Beyond Versailles

This groundbreaking volume edited by Tosh Minohara and Evan Dawley helps us overcome all the Eurocentric historical narratives on the moment of 1919 by putting a spotlight on Northeast Asia. The volume makes a persuasive case that seeing 1919 from an East Asian context makes us better understand its global history and its enduring legacies today. Contributors to this volume collectively reorient the way we should think about both the spatialization and the periodization of 1919.

-- Cemil Aydin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

With new empirical and conceptual research and approaches, this volume provides a timely and refreshing historical perspective to help us understand today’s South and East Asia, which has been experiencing equally challenging events such as border clashes between India and China, Taiwan’s cry for international recognition, Hong Kong’s fight for democracy, and China’s belligerent policies and confrontations with many countries. Anyone who is interested in what happened one hundred years ago and wants to know the possible future of South and East Asia should read this book.

-- Xu Guoqi, The University of Hong Kong

As the title indicates, this major collaborative volume takes our attention beyond the Versailles peace conference to what happened in and around a pivotal year—‘the 1919 moment.’ The truly international background of the contributors reflects another shift of attention, this one opposing the Euro-American focus that has characterized most histories of the post-World War I years to highlight East Asia and East Asians, not merely as passive recipients, but as active agents of postwar transformative changes. From diverse methodological and interpretive approaches, the contributors demonstrate that the year 1919 led to ‘a seismic shift in global politics’ which East Asians actively attempted to shape as well as challenge.

-- Elise K. Tipton, University of Sy