Product Description

Like Volume one, Volume two of "The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective" examines the Russo-Japanese War in its military, diplomatic, social, political, and cultural context. In this volume, East Asian contributors focus on the Asian side of the war to flesh out the assertion that the Russo-Japanese War was, in fact, World War Zero, the first global conflict of the 20th century. The contributors demonstrate that the Russo-Japanese War, largely forgotten in the aftermath of World War I, actually was a precursor to the catastrophe that engulfed the world less than a decade after the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth. This study also helps us better understand Japan as it emerged at the beginning of its fateful 20th century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2284697 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 616 pages

About the Author
John W. Steinberg is Associate Professor of History at Georgia Southern University. His book on the education, training, and performance of the Imperial Russian General Staff, 1898-1914 is forthcoming.

Bruce W. Menning is a professor of strategy at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. A specialist in modern Russian military history, he is the author of Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914.

David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye is Associate Professor of Russian and East Asian History at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. He, together with Bruce Menning, edited Reforming the TsarÂ’s Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution.

David Wolf is Senior Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, specializing in Northeast Asian political and diplomatic history. He has held appointments at Princeton and Berkeley. He is the author of To the Harbin Station: The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898-1914.

Yokote Shinji is Professor of Russian History and Politics at Keio University. He is most recently author of Higashi Ajia no Roshia (Russia in East Asia).

Customer Reviews

Little Known but Important War
The collection of essays on this somewhat esoteric conflict are outstanding and cover a wide range of insights, from the diplomatic to the military as well as economic. This war was the first that saw a major European power defeated by an Asian nation, and as such hailed a new dawn in geopolitics. Russia's defeats inspired the first significant revolutionary stirrings, and the 1905 October Manifesto would inevitably lead to the 1917 Bolshevik Uprising under similar conditions of Czarist defeat in a foreign war.
In a similar fashion, Japan's willingness in 1904 to take on a vastly larger nation with infinite potential would necessarily embolden them to launch a similar venture in 1941, with historic consequences. I found it interesting to read of Japan's flirtations with Filipino revolutionaries prior to the war, but once Japan had punched its ticket to the Big Leagues, cooled in its ardor to espouse other Asian bids to be free of non-Asian rulers.
The essay authors also do a good job in balancing the perspectives that others had of the war, and highlight how Europeans, so eager to brand the Japanese as barbarians before the war, eagerly embraced them as fellow defenders of civilization once they had demonstrated their competence with military violence.
All in all, for any fan of this obscure war or early 20th century geopolitics, a must have. It is pricey, even for a scholarly book, but it is a good looking tome with something for everybody.