert with other individual wills makes or breaks history. Such historians sometimes sound like Monday morning quarterback-type super wisemen , but they seem convinced that if only they had been on the scene to guide the actors a given story would have unfolded in a vastly different way and more to the benefit of all involved. Yur-Bok Lee is one such historian. Brushing aside the advice of Leopold Von Ranke to tell no more than "precisely what happened," Lee frequently and unabashedly, even enthusiastically, indulges in this favorite pursuit of throwing in specific suggestions back to actors long since gone from the stage of history about how they should or should not have conducted themselves toward each other, toward their own governments or other governments or toward Korea. Lee argues that this type of inquiry makes the study of history not only "interesting but meaningful and therefore obligatory" (p. 7). Well, at least interesting, if not meaningful and obligatory, although my students would probably agree with Lee's whole claim. They are often disappointed when I refuse to construct alternative visions of the past based on how things ought to have been done. Lee seems to have seen a similar compelling need in the minds of his students to hear more optimistic, less deterministic resolutions to international crises, and he certainly fulfills the urge very well. But of this, more later. It should not be assumed, however, that Lee's work is confined to Book Reviews197 this function alone. In fact, most of his book is good conventional history—scrupulous in its attention to facts and sources, careful and logical in the presentation of "precisely what happened," conscious throughout of the imperative to stay sharply focused, and lucid, if somewhat uninspired, in its style of writing. As a whole, the factual part of Lee's study is highly informative. It confirms much of what is already known about late nineteenth-century Korean diplomatic crises , alters some of it and offers considerable new data and insight on some episodes. And the speculative part, despite my reservations about its retroactive policy recommendations, is sometimes thought provoking about the sad state of international relations, both in the past and in the contemporary world. Although the book is ostensibly about the Korean career of Paul Georg von Möllendorff, a German diplomat who served as the first Western adviser to King Kojong during 1882-85 and rose to hold the important executive positions of vice-minister in the Korean Foreign Office and inspector general of the Customs Service, Lee examines the entire range of issues and episodes that stemmed from Korea's "opening" in 1876 and the complex involvement of both close and remote foreign powers in the peninsula's politics after that watershed event. In the process, Lee's study ofVon Möllendorff becomes a very skillful scrutiny of the political, economic, and cultural aspects of Korea's international vicissitudes through the 1880s. Von Möllendorff was a man of unusual talents and accomplishments . A linguist who knew many Indo-European languages and was proficient in most of the East Asian languages as well, he was also an ardent Orientalist and globalist. As a result, he was more...