Had Wilson been a Republican, his outlook would have probably been very different: the missionary connection (see Tuchman, "Sand in the Wind: Stilwell and the American Experience in China") seems to have been much more of a factor for Republicans in the US.
And we all know how well that worked out for Stillwell &c. A swamp that size, activist foreign policy isn't your friend.
I asked my well-read-on-Russia relative if the part about the lost chance for peace rang true with her; she wasn't familiar with it, says the dominant narrative for that period is the Provisional Government continuing the war effort apace in solidarity with Allied governments (and Masonic connections between leaders a possible contributor). But that would presumably have been more in the summer after the negotiations collapsed.
Thanks for the summary Mossy; it was good again. Like you, I had no idea how close we were to negotiated peace in 1917.
The war feels odd, with so many countries (like Romania, China, and the US) joining in late, and with a Russia basically dropping out due to internal politics in 1917. I understand China's war declaration against Germany--Tooze emphasizes the American role in encouraging it--but I wonder if nationalist pride and reclaiming the concession areas weighs much heavier than "a seat at the table" as a reason to declare war.
I guess that goes in the confusion pile: Did everyone want to be at the table because they assumed the world was going to be redivided among the powers, and if you're not at the table, you'll be "carved and divided" by those who attend?
Thanks. Very nice summary. I'm going to stop reading the book now and just go with the summaries.
5: I just went to the Amazon page to encourage everybody else to do the same.
I add the praise for Mossy's writeups as well as disappointment the rest of us will be expected to live up to them! These chapters were ones where I felt I seriously hadn't known any of this. I liked the motif of missed opportunities, so close and yet so far, and I think it's going to be an interesting lens. I'm not sure if it makes me more or less worried about current politics.
7: Watch out for the Bill Emblom ones.
4.1, 5: Thanks.
4.2: Yes. That's what the seat at the table was for; they also did get concessions from Britain and France for their entry. And just being at the table implied sovereignty, and was quite a big deal. The British Dominions also went to some lengths to send delegations in their own right, with equal standing with Britain.
Aw shucks, Thorn, I'm sure you can summarize with the best of us. My own knowledge is pretty thin for WWI, and in Asia almost nonexistent, so mostly just feeling my forward.
10.2: including India, which also got a League of Nations seat out of it.
10: I was thinking more... "a seat at the table" seems like an abstract reason for a divided, weak governance China to go to war. I believe it, but it's pretty clinical and thought out.
For selling to the Chinese populace, it sure seems like "we're seizing the German concessions, because we're sovereign and they're bad" would be more persuasive. Especially after the Boxer Rebellion and concerns about the humiliation of the concessions.
I don't quite doubt Tooze, but I wonder if he's emphasizing the international politics part more than the domestic. (Though I don't see much sign of that in the Russia chapter, so maybe it really was that dispassionate for China.)
3: But that would presumably have been more in the summer after the negotiations collapsed.
If I read Tooze correctly the various peace movements never got as far as official contacts; and shit fell apart after the Russian summer offensive was crushed.
13: The Chinese progressives were very cosmopolitan, the leaders largely educated in Japan and/or the West. Their base of support was also the south and cities, which by the 20th C were very international. They definitely wanted to sit at the top table, and saw the importance of the war.
13 last: we would all be right to question Tooze, all the time. He's making large claims far outside his specialty, and it's very easy to fuck up like that.
I knew a little about Russia, on the basis of which I'm inclined to think that Tooze oversimplifies the impact of the July Days, during which the Provisional Government very nearly collapsed and the Bolsheviks were placed in the unlikely position of trying (unsuccessfully) to restrain the mass demonstrations in Petrograd. But since the Kornilov coup effectively reset everything, perhaps it doesn't much matter.
I knew nothing about the Japanese and Chinese situation except in the baldest outline, and on first reading found that chapter very helpful. But Mossy's excellent commentary struck very close to home: "Picking sides in a failed state is very remote from constructive use of actually-existing diplomatic leverage and financial systems..." I mean, whoever would do such a thing?
Did everyone want to be at the table because they assumed the world was going to be redivided among the powers
Frederick Dickinson - WWI and Triumph of New Japan 1919-1930 is largely an IR book, or domestic reactions to IR, and about the liberal internationalist movements in 20s Japan.
Essentially, Wilson and US did not have secret knowledge or plan, Japan (or some elites) at least understood very early, like 1916, that global power now meant economic hegemony and that required new kinds of cooperation and competition. Japan celebrated the Armistice and gave speeches as to the horrible destructiveness of WWI.
You just cannot possibly overestimate the effects of the US joining the war, for Wilson's anti-colonial and internationalist purposes. The resources, the invulnerability, the dynamism and wealth...back into the 19th century, Japan etc knew that the US could rule everything if it chose to. Especially after Europe cannibalized itself. And America was understood at that time as only reluctantly militarily aggressive, America gained and exercised power in ways that could be profitable for associates and allies. Serious as fuck, a New Kind of World was born in 1918.
"Seat at the table" meant US attention and favor.
The next twenty years, the next hundred years, were about failed cultural survival after America called dibs.
18 is great. Thanks for the book rec. Postwar, Japan (in the standard telling) pursued a sort mercantilist/corporate imperialism*; a rebirth of the same policy?
*With laughable results. Apart from you, know, lots of money.
Reading this chapter about China also had a great deal of information that was new to me. Mostly, it made me angry at Japan because I knew what was going to happen in the 30s.
And you'll get angrier, if you buy that the 30s didn't need to happen. Which, intriguingly, bob and Dickinson seem to be agreeing with in 18.
I have the book waiting for pickup at the library.
Moved to quote Laxness:
This so-called World War, perhaps the most bountiful blessing that God has sent our country since the Napoleonic Wars saved the nation from the consequences of the Great Eruption and raised our culture from the ruins with an increased demand for fish and whale-oil, yes, this beautiful war, and may the Almighty grant us another equally beautiful at the earliest possible moment -- this war began with the shooting of a scruffy little foreigner, a chap called Ferdinand or something, and the death of this Ferdinand was taken so much to heart by various ill-disposed citizens that they kept on hacking one another to pieces like suet in a trough, for four consecutive years and more.
Folk began to farm on a larger scale, folk increased their livestock, folk even sent their children to be educated. In some houses there were to be seen not one but as many as four china dogs of the larger size, even musical instruments; womenfolk were walking about wearing all sorts of tombac rings, and many persons had acquired overcoats and wellington boots, articles of apparel that had previously been contraband to working people.
22 is excellent. And mirrors the experience of neutrals all over the world. War is great for business.
18 made me think of stuff I decided to leave out of the Introduction summary, about the US as a universal monarch, which Tooze mentions. The US and its predecessor colonies were seen as a potential nemesis for the European balance of power as far back as the 17th & 18th centuries*. All the other aspirants to that were crushed by alliances: Spain, France, Germany, Britain in the American War of Independence. But America just waltzs to total supremacy without facing any counterbalancing alliances. The world wars mask America's (global) wars of expansion: in each they destroyed Old World enemies while also pursuing policies that sucked the life out of Old World allies. The Deluge sort of tells that story, though that isn't its goal.
*There's a whole (painfully boring) book largely about this.
Wasn't the whole scope of WWII in a sense Hitler's attempt to counterbalance the US? There was that explicit intention with the Hunger Plan to cleanse Slavic Europe and create an empire with an agricultural and industrial base more comparable to the US than any European power had otherwise.
Or I guess Generalplan Ost would be the better item corresponding to what I'm talking about.
25: yes indeed. Openly, in fact: senior Nazis were saying things like "The Volga will be Germany's Mississippi" and by that they meant "the large navigable river running through the middle of the enormous fertile country which we intend to conquer, depopulate and settle". The Germans reckoned that a) if they stayed as they were they couldn't outcompete everyone else, and this would mean they would be crushed, and b) on the other hand if they annexed Poland etc into Germany then they'd have the land and resources but also a lot of unhappy Slavic voters joining the electorate. The answer they came up with was "take the land, expel the people".
25 : Yes. That's the flipside of 24, and much if the point of Wages of Destruction.
Right. I got that originally from Bloodlands, but WoD I think also presented it well.
Postwar, Japan (in the standard telling) pursued a sort mercantilist/corporate imperialism*
Post-WWII? Well-rewarded client-state, with resistance only to remilitarisation requested by the US starting as early as Korean War.
20,21:Not prepared to talk about causes of WWII. Not because Japan isn't to blame, or because it is a big multicausal mystery*.
Dickinson is talking only about a faction, though popular, in the 20s that was dedicated to liberal internationalism. There were constant counterforces. The decade is famously bookended by the rightwing assassination of prime ministers.
*Or maybe so. If Trump gets elected and goes asshole, we will start writing our own self-serving stories about how it happened.
29: Is Bloodlands worth reading? The premise seems kind of arbitrary?
30.2 mercantilism as an alternative to military expansion, efforts to buy influence. Seemed superficially similar to 18.
27 - they were also OK with just murdering everyone (or everyone non-German) between the Oder and the Volga. Expel, murder, it's all good in the hood.
Really great summary btw. I have not started re-reading but I agree with the overall assessment that tge Asia chapters seemed weakest and I basically skimmed those the first time through. Though also I don't know enough of the basics re Asia in this period to know how to criticize.
In Europe, it strikes me as also fair to attack the Brits for not moving towards a negotiated peace faster. The French had just fought Verdun and were maybe facing collapse so you can understand their need to press on. But if we're going to slam Wilson for failing to seize a potential path to peace in 1917 seems to me you can also blame that worthless Welshman Lloyd George for failing to take an opportunity.
Book get. Didn't realize it would be this heavy. I guess Mr. Doorstopper, considering the other one.
I'm not reading the book, but I am finding these summaries really interesting. In this one I'm particularly intrigued by the part about Asia, especially Japan. I've been reading a bit lately about Micronesia (mostly anthropology and archaeology, so this historical stuff just comes in incidentally), which was a German colony before WWI that Japan conquered during the war and went on to rule under a League mandate until WWII, when the US conquered it and went on to rule it under a UN mandate for a few more decades until the various parts of it transitioned to being either official US territories, independent countries, or something in between. I don't know if Tooze talks about this side of Japan's role in the war, which must certainly have been way less of a priority than China, but it's an interesting side note. Apparently there was an influx of settlement on the islands by Japanese colonists during the twenties and thirties, for reasons that are unclear to me from my very limited reading, who presumably all left in advance of the US invasion after 1941. The picture of Japanese politics given in Mossy's summary is intriguing background for these processes.
There was a fair amount of Japanese colonization over time, especially to the less crowded Manchuria. I always assumed the traditional story of release valve plus manifest destiny notions.
Yeah, that definitely makes sense, especially given the German attempts at the same thing per 27. Tiny, extremely isolated islands in the Pacific seem like weird places to choose for that sort of thing, though.
In UK/Australian war comics set in the Pacific, they all turn out to be spies. I mean, I dunno how accurate COMMANDO is, but they have very accurate depictions of Spitfires and Mosquitos and such, so I assume they're A+ on historical throughness in general.
More seriously, I think there was actually some level of geo-political impulse where even though any given island is not that important, a sea of Japanese islands is an attractive prospect, especially to a maritime power.
There's a lot of mainland Chinese interest in the south Pacific these days, mix of direct state engagement and also commercial activity, which maybe has some similarities around establishing spheres of influence and so-on.
And if you came late to colonising the Pacific, you kinda had to make do with what's left -- look at Germany, which had to make do with Samoa (which is great and all, but it's no Australia or New Zealand.)
40 - Where "they" are Japanese people living on any given South Pacific island. It was basically a shamelessly racist but surprisingly prevalent trope in war comics I read as a kid.
look at Germany, which had to make do with Samoa
And Micronesia! Plus part of New Guinea. Totally a real colonial empire. (Africa was a similar story, of course.)
41.1 does make a lot of sense, though. There was also the factor of geographic proximity; Micronesia isn't exactly "close" to Japan in an absolute sense, but it's certainly a lot closer than it is to any other likely colonial power at the time, and there's nothing in between.
AFAICR Tooze never mentions Micronesia. I know essentially nothing about Japanese colonization, but incidental details smell to me a lot like Keynesian* policy. eg. in Korea everything Japan built was manned by Japanese migrants, down to postal clerks and rail signalmen. European colonies tended to use local labor as far as humanly possible. Stand to be corrected though.
*Poor term but best I can think of.
41.2 Chinese defence thinking revolves a lot around the 'island chains' similar I think to Japan's. And it makes more sense today. Those little islands they're building in the S China Sea carry missiles that can kill anything in a 300km radius. Get enough islands like that and US options shrink a lot.
The idea behind "Keynesian" colonialism being to use colonial activity to provide economic opportunity for immigrants from the metropole? If so, definitely a difference from usual European practice, but again perhaps more understandable in light of the geography. The Japanese weren't colonizing the opposite ends of the earth the way the Europeans were.
Different from 19th- and 20th-century European colonialism, that is. There was more of that sort of thing, at least implicitly, in earlier periods, especially in America.
I'm expert but my understanding is that by the late 19th century the major colonial powers (Britain and France, but also Germany) would have loved to ship people out abroad to do colonial work but (a) couldn't find takers (b) the wage differential was too high to be attractive to the colonial governments, which had only sort-of reluctantly taken on the expense of governing all kinds of colonies in the first place to protect various alleged "interests" and failed private adventurers. If Japan was different my guess is that it was mainly because the wage differential between say a Japanese and a Formosa rail builder was less than that between say a French and Cambodian rail builder.*
*did the French actually build rail in Cambodia? Good thing I am spending my time not sleeping and looking this up and the answer is ... yes but not until the early 1930s. And then the main line was to Thailand, but it barely ran and was closed in 1946 when the French took back over since the Thais were seen as supporting Khmer nationalists. Nice job France! Anyhow, just take the spirit of my example as accurate, not the reality.
48-50 sound right. Also the Japanese expansion was all in the steamship era, so distance didn't matter much. In the same period there was eg. major Indian settlement in Fiji and the Caribbean, Indonesian in Suriname.
49 -- The UK definitely exported people as an economic measure in the 19th century, just not so much to places like India -- where do you think Australians/Canadians/New Zealanders came from?
52 possibly sounds excessively snide, as if I'm accusing Teo of believing in the spontaneous generation of Melbournians. But really, I want to say: James Belich is really interesting about this kind of thing.
52 - Sure, but those places were both settled and administered very differently than the late 1800s new-empire colonies like Micronesia. For one thing (without looking it up) I think wages for white people in the dominions were the highest in the world in the late 19th C, due in part to their "murder everyone in our path to make "empty" room for white folks"* settlement plan.
*Yes, I know things were sort of different in New Zealand. But guess what Kiwi, this is an American blog, you're effectively an Australian to us and you should be grateful that you even have that level of recognition. Now where's my gun and Tostitos brand hot pocket snack????
52, 54: Exactly. The white dominions were settlement colonies, with local whites defending color bars against cheaper non-white labor. Japan's mainland colonies on the face of it would be old world colonies like British India, but the Indian railways were manned by Indians.
55: not least because the white dominions (including the US) were much more attractive to European settlers than the rest of the colonial empires. There was a lot of German emigration in the late 19th century. Very few of them went to Tanganyika and Samoa and New Pomerania because it's a lot nicer and considerably less malarial in the Midwest (much to the frustration of German imperial planners). India was not really a colonial territory at all; there just wasn't that much colonising going on.
I beg your pardon -- there is no malaria in Samoa. And the climate is lovely. But there you're right certainly wasn't a large German immigrant population there -- a few old intermarried families, largely rich by local standards.
34: if we're going to slam Wilson for failing to seize a potential path to peace in 1917 seems to me you can also blame that worthless Welshman Lloyd George for failing to take an opportunity.
Wilson was elected on a peace platform, Lloyd George the opposite. And the US had leverage to compel the Entente and menaces to compel Germany. Britain could have managed the former but not the latter.
My favorite factoid re German East Africa: the main drag in Dar es Salaam was Unter den Akazien. A little desperate, no?
Gehen Sie nicht unter der Akazie mit jemand anderem außer mir...
59 almost makes me sorry that German imperialism didn't spread a bit further, to see what other examples they came up with. Willkommen zu Neuschwabenland! Haupstrasse, Unter den Pinguinen.
European colonies tended to use local labor as far as humanly possible. Stand to be corrected though.
True at least of the French and the British (and the bloody Belgians); I don't know about Germany: were they trying to turn e.g. SW Africa into a settlement colony, at least to the extent that the Cape was? They were certainly settling people there, but then the British were sending their losers to farm the Kenyan highlands, but I don't think they ever thought that Kenya would become another Canada.
50.1 is an interesting idea, but how would you prove it one way or another?
64: this is the settlement/extraction colony distinction, isn't it? Take Malaya: the British used some local labour, but they brought in a huge amount of non-local, non-white labour as well. Indians to do agricultural work and Chinese for urban work. Because the point of the country wasn't to be a white settler homeland, it was to produce rubber and tin. But Canada was different, at least after the CPR was completed; there were Chinese exclusion acts and head taxes to minimise Chinese immigration.
It's not Canada's fault it doesn't have any rubber and very little tin.
65. Yes, broadly speaking. There are also hybrids, like S.Africa.
Unter den Akazien, meine Suesse und ich
Canada is a strange example because you have to account for the French, effectively a "native" population at the time of conquest and thereafter.
Canada was apparently on fire so hard that you could see the smoke in Nebraska.
69: was there much immigration from France to Quebec?
64.1: I don't know what they wanted in SW Africa, but they got settlement to about the level of the Cape, ~6% white. Most of those are Afrikaner, though.
Not compared with English immigration to what is now the US, but we never had anything like the ships full of filles du roi either, I don't think.
Stats: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/98-187-x/4151287-eng.htm
Yes, that was my impression. Kamerun and Tanganyika were intended as extraction colonies, but as far as I know they were in practice sinks for German resources.
But by the 1820s, there was a large enough French underclass to go do whatever it was that the English wanted done. And so it continued until Maurice Richard punched Cliff Thompson in that game against the Bruins.
Jane may need to correct me on the particulars here.
I assume, ajay, that you've never been to Quebec City. Add it to your list, it's a lovely city.
I dimly remember there being a serious debate in Japan as to whether they should expand into China or Siberia, and during their involvement in the Russian Civil War they advanced all the way to Lake Baikal, with I think the largest interventionary force by a big margin (And there was a non-trivial chance at that point that Russia wouldbe auctioned for parts, so not just a pipe-dream). The Siberian option would imply large-scale migration. As is, their biggest colony was Manchuria, which is mostly Siberian anyway. And there was substantial settlement there; by 1945 there were IIRC 1-1.5 million Japanese civilians there, though I think many of those were military families.
A lot of incoherence and bureaucratic determinants in Japanese empire. For example, up to a certain point, the Army was acting like its own megacorp in Manchuria, building and managing everything, only bringing in the zaibatsu when pushed. Then in the islands I assume the Navy had hegemony, as in war matters, but don't know how they arranged it.
Famously (?), Army and Navy did not even have common technical specifications for procurement, so much was the interservice rivalry.
I've been rereading A.J.P. Taylor's The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848-1918, and he has in interesting take on Germany's African colonies. His claim is that Bismark couldn't have cared less for colonies and thought that for Germany they were a waste of time an money. However, for purely continental reasons, he wanted to be able to conjure up diplomatic disputes with Britain whenever he thought they might be useful, and so he encouraged the acquisition of African colonies for that reason.
I don't know how accurate that is, but we do have this quote from Bismark:
"Your map of Africa is really quite nice. But my map of Africa lies in Europe. Here is Russia, and here... is France, and we're in the middle -- that's my map of Africa."
I assume 77 means that the answer to 71 is "yes"?
80 is an interesting take. Maybe the trading companies set up to work in Kamerun and Tanganyika were merely intended to minimise the net costs of maintaining them. Not quite a Potemkin empire, but something of the sort.
It's gonna take a lot to drag it away from you.
But nothing that a hundred corps or more couldn't do.
Alsace-Lorraine's in Africa.
Gonna take some territorial concessions in lands we never had.
I had thought 80 was pretty much received wisdom. With the addition (don't know how accurate) that Bismarck encouraged the scramble for Africa in hopes of producing Anglo-French tensions. Which it did, like Fashoda.
And Micronesia! Plus part of New Guinea. Totally a real colonial empire. (Africa was a similar story, of course.)
I totally picture a holiday get-together with Wilhelm and George, with Wilhelm trying to brag, "Have you heard about our latest overseas acquisition?" And George rolling his eyes trying to be polite, "Yes, Micronesia, it sounds, um, petite?"
88: But they could both laugh at Austria-Hungary. Franz Joseph Land is very high up there on the list of most pathetic overseas acquisitions of all time.
88: Not a joke! They all hung out on Wilhelm's yacht and there's a picture of him sitting on George (not yet king). George of course hated his guts and thought he was insane.
Skimming this so this may be redundant, but one thing to note is that the Chinese experience in World War I is incredibly important for all that happens there later. First, anger at getting screwed at Versailles (Japan was rewarded with Germany's Chinese concessions, IIRC) lead to the May 4th Movement, which can be seen as the beginning of mass political participation and the end of the Republic (if you don't consider it to be a stillbirth, over with Yuan Shikai). Second, many of the leaders of the CCP spend their formulative years in France during or immediately after the war, providing labor in place of the soldiers and the dead but also learning how to organize underground. Most notably, both Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping were there.
There was actually very little emigration from France to Quebec - about 15,000 total in the whole period 1610 to 1763, more than half of whom left and went back. But they got an early start and kept reproducing, so the population by now is obviously pretty big, and it was big enough early enough to encourage English/Scottish people who wanted a real genocide/open space settler colony to go to exciting locales like Ontario and New Brunswick.
Not redundant, thank you. Can you recommend an entry-level history of China for the period? (Entry-level for people who read Tooze for fun, obvs.)
Aren't you actually in China, sort of? You could ask around.
93 to 91. New Brunswick obviously is redundant.
They write books funny here, Moby.
Actually according to my car satellite radio by far the biggest wave of emigration from France to Quebec happened over the past 10 years, when a big wave of French people decided to try their luck in Canada. Like 50-100,000 in that period, or 5-10x the total number of French people who came over when Canada was a French colony.
Franz Joseph Land is very high up there on the list of most pathetic overseas acquisitions of all time.
I don't think Austria-Hungary ever actually annexed Franz Josef Land - they just discovered and named it.
Well the smart ones obviously would wait for central heating. Hardly surprising.
99 cleverly to both 97 and 98.
92: what I was curious about was French immigration to Quebec post-1763. I can't imagine there was much but maybe I am wrong.
101 Not wrong, I don't think. There was some, certainly, but not a mass movement so far as I know.
About all I know about the Quebecois is that they opposed conscription in both world wars, to the point of national crisis. Long-lost patriots they aren't.
Spence's Search for Modern China is supposed to be good, but covers a broader period than Tooze.
101: Wouldn't the UK have discouraged that once they were in control? The more non-French the region received, the more firm their control.
101, 105 - the first British move during and after the American revolution was to give the French Canadians a bunch of rights (Catholic clergy, civil law) so that they could use them as a buffer against the traitorous Americans. In a lot of ways that's why French Canada continues to exist and wasn't just dismantled. But then by the 1830s and definitely 1840s the pendulum swung way in the other direction and all things French in Quebec were strongly discouraged.
Indeed it's hard to think of a worse place than Quebec for a prospective French emigrant between, say, 1820 and 1968 -- any other place, you're either a colonial master (Algeria) or a generic easy to blend in white person (USA) but in Quebec you immediately are a persecuted minority, plus surrounded by weirdos with a bizarre accent. So I'm confident in saying that there was vanishingly little emigration from France to Quebec between 1763 and the 1970s, though I can't find a number now.
After the 70s and especially in the past 10 years Montreal suddenly becomes a city that's French speaking and French controlled top to bottom, and international and cosmopolitan and cool, so emigration from France becomes attractive for pretty much the first time ever.
Impressive - this Wikipedia table of French emigrants 1857-1860 has, out of 51,887 people going to all destinations, 33 to Canada.
(As part of my genealogy project, I've learned that one of my grandmother's Quebecoise second cousins married a man who emigrated from Paris as a kid with his family in the 1920s. The dad was an opera singer, and many of the children and grandchildren have ended up in show business. My relative's marriage broke up, and the fellow ended up moving to Sweden, marrying, and having a second family there. Some of whom are also in show business.)
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mia_Riddez
Is Tooze being cute or oblivious when he describes something as a "phantom menace" on page 21 of the hardback?
On page 152 he slips and says "Naboo" instead of Belgium.
A spectre is haunting the internet: the spectre of references.
Only a Sith or a Junker deals in references.
93: Alas, not really--I haven't read any full length books on this topic, just a lot of interwebs learning. I do recommend Laszlo Montgomery's China History Podcast, which goes into excellent detail on, among others, the two notables I mentioned above (like, at least six hours on each). He's also covered various aspects of WWII, the Civil War, the Qing dynasty, earlier history, etc. He has a folksy Midwestern drawl that's easy to listen to--impressive for a man who's been shuttling between LA and Ningbo for years. Then again, it is a podcast, so it's not the most time-efficient way to learn.
In general, I'll admit I'm not on well versed as this period as I'd like to be; like everywhere else at this time, it's so confusing and particular. My general impression of the 1910s/20s is that, perhaps more than any other period in history, choices made by a small number of people and unlikely coincidences greatly changed outcomes in unpredictable ways, with lots of back and forth. China may even be more chaotic than most. This is the Warlord Era: the central government essentially breaks down into competing military dictatorships, and the pieces don't come back together for thirty years.
As an aside, my fiction reading lately has been entirely Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series; I've delighted myself by mentally replacing every occurrence of "Vor" with "Junker."
115: Thanks, I'll check it out. But like you say, not efficient.
Cambridge History, Vol 12 & 13 1912-1949 Parts 1 & 2. 2200 pages, but you can skip the indices. Only $500
China is BIG. China is fucking yuuuuuge.
When I get around to a book on China, I usually do something micro and particular:Modernisation of a NW Province, Newspapers, St Hilda's School, May 4 and its myth, Feminism, Marxism, racism. I should read a bio of Chiang, but I hate the fucker that so many red baiters love, and also...Taiwan. I hate that fucker.
And of course Manchuria, but read a book on beer and liquor sales in Manchukuo for instance.
Isn't the idea that the US shutting off loans to England and France in 197 would lead to peace ignoring that the moment the Germans heard about it, they'd have started a new offensive? As for the "chance of peace" proposed by the Russian Provisional Government in 1917, I've honestly read few historians who thought it ever had a chance.
A decent book about Japanese militarism in the 30's up to the end of WW2 is John Toland's "The Rising Sun: The Decline of the Japanese Empire." There's a fair amount of background that goes earlier than the ostensible 1936 start date. IIRC it supports some of the points that have been brought up in this thread, such as how the Japanese Army ran Manchuria like a wholly-owned subsidiary.
One thing not mentioned so far is the way that Japanese officers would provoke situations that led to fighting or further semi-conquests, and (of course!) be immediately backed up by the higher command. It was a ratchet that at least in theory ended up deniably benefiting the officers involved (who were treated as heroes at home) and the Empire.
I'm finding that I have more interest in reading Tooze than Piketty, so thanks for these posts/threads. (And more to come!)
119: I made a project of the Cambridge history, gave up when I realised the 'chapter' I was reading was over 200 effing pages long.
120: ignoring that the moment the Germans heard about it, they'd have started a new offensive
If doing so would guarantee American entry? And the Reichstag voting against it? Wilson did have cards to play. Very good point though. Probably you'd have to dig a lot deeper into the civilian/military balance in Germany at that point.
120, 1222, It is a good point. I think one of Tooze's implicit, sometimes explicit arguments is that the peace party in Germany was stronger than it's given credit for by most Anglophone historians. Certainly a peace with (honor to be provided by the Americans) party would have had a lot of backing in Germany by 1917 when people were starving like crazy and the strategic situation was pretty clear.
120.2 Thanks for the rec.
120.3 ISTR Japan getting sucked deeper into China by those officers, because machismo made it impossible to disown their actions, even though the government and even senior army knew it was a bad idea.
120.4 Pick up a chapter? There are still a bunch open.
One thing not mentioned so far is the way that Japanese officers would provoke situations that led to fighting or further semi-conquests, and (of course!) be immediately backed up by the higher command. It was a ratchet that at least in theory ended up deniably benefiting the officers involved (who were treated as heroes at home) and the Empire.
I don't think this was unique to Japan.
because machismo made it impossible to disown their actions
And well, because resistance to the Army got freaking Prime Minsters killed. 3? 4?
OTOH, Army outacontrol is the exculpatory Japanese myth, and most of those who study the period demand quite a bit more, especially since Samurai didn't go out of control for 250 years.
George of course hated his guts and thought he was insane.
He may have had a point. He wasn't an unqualified admirer of Nicky either.
He probably had lots of fun picking out "I'm sorry your dynasty failed to adapt to early modernity" cards.
"Roses are red,
violets are blue.
Expanding the franchise too slowly,
has doomed you."
George V wasn't a natural democrat, but his dynasty had acclimatised to living with a constitutional monarchy since they were imported in 1714, so he took the line of least resistance most of the time. When he appointed the first Labour government in 1923, he wrote in his diary, "I wonder what Grandmama (Victoria) would have made of this". But he did it unquestioningly.
"It's to be disputin',
that you should have dumped Rasputin.
Now you're with Lenin,
Who'll kill even the women."
He may have had a point.
Is this the famous British understatement? If you want a real doorstopper hit John Röhl and read literally every person who ever knew him testifying in their journals that he was self-evidently batshit. Best argument against monarchy ever.
Absolutely. One of my favourite counterfactuals is riffing on the possibilities in Friedrich III surviving until, say, 1914 (he would have been 83). A very different world, almost certainly.
So true. IIRC Röhl mentions serious thought given to institutionalizing Wilhelm and establishing a regency council of the lesser German monarchs.
Am I allowed to read the one volume version of Röhl? I think that would be about as much Wilhelm II as I could stand.
135: Yes. The one I linked to is the heaviest book I ever picked up. Literally unbelievably heavy. I was surprised every time I picked it up. It seemed to be subject to a gravity heavier than Earth's.
I'm really enjoying the chapter summaries and the discussion.
I've finally clicked through on 132 and am delighted to get Mossy's local Google. I'm trying to decide whether to take a bath and read a chapter of this or some more of Vidal's Burr or lazily do either without bothering to have a bath or just go to bed. Probably goofing around on the internet will win for a while at least. (I still have not said one substantive thing about this book. Aaaagh.)
Interesting book through chapter 7. Lots I never knew. Makes me want to travel back in time and slap my ap history teacher. In college thebonly history classes i took were focused on Romans and (basically) the 18th century.
139: Post college, I don't think it's actually possible to teach history well at school level. There's just too much reading and too much OTOHing. School history should be taken as national indoctrination classes, not actual study.
Yeah but that's not fair to people from boring or shit countries. What do you do if you're Canadian, treat it as mandatory nap time?
I would like to teach American history as just one long video of a powerful eagle soaring.
This could be a lesson towards the end of the semester.
And then being poisoned and handed over for a federal bounty. And then being resurrected with federal wildlife money. And then being used as a prop by a racist plutocrat. Actually not a bad representation.
144 Ashcroft? (Can't click on that at work)
Believe me, you don't want to.
Canadian history emphasizes how they won the glorious War of 1812.
Is it too late to join in? I'd like to make a concerted effort to catch up and start reading along. I enjoyed doing Piketty, whenever that was.....
Not merely can you join in, but there are, I believe, some chapters yet to be allocated for summary/interpretation [HINT].
Oh, really? Who's keeping track of such things? I can do a week.
I also got the Philby book from the library and started it. I'm reading Deluge on the train to and fro work.
There are two chapters still left unsigned for, and the conclusion.