Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019)
New Books in Military History25 Marras 2019

Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious, confused, and much maligned attempt to create a new bloc order in East and Southeast Asia during World War II. Yellen’s book is welcome both as the first book-length treatment of the Sphere in English and for also being innovative in both approach and analysis. The book is divided into two parts, each addressing one of the “two Pacific Wars,” as Yellen puts it: a “war of empires” and “an anticolonial war… for independence.” The first half of the book treats the Japanese “high policy” of the Sphere. Here, Yellen not only provides—through the Coprosperity Sphere—a provocative new reading of the Tripartite Pact and the imbrication of Japan’s regional and global geopolitical strategies, but also outlines an important timeline of how Japanese conceptualizations of the Sphere evolved with the changing economic, political, and military expediencies of the Pacific War. Though ideas about the Sphere as a regional order of hierarchical solidarity with Japan at its apex, a “grand strategy of opportunism” rooted in the “sphere-of-influence diplomacy” and “cooperative imperialism” of Japan’s bombastic and enigmatic foreign minister, Matsuoka Yōsuke, Yellen shows that plans for the Sphere only became specific and concrete when Japan’s war situation descended into increasing desperation from 1942 on. The second half of the book shifts gears to examine responses to the Sphere in the Philippines and Burma. Yellen shows that for local nationalist elites like Burma’s first prime minister Ba Maw, whether Japanese rhetoric about the creation of more-or-less liberal international order within the Sphere for the top-echelon nations like Burma and the Philippines was genuine or self-serving, “even sham independence brought opportunity.” By focusing on these pragmatic nationalists (“patriotic collaborators”) Yellen contributes to a growing body of literature on empire that refuses to be pigeonholed by binaries of virtuous resistance and traitorous collaboration. This podcast was recorded as a lecture/dialogue for a live audience at Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Jaksot(1522)

John Lukacs, “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning” (Basic Books, 2008)

John Lukacs, “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning” (Basic Books, 2008)

Much has been written about Winston Churchill recently. Some love him, some hate him. But few understand him, at least as well as John Lukacs. That’s hardly a surprise as Lukacs has been thinking and writing about Churchill for over fifty years. He’s written a wonderful book focusing on one of Churchill’s best known speeches, namely the one he gave upon becoming Prime Minister on May 13, 1940. In it, Churchill uttered the memorable and ringing statement that he had nothing to offer the British people but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Hence the title of Lukacs’ book: Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat. The Dire Warning (Basic Books, 2008). Things were bad, very bad, in May of 1940. Churchill knew it. We, as Lukacs points out, seem to have forgotten it. Britain was not only losing the war, but according to many had already lost it. For most, Churchill included, the question was not simply how to make the best of a bad situation, but whether the UK, the Empire, Europe and the cause of freedom would survive at all. Churchill wanted to tell all who would listen how disastrous and momentous things were. He found just the right words, though people at the time didn’t realize it. Only as the scope of the task became clear did “blood, toil, tears and sweat” gain the reality–and meaning–that they have for us today. We should thank John Lukacs for reminding us of them. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

18 Heinä 200839min

Kimberly Jensen, “Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War” (University of Illinois Press, 2008)

Kimberly Jensen, “Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War” (University of Illinois Press, 2008)

Today we have Professor Kimberly Jensen on the show. She teaches in the Department of History and in the Gender Studies Program at Western Oregon University. We’ll be talking with Kim today about her new book Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (University of Illinois Press, 2008). I’m a bit of a war buff, so I was very eager to read the book. It certainly didn’t disappoint. The book offers a detailed analysis of female physicians, nurses and women-at-arms and their struggles before, during and after the war. And it’s fun to read. Did I say Kim got her Ph.D. right here at Iowa? Not that I’m biased… Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

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