David C. Kang

A professor in international relations wrote this book on east Asian state relations from the 14th to the 19th century. The book deals in particular with the relations between China as the dominant political and cultural power, and Japan, Korea and Vietnam as its smaller independent neighbor states. The author argues that the east Asian system of tributary Chinese hegemony produced a more stable international system than the one which prevailed in contemporary Europe.

The thesis is interesting, but unfortunately the author's lack of historical expertise shines through in the writing. He has, no doubt, read a lot of works on this subject and synthezises his readings reasonably well, but he doesn't manage to paint a particularly vivid portrait of the system whose stability he's trying to explain. The story proceeds from one topic to the next, but the overall picture remains muddled throughout the book.

Furthermore, it seems like the author ran out of things to say quite early in the writing process. After discussing various aspects of the east Asian international system for the first 100 pages, he spends the next thirty pages on describing trade relations between Asian countries. I could not see any direct links to international politics in this discussion, and the author fails to motivate this diversion into economic history. The subsequent chapter on nomads also reads too much like a literature review on a subject which has only vague connections to the main topic, with no explicit links explained by the author.

Then in the concluding chapter the author for some reason discusses only modern Asian international relations, rather than the historical ones he described in the first half of the book. This is probably closer to his own area of expertise, but he should be ashamed of himself for concluding the book with material which is so weakly connected to the earlier parts of the book. The author seems to have started writing this book with very ambitious goals and to have realized his limitations belatedly. The content of the book has not been planned very well, and it becomes increasingly incoherent towards the end, so I do not recommend reading it.… (altro)