Survey books are typically difficult to write as they must encompass a deep understanding of historiography and process this vast amount of knowledge into a short primer while maintaining nuance and prioritizing a level of objectivity over analysis. With the rise in scholarship regarding the Great War and its international components (something about being necessary).East Asia and the First World War however seems to miss the mark. While certain chapters, particularly the ones about Japan, seem to include secondary literature published after 2014, a majority of the information is pulled from works published in the 1970s and 80s. This naturally leads to some rather dated points of view and arguments permeating throughout the underlying narrative. 

For example, the author tends to push a rather ham-handed portrait of imperial Japan as this radical state driven to undermine the international ideals of the Wilsonian Moment. For example, Frank Jacob states that Japan “ripped away Chinese rights and claimed to be a guarantor of the (Wilsonian) order when it became a founding member of the League of Nations” (68). This seemingly forgets the fact that the US retained its colonial fingers in the Philippines and northern China or the British and French use of mandates to expand their own colonial empires. The remainder of his introspection of Japan’s involvement in the Great War lacks the nuance that authors like Tatiana Linkhoeva, Frederick Dickinson, and others have brought to the topic in the last decade of scholarship. It seems, despite citing these works, that the author completely missed their arguments or distilled them into such broad statements as to render them ineffectual. Jacob’s argument that 1915 marked a point of “no-return” for Sino-Japanese relations comes to mind. 

The most interesting section is the cross-colonialization of Korea and the marks left by competing Great Powers mirroring conflicts to come in the Cold War and decolonization. The chapter focuses primarily on the nascent nationalist movement and the rise of anti-colonial sentiments. The author puts forward a fairly standard life under colonialism and the efforts of the Japanese to achieve their own mission civilisatrice to assimilate the Korean population under Yamato tutelage. For the most part this stays at a fairly high level overview not allowing for some of the granularity of colonial realities. But overall provides an interesting launching point for further research which is ideal for such a survey work and arguably the best sections of the work. 

Overall, despite the flaws, East Asia and the First World War offers a decent introduction to the historiography of the period. As with any work of such a breadth, there will always be specialists nitpicks or room for improvement in the works cited. The most important thing for such a work is to synthesize this material and present it in a way that attempts to rise above historiographic antagonisms and biases while inviting the reader to continue their exploration. While Jacob does not always achieve this, the work still is worthwhile to those wanting to orient themselves to the region.