Awards

• Winner of Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History 2024 (United States)
• Winner of Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Best Book Award 2024 (United States)

Overview

Winner of the Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History, this dramatic new account of the dawn of modern East Asia places 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, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of Korea. This eye-opening account argues that the contest over Korea set the course for the future of the global order. After centuries of isolation, Korea became a prize in 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 not only gained the Meiji regime a colony but also dislodged Imperial China from regional supremacy. As the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, 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 ambitions and Russia's nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status.

Full Product Details

9780674303485

Table of Contents

Reviews

Sheila Miyoshi Jager has written a grand narrative of modern East Asian imperial rivalry that successfully demonstrates the outsize importance of Korea to the region. Too often, Korea has been treated as a tangential or superfluous component of books and college courses about East Asian history, which tend to focus overwhelmingly on China and Japan. After this book, it should be clear just how blinkered an approach that is. -- Stephen R. Platt * Wall Street Journal * The Other Great Game charts the question of Korea’s place in Asia from the 1850s up to 1910, a 60-year period that saw several wars and a series of more minor conflicts and uprisings…The book is detailed, handling well a rotating sequence of negotiations and negotiators, alongside troop movements and strategic blunders. -- Ian Rapley * Asian Review of Books * Ambitious and wide-ranging…A comprehensive and illuminating history of northeast Asia at a time of tremendous change. -- Martin Laflamme * Japan Times * A terrific book…vividly written, comprehensive in coverage, and extremely well researched…will remain one of the definitive works on the history of East Asian international relations for some time to come. -- Jaehan Park * Texas National Security Review * It is a story…of suspense, high stakes, and sheer intrigue, and one that has as grave implications for the geopolitics of this decade as its namesake had for the geopolitics of the 1980s. -- Alex Zutt * Law & Liberty * Masterful storytelling…incomparable in providing a panoramic, comprehensive, in-depth understanding of what [Korea’s geostrategic location] means historically…this book fulfills something perhaps only a narrative history can do: that is to embrace contingencies of the many historical moments in the shaping of East Asian modernity and transformation, in ways that give voice to all the actors that need to be in, while examining individuals, societies, politics, and international life in a panoramic way and going deeper into human emotions and sufferings. -- Ji-Young Lee * H-Diplo * Chronicles in detail major diplomatic and military events that occurred in East Asia from the 1880s to 1910, when Japan annexed Korea…a readable account enlivened with colorful quotations. -- S. A. Hastings * Choice * Over the course of its temporal sweep and multinational span, [this book] finds room to be very, very good on the details of numerous political debates, diplomatic negotiations, and military clashes, and thus constitutes an ample repository of basic accounts of these events. Meanwhile, its fundamental reframing of the competition for Korea through the dynamics of Russian expansion, and the contest of interests that this expansion helped spark, will likely be most appreciated by a more advanced scholarly readership already versed in existing interpretations and their lacunae. Through either lens, Jager’s narrative represents a magisterial contribution. -- Robert Oppenheim * Asian Review of World Histories * 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 <i>Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey</i> 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 <i>China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism</i> 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 <i>A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present</i>

Author Information

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.

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