The Struggle for Korea, 1876–1882

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The International Journal of Asian Studies

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Oxford Handbook of South Korean Politics, edited by JeongHun Han, Ramon Pacheco Pardo, and Youngho Cho

This chapter provides an overview of key questions, issues, and debates in the scholar ship on the political history of Korea from 1905 to 1945. Japan placed Korea in protec torate status in 1905 and colonized the country in 1910. After nearly forty years under colonial rule, the dominant narrative in the scholarship in South Korea from 1945 to the mid-1980s focused on Japanese colonial oppression and the Korean struggle against it to achieve national independence. The focus of this chapter is on subsequent approaches that have supplemented, qualified, challenged, and refined interpretations of this era. These include analysis of the causes behind the emergence of modern nationalism in Ko rea; the internal political polarization between left and right and the internal conflicts within each camp that formed the domestic foundations for the division of the Korean Peninsula after 1945; the bureaucratization that, according to some scholars, served as the template for the developmental state that emerged in South Korea during the 1960s; and the dissolution of absolute monarchy as a viable system of governance in the post-1945 period.

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