Wayne Patterson - "In the Service of His Korean Majesty: William Nelson Lovatt, the Pusan Customs, and Sino-Korean Relations, 1876-1888""

Wayne Patterson, Professor of History, St. Norbert College

When discussing Korea's "Chinese Decade," roughly defined as the dozen or so years prior to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 of 1894-1895, most of the attention is focused on the heavy-handed activities of Yuan Shikai in Seoul. Less well known is that part of this Chinese effort to bind Korea more closely to China involved the absorption of Korea's newly-formed Maritime Customs Service. Using the recently-discovered correspondence of the first commissioner of customs in Pusan, William Nelson Lovatt, this talk will decenter our focus away from Seoul and will discuss some heretofore unknown aspects of the informal imperialism that China exerted over Korea in the 1880s.