World War I was a global conflict, yet in contrast with the vast outpouring of volumes focused on Europe, the impact of the war and subsequent peace settlement on Asia has attracted relatively limited attention. This collection of essays by a group of distinguished scholars seeks to remedy this situation, exploring the ramifications of the war and subsequent peace settlement from Asian viewpoints. Japan, China, India, and the Ottoman Empire, together with the British, French, and Dutch colonies in Asia, were all belligerents, with the first three sending delegations to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and joining the new League of Nations as founding members.

Particularly valuable is a broad overview essay by Mark Metzler, who juxtaposes different types and levels of crises in the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. He provides a detailed account of the wartime economic boom that much of Asia enjoyed as a result of demand for supplies of all kinds from the belligerent powers, especially the Allies, and its dramatic collapse in 1919–1920, accentuated by the return of the United States to the gold standard and the sudden imposition of fierce deflation from June 1919 onward. His insights into the intimate temporal and causal linkages—an “organic connection”—between deflationary postwar monetary stabilization and the synchronous political settlement complement and expand on those of Adam Tooze's masterly study, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (2014), (Asia after Versailles, p. 47).

India features extensively in Metzler's survey. Although over one million Indians fought in World War I, many in the Middle East, only recently have their contributions begun to win recognition. Metzler describes the war's profound and multifaceted impact on India itself. Up to half the victims of the 1918–1919 global influenza pandemic, perhaps fifteen million in all, may have been Indian—the greatest mortality rate in any country. He also highlights the degree to which before, during, and after the war, the British authorities used India's gold reserves to bolster their own country's financial position, so that “poor India systematically extended credit to rich England” (p. 41). Metzler's chapter clearly demonstrates how extensively and too often to the dominion's detriment—despite occasional efforts by such liberals as colonial secretary Edwin Montagu—Indian interests of all kinds were habitually subordinated to those of the metropole.

An equally stimulating chapter by Cemil Aydin, a noted scholar of both Pan-Islamist and Pan-Asian anti-Western movements, addresses the war's impact on the Islamic world. Ultimately, it broke up the Ottoman Empire and ended the caliphate over Sunni Muslims exercised by the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul since 1517. The implicit contract between the British Empire and the many Muslim soldiers in its Indian army—to respect Islam, especially its holy cities, and support the continuation of Ottoman authority in substantial portions of existing Ottoman territories—was, Aydin contends, broken by the postwar settlement. Effectively, the Allied powers dismantled the Ottoman Empire, converting many of its former Middle Eastern provinces into mandates under British or French control. The largely Turkish state that Kemal Atatürk founded—overturning most of the provisions of the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) in favor of a new settlement, the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), following the Turkish War of Independence—renounced pretensions to the caliphate or leadership of the Muslim world, pragmatically deciding that their small rump state, with perhaps eight million Muslims, should drop any aspirations to head a global community that outnumbered them many times over. The Lausanne agreement, Aydin argues, was an implicit bargain whereby Britain recognized Turkish sovereignty over Muslim Anatolia, in return for Turkey dropping Ottoman claims to influence over more than one hundred million Muslims in British India and Egypt. Turkey nonetheless became a model for other Islamic states, while Britain's Middle Eastern policies “irreparably damaged British imperial legitimacy in the eyes of its Muslim subjects” (p. 69).

If, in what historian Erez Manela has termed “The Wilsonian Moment” (The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism [2009]), anti-imperialist nationalists in Asia and the Middle East had pinned their hopes on President Woodrow Wilson's pledges of self-determination, these expectations proved short lived, dissolving at Paris in what Metzler terms “the Wilson bubble” (p. 48). Almost half this volume's chapters focus on an eclectic range of thinkers in Japan or China, two often antagonistic states that were usually at odds, not least over the disposition of Germany's Shandong concession in north China, captured by Japanese and British forces in late 1914. In both China and the large Chinese community in France, Wilson's decision to respect a 1918 agreement whereby the northern Beijing government ceded administration of Shandong to Japan in return for substantial loans prompted widespread nationalist demonstrations, and soon the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. China's failure in 1919 to obtain an end to foreign extraterritorial privileges and Wilson's effective veto of Japan's moves to include provisions for the equality of states in the League of Nations covenant were galling manifestations of Western privilege that likewise helped to discredit the fledgling international organization with many Asians. Yet at Paris, as Naoko Shimizu highlights, and indeed throughout the next two decades, China, its internally divided government notwithstanding, surely proved more effective than Japan in presenting its case in the international media and using the League for its own purposes. Indian activists, another chapter indicates, demanded—ultimately successfully—that their League delegations be led by Indians, not the viceroy or his handpicked surrogate.

This volume indicates how much still needs to be done to attain a comprehensive evaluation of how World War I and its aftermath played out in Asia. Despite Ho Chi Minh's well-known (though futile) 1919 appeal to Wilson at Paris, no chapter focuses on, for example, French Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, British Malaya, or Thailand. If something of a taster's menu, this invariably thought-provoking collection undoubtedly highlights the need for more in-depth, wide-ranging, and nuanced studies of the global consequences of World War I.