Here is a list of recommended books on eastern and southern Asia. While I have read most of them, in the interests of efficiency I'll just list them without comment.

1. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 by Romila Thapar

2. A History of Japan (3 vols.) by George Sansom

3. Empires of Ancient Eurasia: The First Silk Roads Era, 100 BCE–250 CE by Craig Benjamin

4. The Mongols by David Morgan

5. The Mughal Empire by John Richards

6. Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1545-1879 by Noel Perrin

7.  The Search For Modern China by Jonathan D. Spence

8.  The Making of Modern Japan by Marius B. Jansen

9.  White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India by William Dalrymple

10. The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 by William Dalrymple

11. Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-1941 by David C. Evans and Mark R. Peattie

12  The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War by Jeremy A. Yellen

13.  Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945 by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper

14. Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins

15. India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guh

16. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra Vogel

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.

When it comes to history books, there are good ones and there are great ones. And then there are a few that are truly groundbreaking in their ability to take a subject that has been studied before and address it with such insight that it changes fundamentally the way we think about it. This is one of those books. For in describing the development of the Imperial Japanese Navy from the late 19th century to the attack on Pearl Harbor David Evans and Mark Peattie offers readers a revolutionary look at the thinking and planning that defined the shape of the Pacific War (as the war against the United States and the European imperial powers is called in Japan) before its first shot was ever fired.

Perhaps one of the most surprising things about the Imperial Japanese Navy is how relatively late it was established, for in spite of being an island nation Japan had no naval arm. This changed after the Meiji Restoration, as Japan began to look outward for the first time in centuries. Quickly appreciating the importance of naval arms to national power, the Japanese created a naval force tasked with protecting its shores. Turning to the British the Japanese not only brought over advisers from there to train their officers  but purchased many of its first vessels from its shipbuilders — a necessary step given the undeveloped state of Japanese industry at that time.

By the 1890s the Japanese possessed a small but respectable force, yet the navy still was junior to the army in both status and planning. This changed with Japan's wars of expansion, first with China in 1894-5, then with Russia ten years later. It was then that the Imperial Japanese Navy shifted from a coastal-defense role to one designed to project Japanese power in accordance with the dominant Western strategic thinking of that time. Japan's navy impressed observers with their performance in these two wars, especially with their defeat of the Russians. Here Evans and Peattie stress the importance of the battle of Tsushima both in establishing the navy's reputation and in defining its subsequent thinking. The clash was decisive in ending Russia's hopes for victory in the Russo-Japanese War, and — even more significantly — cemented the idea of the kantai kessen, or decisive battle, in Japanese naval thinking, which would define both the development of the IJN for the remainder of its existence and its conduct of the war against the United States forty years later.

This path was set virtually from the start. For the first decades of its existence Japanese naval strategists regarded regional powers — first China, then Russia — as their most likely opponents. Having defeated both countries, and with an alliance with Great Britain securely in place the United States now became the most likely opponent in a future war. Japan's response to international trends, from the arms races of the 1910s to the arms control treaties of the 1920s were shaped by this, as were ideas about warship design. This did not necessarily have to lead to war, but as Japan contemplated further expansion of its empire it always did so with an eye towards a possible challenge from the Americans, and prepared accordingly.

The result was a fleet designed to defeat the United States Navy in accordance with kantai kessen. Accepting that the United States would possess an unavoidable numerical advantage, the Japanese emphasized quality in naval design and the development of weapons such as the "Long Lance" torpedo and tactics such as night-time fighting that would offset the Americans' superior numbers. These were tested in maneuvers that sometimes cost lives, but resulted in a force which was ready to implement doctrine in practice when war came. The opportunity arose first in China in 1937; here Evans and Peattie stress the often underappreciated advantage four years of combat experience gave the IJN at the start of their conflict with the United States -- experience which the United States would offset only after months of bloody lessons in the South Pacific in 1942 and 1943.

Evans and Peattie conclude their book with a short chapter summarizing the impact of this development on Japan's conduct of the Pacific War. Yet the relative brevity of this section understates the value of this book for readers interested in the Japanese Navy's performance in the Second World War. This is by far the single best book in English on the history of the Imperial Japanese Navy, one that is likely to remain the definitive text on the subject and necessary reading for anyone who wants to learn about Japanese military history or the development of naval combat in the Pacific during the war.

Eric Lacroix and Linton Wells's book is an encyclopedic study in the truest sense of the term. The authors spent a half-century tracking down every detail about the design, construction, and deployment of the cruisers of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which they describe with a generous supplement of photographs, charts, and line drawings. Nor did they confine themselves to just the major classes in service during the war, as they provided chapters covering specialized designs and older vessels that were scrapped even before World War II, an inclusion which better demonstrates to readers the evolution of designs over time. All of this is supplemented with appendices detailing the organization of the IJN, the equipment used aboard the vessels, and the heads of the shipbuilding section. Together they make for a work that is absolute must-reading for anyone interested in these fine warships, the history of the Imperial Japanese Navy, or cruiser design generally.

And yet in spite of all that the authors have done to compile and present this truly impressive body of material, this book can be frustrating for what it leaves out. What Lacriox and Wells have done is given readers all of the who, what, when and where of Japanese cruiser design and construction, but not the underlying reason why these ships were built. Any consideration of the specific purpose envisioned by the design of the ships, the strategic doctrines they were created to fulfill, or even the missions they were sent out to address is absent from its pages. The decision makes the book into a massive, lovingly-crafted technical manual that must be read in conjunction with other works (such as David Evans's and Mark Peattie's Kaigun) to utilize fully the wealth of information between its covers. Perhaps it's an ungrateful assessment considering the sheer amount of labor that went into this book, but in the end the incompleteness of its scope is really more a tragedy than anything else considering how much the authors must have learned about their subject over the course of their decades-long endeavor. To have come up short in this one crucial aspect is nothing less than a missed opportunity have produced a truly definitive work on the subject by the undisputed experts in their field.

At the end of the late 19th century, a dramatic power shift took place in East Asia, as Japan replaced China as the dominant country in the region. While this shift was the result of a series of developments that took place over decades, a key turning point was the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, when Japan defeated China in a short, sharp conflict that reflected the changing balance of power in the area. By its end Japanese forces had driven the Chinese from Korea and established themselves as a force to be reckoned with, one that was treated almost as an equal by the Western imperial powers.

That such "a seminal event in world history" has not received its due from Western historians is not surprising given the language barriers confronting scholars seeking to write about the war. For this reason alone Sarah Paine's effort to provide English-language readers with a long-needed history of the war is a commendable one. Yet this very demand contributes to a sense of disappointment with this book. To write it, Paine relies heavily upon the often unreliable coverage of the war in contemporary newspapers, supplemented with published documentary collections and the related secondary literature on the subject. Nowhere in its pages is there any evidence of archival research on her part that would provide a basis for judging the veracity of sometimes contradictory reports she uses, leaving unaddressed the numerous questions raised in her book about the exact course of events and the motivations behind the decisions made in response to them. Nor does it help when she exaggerates the importance of the war by ascribing to it developments that arguably predated (such as Western perceptions of Chinese decline) or postdated (such as Western regard for Japan as a modern power) it.

The result is a work that is a serious disappointment. Had Paine undertaken the archival labors necessary to sort through the often confusing reportage of events it would have been a major contribution to our understanding of the war and its place in modern history. As it is, however, she has written a book that is useful as an introduction to the conflict but ultimately serves to demonstrate how much more work needs to be done to properly understand its place in the transformation of the fortunes of China and Japan in the late 19th century.