This landmark two-volume set comprehensively examines the role, influence and contributions of American and European military power and statecraft in shaping the state system and regional order in modern Asia across the 20th century. From the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 to the close of the 1970s, Western Military Power and the Reordering of Modern Asia, 1900-1979 explains how strategic foreign policy in the West was used to politically reorder the modern ‘Far East’, an arc of space stretching from Vladivostok to Burma – referred to here as the Asia Pacific.

The volumes pay particularly close attention to the major international ‘visions’ for restructuring an Asian states system within a changing, increasingly global, political order set forth in the period:

* The peace treaties of 1919 and the League of Nations
* The United Nations vision of 1945
* The Geneva Agreements of 1954

Concentrating on three key themes – notions of global order, concepts of sovereignty and legitimacy, and projects for collective security – and bearing in mind the centrality of China and Japan, Brian P. Farrell and his international author team explain why and how these visions, and the power deployed to pursue them, contributed fundamentally to the construction of a post-imperial Asia Pacific; the region’s new state system hard-coded into a now global political order.

Brian P. Farrell is Professor of Military History at the National University of Singapore, Singapore. He is the author of The Defence and Fall of Singapore 1940-1942 (2005) and The Basis and Making of British Grand Strategy 1940-1943 (1998). He is also the lead editor of the two-volume Empire in Asia: A New Global History (Bloomsbury, 2016).

Andrea Benvenuti is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of several books, including Cold War and Decolonisation: Australia's Policy Towards Britain's End of Empire in Southeast Asia (2017).

Shannon Brown is Senior Lecturer in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, USA.

Charles Burgess is a PhD candidate in History at the National University of Singapore, Singapore, where his broad research interests include military, diplomatic, and international history, focusing on grand strategy and coalition warfare.

Karl Hack is Professor of History and Head of the School of History, Religious Studies, Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the Open University, UK. He is the author of several books, including War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore (2012).

SR Joey Long is Associate Professor of History at the National University of Singapore, Singapore. He is the author of Safe for Decolonization: The Eisenhower Administration, Britain, and Singapore (2011).

Marek W. Rutkowski is Lecturer in Global Studies at Monash University, Malaysia. His research focuses on the intersection of the Global Cold War and decolonization in Asia with an emphasis on the Vietnam War, non-alignment, development and the role played by the Soviet Bloc.

Fumihito Yamamoto is an independent scholar and book translator (English to Japanese). Educated in Dokkyo University in Saitama, Japan and at the National University of Singapore, he is working on international relations in the first half of the twentieth century, especially Anglo-Japanese relations. Translation works include Niall Ferguson’s Empire and Kishore Mahbubani’s The Great Convergence.