When historians of East Asia are asked to recommend an English-language book on China's long war with Japan, whether that is defined as the series of Japanese invasions beginning in 1931 or the Sino-Japanese war dated from the skirmish at Marco Polo bridge in July 1937, the works that come to mind have always been less than ideal. There are several edited volumes with superb essays on many aspects of the conflict; there are over half a dozen strong works debating the role of the conflict in the rise of Communist power; there are histories that focus on Nationalist party rule and its role in the war, as well as a growing number of more thematically focused volumes that explore everything from the issues of collaboration to refugees. Most recently, Diana Lary's excellent Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2010) is ideal for teaching, with its innovative combination of short narrative summaries, thematic essays, case studies and primary-source readings. But this war, which so profoundly impacted China in the 20th century, is surely remarkable for the lack of a worthy general survey in English. Rana Mitter has brought this unfortunate state of affairs to an end.

This work builds on the author's own historical research and publications on the war as well as his mastery of the art of effective synthesis. Most of all, however, China's War with Japan benefits from following closely on the completion of a 2007–12 Leverhulme Trust project of the same name that allowed Mitter to bring together a talented team of historians working on a wide range of issues related to the conflict. The result is a work that is deeply immersed in the recent literature, including new scholarship in Chinese, but which also frequently consults primary archival evidence, diaries and published documentary collections.

We are offered three strong background chapters that set the context, including one chapter which covers the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the complex history of Japan's continued move into north China up until 1937. The chapters that follow strike an excellent balance between coverage of the broader developments and the depiction of specific key scenes. One way it accomplishes this is the effective use of contemporary voices, most frequently in the form of excerpts from the diaries of Chiang Kai-shek and Zhou Fohai, who followed Chiang's political rival Wang Jingwei into Japanese-controlled territories to establish a new Nanjing regime with the occupier's support. We also hear from many others, including Western missionaries and wartime correspondents like Theodore White; we see the Nanjing massacre through the diary of relief worker Chen Ruifang; reports on the depths of the famine in Henan from the bureaucrat Zhang Zhonglu, and a range of astute observations from the prominent wartime journalist Du Zhongyuan.

A survey history is not merely a neutral summary, and the choices made by an author in determining the division of coverage and emphasis can have an important impact on readers as well as shape the historiography to come. In this respect, it is impressive to see several important but often neglected aspects of the war get considerable attention. Chiang Kai-shek's breaching of Yellow River dykes in 1938, a horrendous atrocity that led to the death of some half a million people, gets an important chapter. So too does the famine in Henan from 1942, which is intriguingly compared with the famine in Bengal that would begin not long after. Another area where Mitter has set an important, if underdeveloped, example is in his chapter, “States of terror” which juxtaposes the roles played by chill-inducing figures Dai Li (under Chiang Kai-shek), Li Shiqun (under Wang Jingwei's Nanjing regime) and Kang Sheng (for the Communists) in maintaining wartime “terror states.” This opens the possibility of an interesting evaluation of the institutional continuities and differences in the practices of surveillance, violence and social control on each side.

With any survey, there are naturally topics that get less attention. Students of Chinese history who are familiar with the scholarship on rural areas during the war and on various Communist base areas will lament the relative lack of material on the experiences of millions of Chinese in the nominally occupied territories in reality contested by a host of Japanese, resistance, collaborationist and other local forces. However, perhaps precisely because so much has been written on these areas, Rana Mitter has chosen to predominantly centre his focus on the leaders in Chongqing, Yan'an and Nanjing – alone an ambitious project of synthesis that is impressively carried out. Somewhat more regrettable is the fact that Japanese primary sources and the rich Japanese-language historiography on the war are not mined for insights and alternative perspectives. Though the book's focus is on the Chinese experience of the war, the result is a work in which the rocky relationship between the Chinese and their American allies remains in clear focus throughout, while the Chinese interactions with the Japanese enemy are seen primarily through the smoke of the battlefield. However, only so much can be asked of a historian who has taken on a work of this tremendous scope. We are indeed fortunate to have a history of the Sino-Japanese war of 1937–45 that is able to move so smoothly between the killing fields of Nanjing to the jungles of Burma and from the diplomatic dance of the Cairo Conference of 1943 to the Nationalist regime's aspirations for a post-war welfare state.