WAKING THE HERMIT

By the latter half of the 19th century international trade had become increasingly important to the power and influence a nation was able to project. Great Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain were among the significant Western rivals, as was a spirited new contender, the United States, which was increasingly flexing its foreign-relations muscles. In the summer of 1871 the hermit kingdom of Korea became an unintentional pawn in the latter’s rise as a global economic and military power.

Notwithstanding the growing import of international trade as a measure of world status, the millennia-old Korean realm stubbornly resisted being swept up into “corrupting” trade agreements with Western countries. As the ruling Joseon dynasty crafted its foreign policy, it drew lessons from China’s humiliating mid–19th century Opium wars with Britain. Its isolation was self-imposed. But could it resist the global tides of change? The rapidly developing industrialization of war in Western nations—especially the development of increasingly lethal battlefield weaponry—proved a wild card in the events that characterized that contentious era.

Such dynamic geopolitical circumstances formed the backdrop for the 1871 U.S. Expedition to Korea, which culminated in the Battle of Ganghwa. Though its operational name might evoke an old-time Boy Scout jamboree, the “expedition” was in fact a U.S. Navy/Marine Corps joint combat operation. The, or “Western Disturbance in the Shinmi Year [1871].”