A STUDY OF British extraterritoriality in Korea shows how Britain's experience over the previous quarter of a century in Japan was reflected in the more detailed arrangements that were made for Korea. Parkes and Aston, when negotiating the Treaty and preparing the groundwork for British consular representation and judicial activity in Korea, were conditioned by their experiences in Japan – hence Parkes's attention to the extraterritorial provisions of the Treaty and his laying so much stress on the judicial structure in his early memoranda to Aston; and both expressing a wish for British gaol facilities in Korea. Of course, it turned out that goal facilities were hardly needed and Naval Courts, which featured so largely in the caseload in Japan, were, with one exception absent from Korea.

It was not just the British who learned from their experiences in Japan: the Japanese themselves also took to heart the lessons: from insisting upon unilateral extraterritoriality in the Treaty of Ganghwa, through their detailed treaty provisions to the arrangements put in place when extraterritoriality came to an end in Korea.

At first glance, the low case numbers in Korea suggest that the experience in Korea must have been very different from that in Japan; but, once account is taken of the absence of a substantial merchant navy presence, the much smaller British population in Korea and its different make-up, one sees that, so far as the local resident British population was concerned, the caseloads were not dramatically different in proportional numerical terms from those in Japan and, apart from the politically motivated prosecutions of Bethell, the cases are not fundamentally different in nature of those in Japan.

Differences between Korea and Japan can be seen: in Korea, there seems to have been a greater attempt by Koreans to benefit from Westerners’ extraterritorial blanket: both informally by seeking the protection of missionaries and by using the clearer protection given to British owned premises in Korea. Such differences, though, probably reflect the different cultures and, importantly, the different degrees of effectiveness of the control exercised by the Korean and Japanese central governments over their respective local government organs and populations rather than extraterritoriality per se.