This book deals with the impacts of external intervention on state formation in weak, peripheral polities. It sits at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics and attempts to explain how interactions at the international level influence the politics of state formation. The central argument of the book is that the collective effects of powerful states jockeying over access to a weak polity shape the target state's institutional form and help determine the nature of its political authority.

On this account, powerful states intervene in peripheral states according to their expectations of opportunity cost. If a powerful actor expects to gain greatly from intervening without sacrificing the achievement of other important goals, it will intervene robustly by either denying access to rival states, regulating access, or securing privileged access. Likewise, if that state perceives high opportunity costs to intervening, it will only do so in a limited capacity to secure nonprivileged access for itself and to prevent powerful rivals from dominating the target state. If opportunity costs are prohibitively high, the powerful state will forgo intervention altogether, thereby conceding access.

It is when powerful states settle on the opportunity costs of intervention in a particular state being high that the sovereign-state form emerges. In this scenario, external actors all seek to bolster the central government of the target state in order to secure nonprivileged access for themselves and in so doing, a sovereign state with high levels of territorial exclusivity, external autonomy, and political centralization emerges. Yet if powerful actors perceive low or moderate opportunity costs to intervention, they will take actions that undermine state form on these three metrics by, for example, supporting local nongovernment actors who are able to act on their behalf (e.g., warlords), securing extraterritorial rights for their citizens in the target state, controlling particular sectors of the economy, or attempting to annex or colonize the target polity. The result is a state with lower degrees of territorial exclusivity, external autonomy, or political centralization, or a state that is entirely dominated by a foreign power. The alternative explanations for state formation to which Chong compares his analysis are idealist accounts that emphasize the power of nationalism, institutional explanations that analyze how changes in state form alter actors' incentive structures, and bellicist arguments that posit that state institutions form as the result of war or the threat of war.

Empirically, the book focuses on three Asian polities from 1893 to 1952. The bulk of the empirical analysis, however, deals with the formation of the Chinese state, with two chapters devoted to foreign involvement in China from 1893 to 1922 and one examining China from 1923 to 1952. Thailand and Indonesia receive one chapter each to cover the entire time period. Not surprisingly, then, Chong displays the depth of his research, the richness of his analysis, and the nuance of his argument when discussing China in ways that are less apparent in his secondary case studies. The chapters on China provide a robust account of the cross-cutting centralizing and fragmentary pressures generated by external actors during the period under examination. As relevant foreign actors began to coalesce around the perception that intervening in China to deny access to rivals was prohibitively expensive, Chong argues, the sovereign-state form began to emerge. China experts will have ample opportunity to scrutinize Chong's impressive array of primary and secondary evidence.

Perhaps Chong's most provocative argument is his insistence that nationalism played less of a role than commonly suspected in the formation of the Chinese, Thai, and Indonesian states. Chong shows that many “nationalist” actors were willing to forgo their ideals when their aims diverged from those of their foreign backers. He furthermore argues that the timing of nationalist movements does not cohere with an idealist account of state formation. Again, his evidence is particularly deep with regard to the Chinese case.

The book's weaknesses may well be reparable given more space, but there are areas where the argument would benefit from greater clarity. While the emphasis on opportunity costs of intervention is elegant, there are times when it seems that state capacity may be the more accurate concept to use. Did Japan forgo intervention in China after World War II because of prohibitively high opportunity costs or because it simply could not hope to do so (even if it wanted to) given its comprehensive defeat in the war? The Dutch saw regulating access to Indonesia between 1893 and 1922 as “key to prosperity,” but “fully denying rivals access to the archipelago was a goal beyond the reach of the Netherlands government given its physical and fiscal constraints, especially next to security concerns in Europe” (174–75). This seems to hint that state capacity is the more crucial factor. Perhaps the concern is merely semantic, but without an account of why powerful states wish to intervene in peripheral states beyond the assumption of self-interest, the potential for this type of conceptual confusion exists. Moreover, in his analysis of bellicist arguments as an alternative to his explanation, Chong seems to betray a sympathy with the logic of coercive concentration as a prime source of state formation. He maintains that his argument is superior because bellicist accounts do not adequately address the role of external intervention. Yet it is worth wondering whether Chong's account could be read as a supplement to a bellicist explanation instead of, as he implicitly suggests, the other way around.

Some of the most interesting questions posed by the author are not discussed in detail, yet promise utility of the book's framework for a variety of scholars. In particular, Chong's conception of the internal market for assistance from foreign actors is deserving of further analysis. This idea makes appearances in the author's evaluation of the impact of nationalist movements on state formation, but perhaps a useful next step would be systematically to analyze the dynamics of local political groups as price takers in the market for external support. Furthermore, in his introduction and conclusion, Chong points to the contemporary relevance of his framework and highlights a variety of contexts that would benefit from this way of thinking, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and the putative Palestinian state. Developing these insights would be a welcome extension of Chong's argument and would speak to scholars concerned with insurgency, civil war, separatism, and ongoing state formation. Yet one contemporary repertoire of external “intervention” that Chong's book does not address is sanctions, which in the author's framework could be seen as a sort of punitive access concession deriving its power from the ostensible benefits that the powerful state(s) could offer to the weak state. Extending this book's analysis to sanctions and their relationship to state building would help bring an additional element of contemporary relevance to this primarily historical study. In any case, the range of potential scholarly and policy implications makes Chong's book a welcome addition to the state-formation literature.