Reviews for In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia

The average rating for In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-09-24 00:00:00 Alessio Mongardi Spector explores the aftermath of WWII in five Asian nations that were still largely under Japanese occupation in August of 1945. In each case, sudden regime change launches a race to fill a power vacuum, with Allied armies, national liberation movements, former colonial powers, and warlord gangs moving into collision. Naturally, this story could easily involve wholesale vilification of various contending parties, each of which felt victimized. But Spector gives an admirably fair and sympathetic account of what it was like on the ground for basically all of those involved: Japanese troops who sympathized with the Indonesian independence movement; Vietnamese patriots organizing against the French; British troops trying to quell ethic score-settling in Malaysia, or American officers attempting to "help" in the political chaos of North China or Korea. The account shows the US forces at a moment when America was perceived as an anti-colonial liberator, before the doctrine took hold that anti-colonial movements were part of a global communist conspiracy. The victorious warriors against imperial fascism are left in a position of choosing which of many factional leaders are "legitimate," how to keep the peace without clearly taking sides in a civil war, or how to respond in a collapsing rice market. The perils and quandaries of change management have seldom been presented so clearly.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-10-16 00:00:00 Keith Daniels Excellent, just as expected. Professor Spector is one of the most brilliant scholars of his generation in the field of Politico-Military History, and this survey of the chaotic political milieux throughout East & South-East Asia at the end of World War II will no doubt become the standard work on the subject within the coming years. Written in such a way as to be valuable & instructive both to specialists and a more general readership, I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the history of the 20th Century, most particularly as it was impacted by the Second World War. This book is particularly fascinating when one compares its modern scholarly view of events & personalities with the contemporary journalistic perspective offered by books such as the late Harold R. Isaacs' No Peace For Asia (and of course Professor Isaacs' companion volume to the latter, New Cycle In Asia: Selected Documents on Major International Developments in the Far East, 1943-1947 as well...).