Idealism, immigration and imperialism: Durham Stevens and the rise and fall of United States diplomacy with Japan and Korea, 1873--1908

This thesis exams the early promise, as well as the eventual decline, of turn-of-the-century US-Japan and US-Korea relations, through the vehicle of the life of Durham White Stevens (1851--1908), an American diplomat who was assassinated by Korean independence activists in San Francisco in 1908 in a well-known incident. Stevens was involved intimately in the diplomacy between Korea, Japan and the United States, while being employed by the U.S. Legation in Japan, the Japanese Foreign Office and most notably by the Korean Foreign Office, in the years between 1873--1908. Stevens' career demonstrates how US-Japan and US-Korea relations were quite cordial in the late nineteenth-century when they were conducted according to principles of peaceful expansion that included free trade and immigration. It also shows how they soured at the turn-of-the-century as Japanese and American experiments with imperialism caused them to grow suspicious of each other and Korea to become a victim of colonialism.