In my studies of China, Korea, and Japan, I feel as though there are far better sources, analyses, and general scholarship on China and Japan compared to that of Korea. Was/is there little interest by Western historians when it comes to Korea? Is there something about Korea that makes it uniquely difficult to study?
I have heard that there was an attitude in the past that Korean history is merely an off-shoot of Chinese history. Can anyone corroborate this? This is clearly not true, though I am interested in the justification for this if it is so.
Edit: I would also love suggestions on good books in English on Korean history.
Yes, in the West not too long ago there was often an attitude - even within much of historical academia - that Korean history was a miniature China, so to speak, and it was not often discussed on its own terms. For instance, the Goryeo political system was often described as a copy of the Tang system without realizing the great differences in practice between the two. Books like Politics and Policies in Traditional Korea by James B. Palais began to change that, thankfully.
But I would argue it's wrong to compare China to either Korea or Japan. Scholarship on China is not as disproportionate compared to those on Korea and Japan as one would expect despite the immensity of Chinese sources, so from that perspective you could say China is less studied than either of its two eastern neighbors. Japan, by contrast, is a quite different issue.
Finally, you might just not be seeing it. Just among those published in 2015 and 2016, the following Harvard East Asian Monographs were on Korea:
That's a lot - China only got 10 monographs, for example, although Chinese sources are undoubtedly much more numerous than Korean ones.