The Other Great Game

The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia
Sheila Miyoshi Jager returns to the three-cornered contest among imperial Russia, China, and Japan over the Korean Peninsula. The battle to colonize Korea upended East Asian geopolitics, set great-power conflicts of the twentieth century in motion, and seeded internal rivalries that persist in the peninsula’s division between North and South.

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.

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