"At the root of Britain's requirement for extraterritorial rights was its need, as a commercial and trading power, for British subjects to be able to trade on a publicly available set of legal rules which were applied consistently and fairly by an indepedent judiciary and to ensure that British subjects in foreign countries were not subject to a capricious or arbitrary criminal law system. As Western powers had expanded into Asia from the seventeenth century onwards, their economic and military power had enabled them to impose their demands for extraterritoriality upon Asian countries in a form of legal imperialsim. So, when they came to Korea at the end of the nineteenth century, they simply continued in this fashion--as had Japan in 1876 when, as part of its march to achieve parity of status with the Western powers, it had insisted upon extraterritoriality for itself and its subjects in Korea"--Page xxv of Preface.