Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in February 1902 marked an important moment in modern diplomatic history: for the first time in decades, a European power concluded a nominally equal defensive partnership with an Asian state. But the alliance’s crossing of the ‘global colour line’ was politically fraught from the outset, and would become more so as Japan came to pose an ever more explicit challenge to the racial orders on which the British imperial system rested. While Japan came to play a pivotal role in the geostrategic security of the British Empire in Asia, it was simultaneously denounced as a ‘yellow peril’ to British (or ‘Anglo-Saxon’) ascendancy in the Pacific. By examining the Anglo-Japanese relationship along the twinned arcs of empire and race, this book does two things. First, it offers new insight in how Japan’s integration in the international order was complicated by race. Second, it shows how the Japanese ‘question’ came to shape the evolution of the Edwardian British Empire.