There are many written histories about WWII, but few in English about the experience of southeast Asian countries and Japanese imperialism. While it would be inappropriate to compare individual tragedies from wartime aggression across countries, knowing how inhumane some aspects of Japanese occupation were in the region is a long overdue correction. Gregg Huffs book, expansive, critical, and highly researched, will fill this gap in the literature and be a long-lived reference for any scholar or reader interested in the region and period.

In this volume, organized as ten chapters with topics ranging from finance to famine and labor, Huff describes the many devastating ways that war affected the six economies of Burma, Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), Indonesia, Malaya (Malaysia and Singapore), the Philippines, and Thailand. The judiciously selected maps, photographs, and tables detailing transport networks, wartime currencies, commodity outputs, and wages all serve to highlight the diversity of these economies. This is in contrast to the standard single-country historical analyses (e.g., Japan, Korea) that do not provide a comparative context. The shared narrative of Japanese (mis)administration and local loss, however, runs through each chapter, and Huffs holistic grasp of the multifaceted societies is astonishing.

For novices to this regions war experience, even the most basic facts are startling. For instance, the estimate that real per capita income fell by at least half in most of the occupied economies between 1938 and 1945 is shocking (p. 116). Put into context, a similar economic contraction also occurred in Japan in the last five years of war, but the latter was largely due to bombings and direct military conflict instead of the slow strangulation of production and appropriation by imperialists. Similarly, the frequently misunderstood concept of Japans Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is clarified both in aims and execution. Thailand and Indochina were designated as puppet states to provide some manufacturing and services while the remaining economies acted as producers of raw materials (p. 56). That the aims of a cohesive and self-sustaining economic bloc were not met even at the outset, which meant leaving each economy to fend for itself, testifies to the folly of the enterprise. Huff does not shy away from naming local officials who were complicit with the Japanese, such as Phibun (Thailand), Ba Maw (Burma), and Roxas and Laurel (Philippines). The book also has excellent dynamic treatments on the motivation for Japanese imperialism and each countrys political economy and major industries.

For scholars of specific countries in the region, the book is highly rewarding in having comparisons within each chapter so as to provide context to how the region was interconnected (or not, as the war progressed). If a fault in the book could be identified, and this may be a matter of taste, this organization of chapters by topic and subdivision by country may frustrate those who want fuller discussion of one country without needing to flip through multiple chapters. That said, the index at the books end does have extensive listings for each southeast Asian country.

What may be lacking more generally is not in the richness of the data and descriptions of the regions economies but in what lies outside the books discussions but may still be within its scope. There is no question about the enormous destruction under Japanese occupation, and this is the major takeaway point, but economic historians are also interested in counterfactuals. One such counterfactual is whether the region (or specific countries) could have fared better or worse without the Japanese and, by extension, not being involved in the war at all. As noted earlier, both Japan and its occupied areas suffered similarly in terms of overall magnitudes by income. Could the region or individual countries have escaped this level of destruction while being colonies of (or adjacent to those who were) Japans enemies? Would colonial trade still have persisted given the disintegration of the world economy? Related to this point, would it be accurate to describe the regions economies as flourishing before Japanese occupation since most were semi-dependent on external western powers? Extending the time series of some tables to include pre-Japanese occupation years may be useful to gauge the impact of colonization as a whole.

Huff is more explicit in addressing the longer-term consequences of Japanese rule, which include how occupation catalyzed self-determination in the region that would otherwise have remained part of other (western) empires. In the books epilogue, Huff suggests that regional independence was an outcome of both the war and Japanese occupation (p. 399), Thailand and the Philippines excepted for their own idiosyncratic reasons. This seems to be a reasonable, but perhaps unverifiable, hypothesis given the protracted and violent independence movements in Africa and the Middle East. At the same time, this also seems to be incongruent with the broader narrative about the brutality of Japanese occupation throughout the earlier chapters. Nevertheless, the wealth of information Huff provides to the reader outweighs any interpretative concerns and will likely generate much needed research into this part of the world.