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新书 | The Other Great Game:The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia

Sheila Miyoshi Jager

ISBN 9780674983397

Publication Date: 05/16/2023

624 pages

About this book

A dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars.

In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two “great games”: one, well known, pitted the tsar’s empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, hitherto unrecognized but no less significant, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, brought to life in lucid narrative prose, Sheila Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order.

When Russia’s eastward expansion brought it to the Korean border, an impoverished but strategically located nation was wrested from centuries of isolation. Korea became a prize of two major imperial conflicts: the Sino–Japanese War at the close of the nineteenth century and the Russo–Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth. Japan’s victories in the battle for Korea not only earned the Meiji regime its yearned-for colony but also dislodged Imperial China from centuries of regional supremacy. And the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, even as the United States and Britain sized up the new Japanese challenger.

A vivid story of two geopolitical earthquakes sharing Korea as their epicenter, The Other Great Game rewrites the script of twentieth-century rivalry in the Pacific and enriches our understanding of contemporary global affairs, from the origins of Korea’s bifurcated identity—a legacy of internal politics amid the imperial squabble—to China’s irredentist territorial ambitions and Russia’s nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status.

About the author

Sheila Miyoshi Jager is the author of Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea and Narratives of Nation-Building in Korea: The Genealogy of Patriotism. A specialist on modern East Asian and Korean history and politics, she has written for the New York Times, Politico, and the Boston Globe. She is Professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College.

Contents

List of Maps*
Note on Romanization, Names, and Dates
Preface
Prologue: The Rise of Russia in Asia
I. New Frontiers
1. Korea’s Pyrrhic Victory
2. Japan’s Korea Problem
3. The Opening of Korea
II. Controlling Barbarians with Barbarians
4. China’s Korea Problem
5. The Other Great Game Begins
6. Russia’s Railway to the East
III. Wars and Imperialism
7. Prelude to War
8. Triumph, Defeat, and a Massacre
9. Two-Front War
10. Triple Intervention
11. Continental Power
12. Maritime Power
13. Boxers
14. The Death of Li Hongzhang
IV. New Friends, Old Enemies
15. New Agreements
16. Russia’s Korea Problem
V. The Russo–Japanese War—World War Zero
17. War for Korea
18. War in Manchuria
19. Mukden
VI. New East Asian Order
20. The Portsmouth Treaty and Korea
21. “Eternal Peace and Security in Asia”
22. Annexation
Epilogue: Legacies
Abbreviations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
* Maps
China, Korea, and Russia circa 1900
Russian Acquisitions, 1858–1860
Movement of Japanese Troops, June–October 1894
Japanese Suppression Campaign against the Tonghaks, November 1894–January 1895
Trans-Siberian Railway circa 1895
Sino–Russian War, July–October 1900
Battle of the Yalu River, April 30–May 1, 1904
Advance on Liaoyang, May–June 1904
Battle of Nanshan, May 25–26, 1904
Battle of Telissu, June 14–15, 1904
Battle of Liaoyang, August 25–September 3, 1904
The Siege of Port Arthur, May 26, 1904–January 2, 1905
Battle of Sandepu/Heikoutai, January 25–29, 1905
Battle of Mukden, February 23–March 10, 1905

Reviews

A monumental achievement. Recounting the story of China’s decline in East Asia, Jager provides a definitive reference for the diplomatic machinations of the great-power conflict in the late nineteenth century. This is narrative historical writing at its best.—Michael Robinson, author of Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey

For too long, the role of Korea has been in the shadows of East Asian history. With brilliant analysis and meticulous research, Jager shows that Korea’s fate was actually crucial to shaping the Asia of the nineteenth century and the turbulent regional politics that followed all the way up to World War II. Essential for readers of East Asian history and geopolitics alike.—Rana Mitter, author of China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism

Beautifully written and deeply researched, The Other Great Game is a work of great importance and powerful insight. This gripping history offers a fresh interpretation of the age of empire at the turn of the twentieth century and a clear-eyed view of its long shadow.—Andrew Gordon, author of A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present

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