Corea — the spelling of Korea customary in nineteenth-century English — is named in Vol. I of The Achehnese only in a passing comparative reference, where it serves C. Snouck Hurgronje as an example of the subjects on which European, and especially German, savants were apt to expend more critical energy than they devoted to the injustices perpetrated by their own countrymen in the colonial world.
In the Introduction to Vol. I, Snouck remarks that the legend of the Acheh War, constructed by writers outside Holland, “continues still, outside Holland, to be accepted as history,” and that “speaking generally, the most absurd errors are accepted in Europe for the truth regarding events that concern the minor states; even in Germany, the land of learning, savants take each other more seriously to task over an error in an edition of a Pushtu text or in an essay on the ethnography of Corea than over a tissue of injustices to their neighbours and kin in the Netherlands.”
The mention of Corea is thus incidental to a comparative thrust directed not at Korea itself but at the European, and especially the German, scholarly public. Snouck’s point is that the standards of historical criticism applied by European scholars to exotic subjects — Pushtu philology, Korean ethnography — were not extended to the colonial policies of their own or neighbouring states, and that the Acheh War had consequently been misdescribed in the literature outside Holland.
The reference to Corea belongs, accordingly, to the rhetoric of the Introduction, where Snouck defends the Dutch record against foreign criticism and at the same time rebukes the German savants for their one-sided zeal. The country itself has no further part in Vol. I; but its mention is interesting as a token of the international scholarly horizon against which the work was composed, and of the comparative breadth of Snouck’s own reading.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.