Though when people discuss World War I, they usually center on the fighting in Europe, it truly was a global war. This book examines the role of East Asia in the fighting. It looks at how East Asian commentators saw and interpreted the war, both in Europe and elsewhere, and what lessons they drew from the experience for their own societies. What influence did World War I have on East Asian visions of the world order? Presenting scholarship by a number of East Asian authors in English for the first time, the book greatly expands our understanding of World War I and its effects.

Welche Rolle spielte Ostasien im Ersten Weltkrieg? Wie sahen und bewerteten ostasiatische Beobachter den "totalen Krieg" in Europa, welche Lehren zogen sie daraus für ihre Gesellschaften? Wie verschoben sich wirtschaftliche Netzwerke durch den Krieg? Welchen Einfluss hatte er auf Ordnungsvorstellungen und Weltbilder in Ostasien? Das Ziel der neueren Geschichtsschreibung, die Globalität des Ersten Weltkriegs stärker zu erfassen, ohne seine lokalen Rückwirkungen aus dem Blick zu verlieren, verfolgt dieser Band gut 100 Jahre nach dem Beginn des Krieges am Beispiel Chinas, Japans und Koreas.

The First World War was a truely global event that changed the course of history in many participating as well as non-participating countries. In East Asia, the war stimulated the further rise of Japan as the leading power in the region during the war, yet also its radicalization and social protests after 1918. In China and Korea it stimulated nationalist eruptions, demanding freedom and equality for the (semi)colonized countries and the people living within their borders. All in all, the present book offers a consice introduction of the history of the First World War and its impact in East Asia.

For Japan, as one of the victorious allies, World War I meant territorial gains in China and the Pacific. At the end of the war, however, Japan discovered that in modeling itself on imperial Germany since the nineteenth century, it had perhaps been imitating the wrong national example. Japanese policy debates during World War I, particularly the clash between proponents of greater democratization and those who argued for military expansion, thus became part of the ongoing discussion of national identity among Japanese elites. This study links two sets of concerns--the focus of recent studies of the nation on language, culture, education, and race; and the emphasis of diplomatic history on international developments--to show how political, diplomatic, and cultural concerns work together to shape national identity.

This volume deals with the multiple impacts of the First World War on societies from South Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa, usually largely overlooked by the historiography on the conflict. Due to the lesser intensity of their military involvement in the war (neutrals or latecomers), these countries or regions were considered "peripheral" as a topic of research. However, in the last two decades, the advances of global history recovered their importance as active wartime actors and that of their experiences. This book will reconstruct some experiences and representations of the war that these societies built during and after the conflict from the prism of mediators between the war fought in the battlefields and their homes, as well as the local appropriations and resignifications of their experiences and testimonies.

Although not a major player during the course of the First World War, Southeast Asia was in fact altered by the war in multiple and profound ways. Ranging across British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and French Indochina, Heather Streets-Salter reveals how the war shaped the region's political, economic, and social development both during 1914–18 and in the war's aftermath. She shows how the region's strategic location between North America and India made it a convenient way-station for expatriate Indian revolutionaries who hoped to smuggle arms and people into India and thus to overthrow British rule, whilst German consuls and agents entered into partnerships with both Indian and Vietnamese revolutionaries to undermine Allied authority and coordinate anti-British and anti-French operations. World War One in Southeast Asia offers an entirely new perspective on anti-colonialism and the Great War, and radically extends our understanding of the conflict as a truly global phenomenon.

From the Treaty of Versailles to the 2018 centenary and beyond, the history of the First World War has been continually written and rewritten, studied and contested, producing a rich historiography shaped by the social and cultural circumstances of its creation. Writing the Great War provides a groundbreaking survey of this vast body of work, assembling contributions on a variety of national and regional historiographies from some of the most prominent scholars in the field. By analyzing perceptions of the war in contexts ranging from Nazi Germany to India’s struggle for independence, this is an illuminating collective study of the complex interplay of memory and history.