The East Asian Dimension of the First World War – Global Entanglements and Japan, China and Korea, 1914–1919

Which role did East Asia play in World War I? How did East Asian commentators view and interpret the total war being waged in Europe and elsewhere? What lessons did they draw from that experience for their own societies and cultures? How did economic networks shift or tangle? Which influence did the war have on East Asian visions of world order?

The East Asian Dimension of the First World War addresses those questions and more through groundbreaking scholarship, much of it the work of hitherto untranslated East Asian authors. It is part of a larger movement in current historiography to emphasize the global qualities of World War I, without losing sight of focused, local repercussions and developments in East Asia. This will be a valuable collection with rich insights for those interested in World War I and East Asian studies alike.

Jan Schmidt is associate professor at Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven in Belgium.

Katja Schmidtpott is professor of the history of Japan at Ruhr-Universität, Bochum.