Long before the arrival of Western emissaries and powers, East Asian peoples and states were deeply involved in world affairs. In this sweeping account, Warren I. Cohen explores four millennia of international relations from the vantage points of China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Writing incisively and authoritatively for readers at all levels, Cohen paints a broad but revealing portrait of East Asia’s place in the world. He defines the region’s boundaries widely, looking beyond China, Japan, and Korea to include Southeast Asia, and extends the scope of international relations to consider the vital role of cultural and economic exchanges. Cohen examines the system of Chinese domination in the ancient world, the exchanges between East Asia and the Islamic world, Chinese sea voyages to Arabia and East Africa, and the emergence of a European-defined international system. He chronicles the new imperialism of the 1890s, the ascendancy of Japan, the trials of World War II, the drama of the Cold War, and the transformations of East Asian states toward the close of the twentieth century. By showing that East Asia has often been preeminent on the world stage, this book not only recasts the past but also adds crucial historical perspective on international politics today. This second edition of East Asia at the Center features new material on the first decades of the twenty-first century.

This accessible collection examines twelve historic events in the international relations of East Asia.

Beyond the Book is the first book dedicated to studies of rare East Asian materials collected by individuals and institutions in North America. It sheds new light on the two centuries of cultural exchanges between East Asia and North America and provides fresh clues for East Asian studies scholars in their hunt for raw research materials.

"The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere offers a lucid, dynamic, and highly readable history of Japan's attempt to usher in a new order in Asia during World War II." ― Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review In The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Jeremy A. Yellen exposes the history, politics, and intrigue that characterized the era when Japan's "total empire" met the total war of World War II. He illuminates the ways in which the imperial center and its individual colonies understood the concept of the Sphere, offering two sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, and always intertwined visions—one from Japan, the other from Burma and the Philippines. Yellen argues that, from 1940 to 1945, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere epitomized two concurrent wars for Asia's future: the first was for a new type of empire in Asia, and the second was a political war, waged by nationalist elites in the colonial capitals of Rangoon and Manila. Exploring Japanese visions for international order in the face of an ever-changing geopolitical situation, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere explores wartime Japan's desire to shape and control its imperial future while its colonies attempted to do the same. At Japan's zenith as an imperial power, the Sphere represented a plan for regional domination; by the end of the war, it had been recast as the epitome of cooperative internationalism. In the end, the Sphere could not survive wartime defeat, and Yellen's lucidly written account reveals much about the desires of Japan as an imperial and colonial power, as well as the ways in which the subdued colonies in Burma and the Philippines jockeyed for agency and a say in the future of the region.

The Imjin War (1592–1598) was a grueling conflict that wreaked havoc on the towns and villages of the Korean Peninsula. The involvement of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean forces, not to mention the regional scope of the war, was the largest the world had seen, and the memory dominated East Asian memory until World War II. Despite massive regional realignments, Korea's Chosôn Dynasty endured, but within its polity a new, national discourse began to emerge. Meant to inspire civilians to rise up against the Japanese army, this potent rhetoric conjured a unified Korea and intensified after the Manchu invasions of 1627 and 1636. By documenting this phenomenon, JaHyun Kim Haboush offers a compelling counternarrative to Western historiography, which ties Korea's idea of nation to the imported ideologies of modern colonialism. She instead elevates the formative role of the conflicts that defined the second half of the Chosôn Dynasty, which had transfigured the geopolitics of East Asia and introduced a national narrative key to Korea's survival. Re-creating the cultural and political passions that bound Chosôn society together during this period, Haboush reclaims the root story of solidarity that helped Korea thrive well into the modern era.

Examines a range of contemporary social and cultural conflicts in East Asia and the echoes they have throughout the world.

Soon after the American Revolution, ?certain of the founders began to recognize the strategic significance of Asia and the Pacific and the vast material and cultural resources at stake there. Over the coming generations, the United States continued to ask how best to expand trade with the region and whether to partner with China, at the center of the continent, or Japan, looking toward the Pacific. Where should the United States draw its defensive line, and how should it export democratic principles? In a history that spans the eighteenth century to the present, Michael J. Green follows the development of U.S. strategic thinking toward East Asia, identifying recurring themes in American statecraft that reflect the nation's political philosophy and material realities. Drawing on archives, interviews, and his own experience in the Pentagon and White House, Green finds one overarching concern driving U.S. policy toward East Asia: a fear that a rival power might use the Pacific to isolate and threaten the United States and prevent the ocean from becoming a conduit for the westward free flow of trade, values, and forward defense. By More Than Providence works through these problems from the perspective of history's major strategists and statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson to Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Kissinger. It records the fate of their ideas as they collided with the realities of the Far East and adds clarity to America's stakes in the region, especially when compared with those of Europe and the Middle East.

The second edition of Charles Holcombe's acclaimed introduction to East Asian history from the dawn of history to the twenty-first century.

This work examines Asia as a second front in the Cold War, looking at how the six powers, the US, China, the USSR and North and South Korea, interacted with one another and forged conditions that were distinct from the Cold War in the West.

This book examines the need for greater East Asian cooperation and the challenges to this grand endeavor. With differing national outlooks, how can East Asia preserve peace, prosperity and stability amidst geopolitical competition? To answer this question, the volume examines the political and economic relations between Beijing and its neighbors against the backdrop of two trends: the power shift from the West to the East in the aftermath of the American Financial Crisis and the ongoing eurozone crisis, as well as the rise of China.