THE FAILURE OF THE WEST TO FILL THE POWER VACUUM IN EAST ASIA: ANGLO–FRENCH RIVALRY ON THE KOREAN PENINSULA, 1866–1887

DOI: 10.18173/2354-1067.2025-0057

Tóm tắt

In the late nineteenth century, the race for colonial expansion unfolded across many regions of the world, most notably in Asia and Africa. Although this imperial contest drew in the principal European and American colonial powers, certain areas remained “power vacuums” owing to rival cooperation or the absence of explicit agreements among Western states. The Korean Peninsula during the final decades of the nineteenth century epitomises such a case. Despite their military and diplomatic interventions, both Britain and France failed to construct a sustainable “Western order” on the peninsula, thereby leaving an unfilled “power vacuum” within East Asia. This vacuum was gradually occupied by Japan from the late nineteenth century onwards, especially following the first Sino–Japanese War and, ultimately, through formal annexation in 1910, while the Qing dynasty still retained residual influence and Korea pursued a strategy of “pragmatic balancing.” This paper seeks to analyse the failure of Britain and France in their endeavours to conquer and partition East Asian territories through a case study of Korea between the 1860s and 1880s, and to elucidate the structural and contingent reasons behind this failure, thereby contributing to interpretations of how East Asia’s power structure was transformed amid the colonial expansion of the Western imperial powers and the rise of Japan, which came to replace the West’s regional role during this period