The Far East at the end of the First World War

Abstract

It has become standard usage to speak of the two wars which began in I914 and in I939 as the first and second world wars, but it is a usage which can be misleading unless the actual geographical scope of serious military and naval operations in each war is kept clearly in mind. In neither war was there any fighting in the Western Hemisphere; as far as the Americas were concerned, the Seven Years War of the eighteenth century has a better claim to universality. In the second world war from I94I to I945 there was an armed struggle in East Asia and the Pacific Ocean comparable in scale and violence to the struggle which raged on the continent of Europe. But the war of I9I4-18 was throughout its course essentially a European war with an extension to the territory of the Ottoman Empire in Asia and areas close to its borders. Outside the theatre of war reaching from the Yser to the Tigris there were only the minor operations required for the liquidation of Germany's overseas colonial empire, and these, except for the campaign in German East Africa, were not only minor, but trivial. It is difficult to regard a struggle in which the range of major hostilities was so circumscribed as really entitled to be called a world war. The effects of the struggle, however, were not limited to the regions in which important fighting fronts were located. The political and economic repercussions of the gigantic armed conflict were felt all over the globe, and nowhere more than in the Far East, where during the two decades before 1914 the enfeebled Manchu-Chinese empire, replaced in 1912 by the Republic of China, had been the object of a complicated international diplomacy with a rivalry for influence among six Great Powers Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, and Japan. The fourth month of the war saw the elimination by an Anglo-