It is the events of the late 1890s in China which represent the most notorious example of a ‘scramble’ or ‘battle’ for concessions in the era of Western imperialism. The five years following her defeat in her war with Japan of 1894–95 seemed to reduce China to chaos and the brink of dismemberment, when the so-called ‘Boxer Rebellion’ was crushed by an international army comprised mainly of Russian and Japanese troops. But the powers could not agree on how to extend the concessions they had previously secured, and the ‘open door’, championed by Britain, the United States and initially Japan, prevailed. The ultimate blow to Western imperial expansion on a world scale was then delivered by Japan against Russia in the war of 1904–05, and a mere six years later, the Chinese launched out on their own revolutionary path which was to culminate in the Communist victory of 1949.
This is an article highlighting the limitations of Lord Salisbury as foreign secretary in an age when foreign policy was for the first time taking on a truly global character, and yet its practitioners still possessed a rather parochial, almost exclusively European experience, and distrusted ‘experts’. It was of course the late nineteenth-century spread of European imperialism that first called for such global policy making, and thus most of this Europe-dominated world was still for the time being quite susceptible to a Eurocentric approach.But if any area was the exception it was eastern Asia, in due course to be mainly responsible for decline of Western imperial world hegemony. And in the vanguard of this counter-challenge was to be Japan, a country with which Salisbury personally was to find himself all at sea. By contrast, Ernest Satow, more than any other figure of his time, found the key to Japan, and it is a sign of how poorly general Western understanding of that country has progressed since then that his voluminous diaries and papers sit in the Public Record Office, still largely untouched by researchers.
It is now nearly thirty years since Paul Schroeder sought to represent the so-called Pacific War as 'unnecessary and avoidable', and caused not so much by the Japanese as by American 'obsessive moralism'. 1 It is twenty years since James Crowley 'cleared away conventional exaggerations of the policy-making influence exerted in [1930s] Japan by political murders, extremist plots, and military factionalism', and to the extent that Japan was responsible for war, either locally in Eastern Asia, or across the Pacific, focused attention instead on the old-time aristocrat and premier in 1937-9 and 1940-1, Prince Konoe Fumimaro. 2 And it is fifteen years since R. H. Minear attacked as 'arrant nonsense' the main conspiracy theme of the 1947 Tokyo War Crimes Trials, which sentenced to death wartime Japanese premier General Tojo Hideki, five other services leaders, and one civilian. 3 4 Similarly motivated recent resentment on the part of Southeast Asian peoples should be considered quite distinct from wartime feelings towards the Japanese. 5 Cf. the multi-authored History and works of field marshal Sant Thanarat (Bangkok, 1964), part translated in Thak Chaloemtiarana (ed.
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