An intellectual biography of An Ch'angho, the study explores the life, thought and activities of the founding father of the Republic of Korea who unified the Provisional Government, wrote the first republican constitution and waged the war of independence against Japan. Comparable to Sun Yat-sen of China or Gandhi of India, An Ch'angho was a republican revolutionary like Sun and an ethico-spiritual leader like Gandhi. Yet, as a "Revolutionary-Democrat", An Ch'angho not only championed constitutional democracy but also led the efforts for the war of independence. The pioneer of Korean democracy, An Ch'angho was also an institution-builder, constitution writer and military strategist. A revisionist effort, the aims of the inquiry are two-fold: first, to shed new light on how the idea and practice of democracy were introduced to Korea through the nationalist movement, and second, to rectify the previous misjudgments of An Ch'angho by revealing the genuine nature of his nationalist ideology and strategy by investigating his private papers for the first time. As the most significant and extensive collection among Korean nationalists, the An Ch'angho Collection of private papers not only provides valuable insights into his role as the chief architect and strategist of nationalist movement but also offers a rare glimpse of the actual modus operandi of the worldwide network of exile and underground activities. Among others, the private papers of So Chaep'il (1866 -1951) and An Chunggun (1879- 1910) are also consulted. Overcoming a storm of academic controversy, the revisionist findings replace the earlier conceptions of An Ch'angho as a "gradualist-pacifist" or "cultural nationalist", the ideé fixe that had not been questioned since the 1960s. Defining An Ch'angho as a "revolutionary-democrat", the study delineates his comprehensive vision and systematic strategy to achieve independence and democracy.

Since the 1990s, South Korean institutions have actively engaged in providing grants for the establishment of permanent and independent Korean galleries in renowned museums abroad. The point of departure of this thesis is to provide insights into this recent serial pattern, focusing on the notion of Korea. This is based on the belief that these events should be understood as the outcomes of large-scale historical processes.;In this thesis, the notion of 'Korea' is taken as the point of convergence between the three major agents: people (i.e. Koreans and others), Korean material culture, and museums. The thesis aims to explore the nature of the three agencies and their interaction in relation to the notion of Korea, by examining how Korean people came to understand their identity as being Korean in relation to other, different such identities, and to their material culture and museums; how other people understood Korea and Korean material culture; and how far both Korean and other people's perceptions of the relationship between the notion of Korea and Korean material culture has influenced the museum field. This will lead to an understanding of South Korean efforts to open Korean galleries abroad.;The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter Two explores the notions of Korea and Korean identity. Chapters Three to Five follow the chronological framework of Korean history, Chapter Three dealing with the period from the second half of the nineteenth century to 1910, Chapter Four with that up to 1945, and Chapter Five with that up to the contemporary period. Each chapter attempts to investigate the points made above from a historical perspective. Finally, Chapter Six considers some emerging issues concerning Korean identity in South Korea, and the potential roles of museums and Korean material culture.

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The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a turbulent period in East Asia. Aggressive imperial powers challenged the traditional regional order, changing the relationships between the nations in the region and ushering in a period of imperialism and intense international rivalry. The subject of this study is Korean neutralisation attempts in this period, initiated by Koreans as well as by international actors, in an effort to fully understand how Korea endeavoured to preserve its sovereignty and how major powers pursued their interests in the Far East. Arguing that previous scholarship has dealt with Korean neutralisation in a too piecemeal fashion, this study utilises previously overlooked diplomatic documents, examines influencing factors previously disregarded, and covers a longer time period (1882-1907) than prior scholarship to provide a comprehensive and multilateral analysis of Korean neutralisation. Whereas previous scholarship has downplayed the historical significance of these attempts, based on such comprehensive analysis, this study argues that Korean neutralisation was possible on at least one discrete occasion. To facilitate a better understanding of the factors that influenced these neutralisation attempts, the study introduces examples of successful neutralisation in Europe and compares these with the Korean case. The structure of the study is chronological, describing attempts within the context of domestic and regional historical developments, focusing on the time periods surrounding major domestic and international events such as the Imo Mutiny, 1882, the Gapsin Coup, 1884, the British occupation of Port Hamilton (Geomundo), 1885-87, the Sino-Japanese War, 1894-95, and the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905. Although comparisons with successful European cases show that a lack of essential requirements made all Korean neutralisation attempts discussed in this study infeasible, this study re-evaluates their historical significance and illustrates that neutralisation can only be realised through the candidate's own will and strength combined with international respect and support.

This thesis discusses the emergence of anti-Japanese resistance movements based on mission schools in Seoul and Pyongyang established by American Northern Presbyterian missionaries in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Korea. It examines how Korean elites from the schools, despite Japanese surveillance, took part in national independence activities by orchestrating diverse systematic anti-Japanese organizations at home and abroad. It is also explored how educational missionaries influenced the formation and development of Koreans’ national consciousness and anticolonial activism, thereby unveiling missionary attitudes toward Korean independence and the Japanese colonial regime. This thesis broadly explores three key issues. Firstly, this research demonstrates the subtle interplay between mission education and socio-political dimensions of Korea in the imperialist milieu of East Asia. This issue pays particular attention to hegemonic contest between American missionaries and Japanese colonialists over mission schools, emerged in the imperialist landscape of Western powers. This study traces how the unique but mutually incompatible projects of evangelization and colonization pursued by missionaries and colonialists respectively encountered in a site of mission education. It is also important to note the clash between American democratic ideas and Japanese values, each in their own way trying to civilize the Koreans. Secondly, this study illuminates the connection between Koreans’ expectation of mission education amidst foreign imperialist threats to Korea and their collective vision of making a sovereign nation. Especially, pro-Protestant Korean reformers attributed Korea’s inability to check the imperialist intrusion to Confucian civilization and sinocentrism deeply rooted in Korea. Therefore, under an epoch-making slogan of ‘civilization and enlightenment’, the reformers sought modern Western elements derived from mission education in order to protect Korea from imperialism and simultaneously to develop it into a strong ‘civilized’ nation. For them, mission schools were not simply religious institutions for evangelism, but incubators to produce national leaders for Korean independence and restoration of sovereignty by diffusing liberating knowledge and patriotic sentiment throughout Korea. Mission education thus had multiple objectives and roles in a particular historical condition of Korea. Lastly, this thesis considers the anticolonial discourse and praxis of mission-educated Koreans during Japan’s early colonial era of Korea. The modernizing vision of Korean reformers flowed into the curricula and contents of mission education, Korean students imbibing Western concepts such as democracy, equality, and freedom related to Korean nationalism. This intellectual interaction imbued the students with critical consciousness reflecting their colonial reality, leading them to form anti-Japanese organizations intended to subvert the colonial regime. The anticolonial activism of Korean students reinforced the tense interaction between missionaries and colonialists. The principle of political non-interventionism taken by the missionaries crumbled away when the students engaged in anti-Japanese movements, and the missionary involvement in colonial politics resulted in the colonialists’ policies to eliminate missionary power in mission education. Observing the advent of anticolonial activism in mission schools, this research elucidates the unintended missionary links with Korean resistance movements against Japanese colonialism and for Korean independence.

This thesis explores social and political identities in Choson Korea between the years 1567 and 1637, particularly during the Imjin War (1592-1598) and the Manchu Invasions (1627 and 1636-1637). During the Imjin War, the Japanese caused widespread destruction over the entire Korean peninsula and the Ming army entered the country. The Later Jin briefly invaded in 1627 and launched a large scale invasion in 1636. The Manchus overran Choson's feeble defenses and forced Choson to become a vassal state of the Qing Empire. Scholars are at odds over the form of socio-political identity during this period of foreign invasion. Some claim these wars created the 'Korean nation' for the first time, while others contend that no such socio-political concepts could have existed before the twentieth century. However, researchers often use the same philosophical approaches and merely select aspects of certain theorists' frameworks that best support their arguments. Both the theories and historian's methodologies are limited in their explanation of socio-political identity of the premodern Korean past and even more so for the time of the Imjin and Manchu Invasions. My research attempts to solve these theoretical problems by creating a 'fusion of horizons' between past and modern concepts of socio-political identity in order to explore the political and cultural environments of the Choson people before and during the wars (bildung). This is achieved firstly by relying on official government histories and individually written diaries that, together, create a more complete picture of former socio-political identity. Secondly, I propose understanding Choson by looking at the definitions of the king, state, people, culture, history, and foreign world using their own definitions from their own times.

Saemankum en tant que milieu naturel aux multiples et riches ressources constitue un espace rural que le gouvernement décide d’aménager et d’urbaniser au début des années 1990. La mise en œuvre de cette politique d’aménagement du territoire a entrainé des mutations de l’environnement social et engendré un conflit entre partisans et adversaires du projet face à la question du mode de développement local le plus adapté. Les enjeux écoterritoriaux peuvent être analysés comme un jeu d’interactions entre l’action publique et l’espace pratique de la pêche. Ceci s’inscrivant dans le cadre d’un rapport de forces. Il s’agit essentiellement ici de décrire la compatibilité entre les rationalités à l’œuvre dans ce projet, en prenant en compte d’une part la territorialisation des pratiques environnementales, d’autre part les objectifs politiques et de croissance des acteurs concernés. Comment l’idée d’une gouvernance démocratique a-t-elle émergé ? À quel point le modèle du développement durable s’est-il imposé comme un élément unificateur dans la régulation des usages des zones littorales ? Cette recherche se définit comme une étude du rapport social au système territorial tel qu’on a pu le voir dans le jeu des acteurs, à travers l’évolution générale récente de l’administration du pays. / Saemankum as a natural environment is a rural area with many rich resource that the government decided to develop and urbanize in the early 1990s. The implementation of this land policy has led to changes in the social environment and created a conflict between supporters and opponents of the project facing the question of which local mode of development would be most suitable. Eco-territorial issues can be analyzed as a set of interactions between public policy and the practice of fishing area. This is in the context of a power relationship. That means to describe the compatibility between rationality at work in this project, taking into account both the regionalization of environmental practices, on the other hand, political and growth objectives of stakeholders. How the idea of democratic governance was born? In which way the model of a sustainable development has emerged as a unifying element in the regulation of coastal areas uses? In short, this research is defined as a study of the social relations within the territorial system as we have seen in the actors’ strategies through the recent developments in the administration of the country.