柳馨遠과 동인도회사(VOC) -근대성의 개념에 대한 斷想- Yu Hyŏngwŏn and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) -Stray Thoughts on the Notion of Modernity-

Abstract

It has sometimes been suggested that Korea would have been able to modernize more quickly and avoid colonization if, like the Japanese did through Rangaku (the pursuit of Dutch knowledge), Koreans too had made use of the opportunity contacts with the Dutch East India Company afforded to learn about the West. In the seventeenth century a group of employees of the East India Company who had been shipwrecked off the coast of Cheju-do and thereafter lived in Korea for 13 to 15 years offered such an opportunity. Thanks to a brief passage in Pan’gye surok we know that Yu Hyŏngwŏn met some of these Dutchmen and had a serious conversation with them about the use of coins. Unfortunately, we do not have any detailed information about possible other topics of discussion. Nevertheless, this brief Korean encounter with the West prompts us to reflect on the question of what there would have been to learn from the West. If we examine the nature of Western culture as represented by the employees of the East India Company, there are good reasons to believe that the kind of “modernity” represented by the Company, which relied as much on military violence and massive enslavement as on commercial acumen, cannot be regarded as having been a desirable goal to strive for. This undercuts the assumption that is habitually made that modernity simply equals progress.