There is a profound revision taking place among scholars today who are examining the depth and complexity of what was earlier believed to be a simple enough Orientalist categorization of “East” and “West,” or “the West” and “the Rest.” Studies on modernization in “non-Western” societies and their relationships with Western powers tended to emphasize Europe's role rather one dimensionally as occupiers, mentors, or as models to emulate, thus yielding the conclusion that anti-Westernism is the reactionary end result, and that it is generally a response directed at liberalism by “traditional” elements of non-Western societies.

Cemil Aydın's work brilliantly challenges this assertion with his thoroughly researched monograph using an extensive source pool in various languages that until now had not been utilized to its fullest. In doing so, he makes a long overdue contribution to international history, linking Asian intellectuals who formerly were studied from a primarily “area-studies-constrained” epistemological vantage point. He succeeds in constructing a framework for understanding these relationships between Asians and with non-Asians that will set in motion more studies in this field for years to come. He explores who has defined the international world system at a particular point in time and traces how the rejection of that particular world order came about among many peoples in the late-19th to mid-20th centuries. Aydın's intellectual history captures the moment in which profound change is taking place in the “non-Western” world concerning views of the West and its believed civilizational supremacy in the modern era. His study identifies the beginning of an ideological trend that is relevant to understanding the international political climate today.

As represented by the attitudes of intellectuals, statesmen, and political activists hailing from the Ottoman Empire and modern Japan (as well as other nationalities/ethnicities in contact with individuals from these polities), these two political entities both engaged in a struggle to free themselves from the West's hegemonic appropriation of modernity by deconstructing Western claims to a superior civilization. They identified the West's imperialist violations of its own standards of civilization as defined by earlier European thinkers, and, in many cases, their Pan-Asian and/or Pan-Islamic writings suggested innovative ways in which to reorganize the world according to what they understood to be truer linkages between peoples (sometimes racially based) and more moral measures of civility than the ideals espoused by the decaying West.

As Aydın points out, “the Ottoman turn to pan-Islamism was partly a result of the failure of Eurocentric international society, which had pushed . . . [the Ottomans] to formulate a radical alternative” (p. 111); the Ottoman ruling elite had, for the most part until the Italian invasion of Tripoli and then the Balkan Wars, continued to tacitly accept European demands that the Ottoman Empire conform to Western political patterns and reform along European lines. The “Ottoman” moment of transition back to an idyllic gaze toward the West coincided with the transformation from a religiodynastic realm to the nation-state, which came shortly thereafter, when the Islamic office of the caliphate was abolished in 1924 by Atatürk and his fledgling Turkish republic.

The Japanese, who had survived Western encroachment and rapidly modernized by the turn of the 20th century, perceived the failure of the liberal Eurocentric international system and its moral bankruptcy to have been undeniably proved by the violent upheaval of World War I, a war in which Western powers battled one another over colonial possessions.

In both cases, the Ottomans and the Japanese altered colonial Asia's relationship with the West in revolutionary ways. On the one hand, the Ottoman call for jihad in 1914 “was instrumental in further eroding the legitimacy of the colonial powers in the Muslim world by emphasizing religious and national self-determination against foreign rule” (p. 110). This Ottoman decree, promulgated by Ottoman members of the ruling elite who were often Western educated and secular in outlook, reflects a desire to loosen the Western grip on the Islamic world just as Muslim intellectuals had been attempting to liberate modernity, understood to be a cultural possession of the West, from this perceived cultural origin since the mid-19th century. On the other hand, despite Japan's shift from a position of idealistic Pan-Asianism, which implied Japan as a “brother” nation assisting other Asians' liberation, to the sense of Japanese superiority over the rest of Asia and the right to rule it, imperial Japan's ousting of Western powers from Asia in World War II nonetheless did set the stage for full postwar decolonization of Asia.

Both the Ottomans and the Japanese expressed Pan-Asian/Pan-Islamic solidarities, yet ultimately both states acted for their own (imperial) political purposes in supporting such an ideology. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, Pan-Islamism abroad as a foreign policy was intended to generate unrest among Muslims under French, British, Russian, and eventually Italian control, who might then rebel against their occupiers who were threatening Ottoman interests.

Whereas most accounts of imperial Japan's behavior tend to place too much emphasis upon domestic, antiliberal impulses behind Japanese Pan-Asianism, Aydın is able to take a more nuanced view, balancing international and internal factors. He attributes Japanese actions and ideology in Asia to global currents, such as the need for isolationism and self-sufficiency (the “Asian Monroe Doctrine,” pp. 121, 165), the increasing significance of transnational identities in the 20th century, and a general feeling of anti-Westernism emanating from the legacy of European colonialism in the previous century. On a domestic level, Japanese government policies and the Anglo–Japanese alliance eventually forced a collaborative relationship of resistance between Pan-Asianist ideologues and ultranationalists, resulting in what Aydın calls the formulation of a wartime Pan-Asian discourse explicating the “Japanese international mission” in Asia. As early as the Nagasaki Conference (1926), however, there was a looming contradiction between Pan-Asian solidarity and Japanese colonialism in Korea and China.

Shortcomings in this monograph are few, yet I suggest a new edition to correct typographical errors in the text. Aydın's mention (on p. 178) of his surprise at a lack of anti-American sentiment in the Greater Asia Association's monthly publication in the 1930s, Dai Ajia Shugi, is perhaps not so striking, given the fact that Europe still possessed the most blatant Asian colonial legacy prior to 1945. One discernible dilemma of this work, subject of recent historian debate, is the relationship between elite discourses and nonelite populations when examining intellectual history. This falls beyond the scope of Aydın's book; his work clearly intends to explore a broad facet of global thought, and he does so with myriad sources to prove his arguments. However, it problematizes the extent to which an ideology propagated by literate-elite influences or has an effect upon mass society and its actions.

How does the historian measure this effect? Is this ideology limited to an elite audience, a well-placed circle of Japanese, Ottoman, Indian, or other Asian individuals, or are there other nontextual means by which Pan-Asian ideas are articulated that seep into Asians' everyday lives? The issue of literacy rears its head here, and although Japanese society in the 19th and 20th centuries is more literate than many other Asian cultures, the question remains unanswered.