‘Blood Dawn’ by Hans van de Ven review

Concluding his authoritative, perhaps old fashioned, account of the interlocking conflicts that engulfed Asia from the late 18th century onwards, Hans van de Ven expresses his hope that Blood Dawn will contribute to ‘a gradual shift in our understanding of the significance of World War II’, by which he means a shift away from a myopic focus on the war’s European theatre. It is a worthy ambition. It is also a well-populated one. The globalisation of Second World War historiography has been underway for some time, and van de Ven’s claim to be pioneering must be judged alongside a substantial body of work. Rana Mitter’s Forgotten Ally (2013) placed China at the centre of the Allied war effort, arguing that no power faced the Axis for longer, or at greater cost, than Chiang Kai-shek’s China. Likewise Antony Beevor opened his history of the Second World War, published in 2012, with the Battles of Khalkin Gol, which took place on the border between Japanese-occupied Manchuria and Mongolia in early 1939. Richard Overy’s Blood and Ruins (2021) pushed the war’s origins even further back to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931.

None of which is to diminish what van de Ven has achieved. Central to his account are the conflicts driven by a Japanese state reformed under the Meiji Restoration according to Western models of nationhood that bound prestige and status to imperial ambition. Allied to Britain during the First World War, Japan was one of the Big Five powers at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 yet emerged from it nursing a grievance. The Japanese delegation’s proposal of a racial equality clause was blocked, primarily by Britain and Australia, and the humiliation curdled into expansionist resentment. Already in possession of Taiwan and Korea, Japan turned its ambitions towards China, invading Manchuria in 1931 and the mainland in 1937. Japanese imperialism led, eventually, to the brutally swift collapse of the French, Dutch, and British colonial empires in Asia. From their ruins emerged newly independent states: India and Pakistan in 1947, Burma and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) the following year, and 1949 saw both Mao Zedong’s Communist victory in China and the Dutch finally relinquishing Indonesia. In this perspective, the long arc of Asian history reaches its climax not with the Japanese surrender in 1945 but with the momentous Bandung Conference that brought together Asian and African postcolonial states (and, curiously, Japan) in 1955. This is a compelling trajectory, and van de Ven plots it with immense, if rather dry, authority. It is history from the top down, but no less important for that.

Blood Dawn, however, begins its narrative long before the cataclysmic events of the mid-20th century. At the end of the 18th century, Mughal India and Imperial China were global powers commanding vast territories and revenues, dwarfing colonial enterprises such as the Dutch and English East India Companies. To redress a chronic trade imbalance with China, Britain established a lucrative opium industry in Bengal and deployed its product to prise open Chinese markets. When the Qing emperor resisted, Britain fought two Opium Wars – the second alongside France – which eviscerated Chinese power. By the end of the 19th century Western colonial powers had reshaped global relations, subjugating both India and China. In the first half of the century, this astonishing reversal was led by the British East India Company, an armed corporation that functioned like a highly aggressive state. The Company was extinguished after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, its powers assumed directly by the British Crown. Backed by formidable naval power, the British Empire in Asia reached its fullest extent after the First World War. Behind the triumphalist facade, however, European powers were in decline and under sustained attack by Asian nationalists, a history told with meticulous grandeur by Tim Harper in Underground Asia (2020). Van de Ven presents this history as the foundational landscape from which the emergence of an imperialist Japan and all that followed in the 20th century become intelligible.

The core chapters of van de Ven’s narrative are masterpieces of compression. He unravels the dynamic between the global powers – Britain, the US, and the Soviet Union – and a succession of shocks engineered by a Japanese state dominated by military cadres, shocks that coincided with mounting unrest in India culminating in the Quit India movement of 1942. The first shock was Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, triggered by the aftershock of the Wall Street Crash and the global depression it unleashed. Democracy had blossomed in Japan during the Taishō period of the mid-1920s, but worldwide economic convulsion propelled the state towards massive military expansion first into China, then after 1941 against the Americans in the Pacific and the European colonial territories of Southeast Asia. The shocks kept coming for a simple reason: the West and the League of Nations failed to respond to the assault on Manchuria. For the Japanese, Western disinterest was a licence to conquer.

Bogged down in a war of attrition against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces, Japan delivered its second great shock in 1941, smashing the exposed underbellies of the British, French, and Dutch empires with cataclysmic effect. The fall of Singapore in 1942 shattered the myth of European invincibility. For the Asian subjects of empire, the world had changed forever. Japan’s ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ offered a euphemistic promise of ‘Asia for Asiatics’, galvanising, inadvertently, nationalist movements across Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia. An age of empires gave way to a world of nation-states that would gather at Bandung in 1955. The inexorable rise of China in the 21st century suggests that the age of empire building is not over and that those nation-states created after the Second World War may well experience another series of shocks – not from Tokyo but from Beijing.

• Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia
  Hans van de Ven
  Basic Books, 464pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Chris Hale’s latest book is A Brief History of Singapore and Malaysia (Tuttle, 2023).