On his Substack, Dr. Robert Lyman reviews a new book on the Second World War in Asia by Hans van de Ven:
I really wanted to enjoy this book. The enthusiastic endorsements from Rana Mitter, Antony Beevor and Richard Overy raised my expectations considerably. Yet by page eight of Blood Dawn I felt as uncomfortable as the proverbial curate confronted with a rotten egg.
The author aims to provide a narrative that “contributes to a gradual shift in our understanding of the significance of World War II”. This is admirable. A more Asian-centred interpretation of the conflict is certainly needed, as the war is still too often viewed through a Eurocentric or North Atlantic lens. Historians such as Rana Mitter, Jonathan Fennell and Richard Overy have already helped redress this imbalance. It is unquestionably true that the conflict began with Japanese aggression in China as early as 1931 and that the war both began and ended in Asia.
The problem is that the book insists that the central dynamic of modern Asian history is a nationalist struggle to escape imperialism and colonialism. While both undeniably shaped Asia, it is a considerable stretch to explain the region’s political development primarily through resistance to empire. The author correctly notes that many Asian political movements saw the war as an opportunity to cast off colonial rule, but he greatly overstates their role in determining the war’s outcome.
Consequently, the analysis neglects the broader dynamics of power – local, regional and imperial – that shaped Asia before, during and after the war. The author assumes that modern Asia is the product of “Asian peoples’ continuing struggle to overcome the legacies of empire”. That seems reductive. A more convincing interpretation would describe modern Asia to be the result of a power-based confrontation among declining powers such as Britain, France and the Netherlands, a rising Japan, a developing China, and the emerging superpowers whose ideologies would shape postwar Asia: the United States and the Soviet Union. The war was principally caused by one rising empire, Japan, seeking to assert its dominance regionally and to replace existing empires.
As a result, some empires disappeared, others expanded, and many colonial territories gained independence as competing political elites seized opportunities created by wartime upheaval. Where those struggles could not be resolved peacefully, civil war followed. One may call this nationalism or self-determination, but it was power politics nonetheless.
In the postwar period, Asians were often less concerned with abolishing imperial legacies than with creating new centres of power controlled by local elites. Since 1945, Asia has been shaped by competing powers, some imperial in nature, such as China, the Soviet Union/Russia and the United States, and others nationalist and local.
A similar lack of nuance appears in the treatment of imperialism. British imperialism is lumped together with that of France and the Netherlands, with little appreciation for their differences. British involvement in 19th-century China is presented primarily as the cause of China’s problems rather than as part of a broader interaction with a declining and dysfunctional Qing polity. Imperialism was certainly influential, but so were domestic developments, including China’s internal sclerosis and Japan’s response to modernity, which produced its own imperial ambitions in China, Korea, Manchuria and the Pacific.
The author’s ideological predispositions are impossible to miss, and the book frequently descends into crude Anglophobia. We are told, for instance, that “British elites, who liked (and like) to think of themselves as natural and gifted rulers, found a new outlet for their yearning to govern India”. Such statements are simplistic, if not puerile. Similarly, discussing the collapse of the American-British-Dutch-Australia Command (ABDACOM) in 1942, the author remarks that “the Dutch were abandoned to their fate. Retreat is an underappreciated military skill, and the British were practiced masters of it, as they had shown at Dunkirk”. This is the sort of cheap point-scoring that would weaken an undergraduate essay, yet here it appears in a supposedly serious work of history.
The treatment of India is particularly problematic. The narrative focuses heavily on the Indian National Congress and consequently overlooks the diversity and complexity of the independence movement. There is little recognition that what Congress often described as British obstruction was, in part, a debate within Britain (especially the Conservative Party) about the form an independent India should take. The same debate also took place within Indian circles considering the subject.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the central political question in India was often not whether independence would occur but what form it would take and, crucially, who would benefit from it. The Quit India movement of 1942 followed the Cripps Mission, which had already offered India Dominion status after the war. Congress sought immediate separation, but many of its leaders privately supported the Allied war effort, believing correctly that victory would hasten independence. One could even argue that Congress’s greatest unintended achievement was not independence but the partition and communal violence that accompanied it. The book fails to engage adequately with these complexities.
