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The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia Kindle Edition
by Sheila Miyoshi Jager (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 18 ratings
A dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing 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 but no less significant, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, brought to life in lucid narrative prose, Sheila Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order.
When Russia’s eastward expansion brought it to the Korean border, an impoverished but strategically located nation was wrested from centuries of isolation. Korea became a prize of two major imperial conflicts: 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 in the battle for Korea not only earned the Meiji regime its yearned-for colony but also dislodged Imperial China from centuries of regional supremacy. And the fate of the declining tsarist empire was sealed by its surprising military defeat, even as 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 territorial ambitions and Russia’s nostalgic dreams of recovering great-power status.
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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" (12/22/2023 12:00:00 AM)
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" (3/26/2024 12:00:00 AM)
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 China's Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism
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 A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present
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" (9/5/2023 12:00:00 AM)
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 Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey
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" (5/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)
Ambitious and wide-ranging...A comprehensive and illuminating history of northeast Asia at a time of tremendous change.--Martin Laflamme "Japan Times" (7/9/2023 12:00:00 AM)
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" (2/7/2024 12:00:00 AM)
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" (6/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)
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" (6/23/2023 12:00:00 AM)
About the Author
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.
Kathleen Li is an Asian American narrator whose parents are from Taiwan. She has a warm, engaging, and empathetic voice that lends itself equally to YA, fantasy, historical fiction, and self-help audiobooks, as well as to other genres. She has also voiced characters in several audio dramas, including Doctor Who: The Voice of Reason, Seminar, and Pod to Pluto. Kathleen lives in Austin, Texas, where she sometimes slips into a Texas twang. When she's not in her booth narrating, you can find her learning to play violin, doing water aerobics, or cheering on her son's high school marching band.
Product details
ASIN : B0BVGHMKW2
Publisher : Belknap Press (16 May 2023)
Language : English
File size : 62003 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 606 pagesBest Sellers Rank: 523,612 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)51 in Korea History
214 in History of Korea
249 in Japanese History (Kindle Store)Customer Reviews:
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 18 ratings
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Educated Consumer
5.0 out of 5 stars SuperbReviewed in the United States on 23 September 2023
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An impressive, engrossing, and entertaining history of the great power struggle for Korea that laid the foundation for the rapid emergence of modern East Asia. Unprecedently, Russia's key role and Korea's own agency are highlighted. The Other Great Game will remain the go-to reference for this period of history (1860-1910) of East Asia for the foreseeable future.
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Yves V. Raic
5.0 out of 5 stars Korean internal struggles fashioned in large part Foreign interference in Korean affairsReviewed in Canada on 7 July 2023
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It will not be a big, extensive review. I can safely say that it is the best book I have ever encountered on the subject. It fuses all the powers' and Korean interests in a highly professional and readable book. I have discovered books that discussed in learned fashion about Japanese, Chinese and Russian interests in Korea. I have never read one that fused all into one and provided, for the first time, a distinct Korean perspective; that is that Korean internal struggles and preferences have attracted foreign power intervention because these struggles affected regional power stability.
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Gabriel Stein
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and informativeReviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 November 2023
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An excellent and informative history of a part of the world and a time in this part, that is all too frequently glossed over.
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