David Ulbrich - Böcker

The years 1900 to 1954 marked the transformation from an exotic, colonized "Far East" to a more autonomous, prominent "Asia Pacific". This anthology examines the grand strategies of great powers as they vied for influence and ultimately hegemony in the region. At the turn of the twentieth century, the main contestants included the venerable British Empire and the aspiring Japan and United States. The unwieldy leviathan of China, the European imperial holdings in Southeast Asia, and the expanses of the western Pacific emerged as battlegrounds in literal and geopolitical terms. Other less powerful nations, such as India, Burma, Australia, and French Indochina, also exercised agency in crafting grand strategies to further their interests and in their interactions with those great powers. Among the many factors affecting all nations invested in the Asia Pacific were such traditional elements as economics, military power, and diplomacy, as well as fluid traits like ideology, culture, and personality. The era saw the decline of British and European influence in the Asia Pacific, the rise and fall of Japanese imperialism, the emergence of American primacy, the ongoing struggle for independence in Southeast Asia, and China’s resurrection as a contender for hegemony. Great powers shifted and so too did their grand strategies.

The second edition of Race and Gender in Modern Western Warfare includes updated materials on the World Wars, the Cold War, and the Global War on Terror. Of particular interest are the additional perspectives and experiences of non-white, non-American, and non-Europeans that help give agency to these groups and add balance to the book’s overall focus on the modern West. This book fills a gap in existing scholarship because no other book has so broadly explored the historiographical and theoretical intersections of the fields of race, gender, and war. It also asks readers to grapple with how and why cultural constructions of identity are transformed by war, as well as how and why race and gender in turn influence the nature of military institutions and conflicts. Readers are guided through a series of case studies, ranging from the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first century. Race and Gender in Modern Western Warfare does not merely recount a list of “great moments” in race and gender in military history, but instead creates a meta-landscape in which readers can learn to identify for themselves the disjunctures, flaws, and critical synergies in the traditional memory and history of a largely monochrome and white, male-exclusive military experience in the United States and Europe. The second edition’s expanded final chapter highlights the fact that these conversations remain relevant in the twenty-first century. Race and Gender in Modern Western Warfare is both a synthesis of existing scholarship and a starting point for future study.