Lew Young Ick (Yu Yŏng-ik) is a senior historian well known to scholars of Korea. He is generally regarded as one of the leading interpreters of the turbulent period comprising the last four decades of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), and it is this period that is the focus of the book under review.
The six essays represent revisions of articles or papers produced over a period of nearly thirty years between 1976 and 2002, and they are the culmination of a lifetime of meticulous, multilingual, multiarchival scholarship in an attempt to understand the forces at work leading up to the demise of Korean independence. In Korea, prominent scholars nearing retirement often produce commemorative volumes (kinyŏm ch'aek) composed of their previous writings, usually churned out with little effort at revision. While these volumes represent a symbolic retrospective on the person's academic career, the scholarly discourse usually has long since...