This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

How did the man who developed a limited border offensive into a full scale campaign and advanced over 2,000 miles to defeat the Italian Army and liberate Addis Ababa, who formed and commanded the Eighth Army, end up at Camberley and then Northern Ireland?

Though few realize it, the Netherlands East Indies were the object of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Likewise, their invasions of Guam, Wake Island and the Philippines were mainly diversionary operations to safeguard their main assault on Dutch and British colonies. Since the end of World War I, Japan had coveted the vast East Indies oil reserves, and the colony had feared invasion since Germany overran Holland in May 1940. Isolated politically the weakly defended archipelago was a tempting prize. The East Indies government initially maintained a strict policy of neutrality while desperately working to build up its military strength. As Japanese actions pushed the region toward war, the Dutch reluctantly embraced closer ties with America and Britain. For a brief period, the East Indies were key players in Pacific War strategy. This book details for the first time in English the Dutch prewar strategy, their efforts to counter Japanese espionage and their sizable though largely forgotten military contribution in the early months of the Pacific War.

In the twentieth century, the British Crown appointed around a hundred thousand people - military and civilian - in Britain and the British Empire to honours and titles. For outsiders, and sometimes recipients too, these jumbles of letters are tantalizingly confusing: OM, MBE, GCVO, CH, KB, or CBE. Throughout the century, this system expanded to include different kinds of people, while also shrinking in its imperial scope with the declining empire. Through these dual processes, this profoundly hierarchical system underwent a seemingly counter-intuitive change: it democratized. Why and how did the British government change this system? And how did its various publics respond to it? This study addresses these questions directly by looking at the history of the honours system in the wider context of the major historical changes in Britain and the British Empire in the twentieth century. In particular, it looks at the evolution of this hierarchical, deferential system amidst democratization and decolonization. It focuses on the system's largest-and most important-components: the Order of the British Empire, the Knight Bachelor, and the lower ranks of other Orders. By creatively analysing the politics and administration of the system alongside popular responses to it in diaries, letters, newspapers, and memoirs, Tobias Harper shows the many different meanings that honours took on for the establishment, dissidents, and recipients. He also shows the ways in which the system succeeded and failed to order and bring together divided societies.

A definitive history of the Royal Navy’s China Station. In the The Navy List for April 1864 the China Station was first shown as a separate Royal Navy Station . It remained as such until the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941 which was to signal the end of that era. In addition to a precis of the lives and naval careers of each of the Commanders in Chief of the China Station, this volume also gives relevant information outlining something of the concurrent internal affairs of China and Japan. Both are very different but sad tales, the former in decline towards the end of the Manchu Ch’ing dynasty and then into the chaotic 1920’s and 1930’s, and the latter increasingly adopting a militaristic attitude which was to result in their disaster of the Pacific War of 1941-1945. As a reminder of these days long gone are interwoven brief references to the British Consular Service. This is especially relevant for China, and for a shorter period for Japan during that era of extraterritoriality. Mention is also made of the British Colonial Service with whom, necessarily, the Navy worked very closely. In addition, being one important reason for it all, frequent references are made to a few British shipping and trading interests together with those of some other nations. All of these areas are linked together to give a definitive history of this very important Royal Navy Station.