Picked these up when they were offered for free, last year occurring to Amazon.  

The Suleiman one is the better of the two.  I did want more information about his wives, but it is a good introduction.   3 stars.

Guangzhou is more European centric than I liked.  I understand that it was a trade center, but I learned more about how it effected the Europeans than the Chinese.  Strange considering where the city is located.

In September 1931, Japan began a series of conquests that ended fourteen years later with a surrender signed in Tokyo Bay and the dismantling of their empire. Yet despite the scale of Japan's dominion and its role in reshaping East Asia and the western Pacific there has been relatively little written about this empire. One of the few books available that gives readers a sense of the origins of the empire, its operations, and its legacy is this collection of essays. The product of a 1991 academic conference, the thirteen chapters that comprise the text offer readers an incomplete yet useful mosaic of its subject, one that is all the more worth reading because of the paucity of other works on the topic.

The essays in the book are divided into four groups, each of which examines different aspects of the empire. The first of these concentrates on the role Japan's prewar colonies in Korea and Taiwan played in their newly expanded empire, showing the ongoing Japanese efforts to assimilate their territories into a Japan-dominated East Asia. Here the two authors, Carter Eckert and Wan-yao Chou, emphasize the efforts of the Japanese to incorporate these territories into their economic network, even to the point of encouraging industrialization. Yet development increased the demand for raw materials at a time when the Depression-driven trends were causing trade to break down. This fueled the drive for further territories, which is the focus of the book's second and third sections. In these two parts, which together comprise the heart of the book, focus on the two stages of Japan's imperial expansion during this period: first the conquest of Manchuria, and then the Western imperial possessions in southeast Asia. Here readers learn of the growing domestic enthusiasm for empire, the effort to expand Japan's economic dominion of the region, and the response of indigenous groups in southeastern Asia to the Japanese-driven challenge to the Western empires in their region. The final section of the book expands the focus chronologically by considering the postwar legacy of Japan's empire and how it compared to that of its wartime partner, Nazi Germany. In these essays, the authors involved consider the enduring legacy of Japan's empire, and how it continued to define the region for the next half-century and more.

Though the essays themselves address specific topics, collectively they provide a surprisingly coherent overview of Japan's empire during this period, with the key arguments in the essays stitched together by Peter Duus's superb introduction at the start of the book into a comprehensive picture of its overall subject. The result is a work that serves as a useful resource for anyone seeking to learn about Japan's wartime empire and the changes it brought to eastern Asia. The authors' labors are especially valuable considering the long shadow the war continues to cast on the region. For while readers interested in the empire or the war itself will undoubtedly find much of interest in this collection, given the extent to which the region still bears the imprint of the conflict it is one that should be also read by anyone interested in understanding it today.

My latest podcast is up on the New Books Network website! In it, I interview Craig Benjamin about his history of the emergence of the trading routes across Afro-Eurasia in the late ancient world. Enjoy!

In the early 15^th century, the coastal states of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean were the subjects of a remarkable event, as they received repeated visitations by a large fleet of Chinese ships.  Dispatched by the order of the Ming emperor Yongle, they consisted of thousands of men on board the largest wooden ships ever built.  The expeditions were all commanded by Zheng He, a eunuch with a long history of service to the emperor.  Yet in spite of the dramatic novelty of the voyages, they and their commander received only the scantiest attention in the Chinese historical sources, with many of their exploits becoming as much myth as reality.  In this book, Edward Dreyer attempts to uncover the man behind the myths, assessing his goals and achievements by evaluating them in the context of his times.

To do this, Dreyer reconstructs Zheng’s life as completely as possible from the available contemporary and near-contemporary sources.  This provides at best only a sketchy outline, which the author then fills in with a broader analysis of the voyage, the ships and men involved, and the broader background of events.  He argues that, contrary to later writers, Zheng’s expeditions were not voyages of exploration or assertions of naval hegemony but an effort to extend the Chinese tributary system to that part of the world.  Though far less inspiring a motivation than the others, it is one that helps to explain the subsequent abandonment of the effort after a final voyage in 1431-33, as the returns were far outweighed by the considerable expense of the effort – a factor that became critical during a time of enormous expenditure on military expeditions to Mongolia and construction of a new imperial capital in Beijing.

Though thin in some areas and repetitive of its major points, Dreyer has succeeded in writing a clear and accessible study of a legendary figure.  Though it, readers can better understand both the scope of his achievement and why it was not followed up by Yongle’s successors.  For anyone seeking to understand the early Ming dynasty or why a tantalizing opportunity was never fully exploited, Dreyer’s clear, thoroughly researched, and well-argued study is an excellent place to begin.