Since diplomatic history took a cultural turn in the 1980s, historians of US foreign policy and culture have shared common cause in untangling the intersection of ideology with national security and economic concerns. In her recent book, Carol C. Chin, a diplomatic historian, merges her field's interest in ideology as a shaper of foreign policy with East Asian scholars’ interest in modernity. Chin focusses on the quarter-century between the First Sino-Japanese War and the end of World War I, when the world's newest and oldest empires – the United States, Japan, and China – reoriented themselves to the world. She argues that through experiences with armed conflict and reform in Asia, statesmen, reformers, and public intellectuals of each country came to champion participation in international affairs as a means of advancing national interests. By 1919, critical factions in each country supported internationalism as the cornerstone of the national identity they held of themselves and projected onto the world. According to Chin, the process of internationalizing national identities established the United States, China, and Japan as modern nation-states. By locating the advent of modernity in the United States, China, and Japan within the context of global conflicts in Asia, Chin gives us a new geographical and temporal starting point for understanding the form and development of modernity.

Through six chapters on war, peace, and women's rights, Chin charts the nascent internationalization of American, Chinese, and Japanese identities. This multinational study is based on close readings of multilingual sources, including popular US nonfiction, US missionary journals, major US magazines, Chinese feminist periodicals, and personal papers of US missionaries and statesmen, as well as US foreign dispatches between Washington and China.

Chin begins her study with the end of exceptionalism. She argues in the first two chapters that because of challenges to their national interests in Asia, the United States, China, and Japan were compelled to abandon illusions of superiority. Chin defines this reformulation of national identities around being one member of a “family of nations” as the advent of modernity.

The middle two chapters focus primarily on China. In her two most effective chapters, which cover women's rights in China, Chin shows that moderate and radical feminists from the United States and China created space in the Chinese debate over modernity for women to take an active role. She argues that American missionaries and suffragists in China planted the seeds of a local, Chinese feminist movement. Led by middle-class, college-educated young American women, the US Episcopalian and Presbyterian missions in China established women's schools out of the belief that Chinese women, as wives and mothers, could modernize China. Radicalized by their encounters with Western and Japanese feminism, Chinese suffragists blamed China's declining international standing on gender inequality and called for education reform and women's suffrage as central pieces in China's modernizing project. According to Chinese suffragists, China's competitiveness on a global scale pivoted on the equal contribution of its women. The striking genealogy of feminists and feminist thought in China outlined in these two chapters stands out as a particularly important contribution for scholars of gender and foreign relations.

The final two chapters assess the relationship between these national modernization projects and World War I. Chin begins this discussion in 1912, with the birth of the Republic of China and the death of the Meiji emperor, to tease out the tactics of internationally oriented nationalisms used by the three nations under study. The United States expanded its global influence by asserting itself as a defender of weaker nations, and sought to defend China against further territorial losses. China counted on its participation in international organizations and negotiations as the means for restoring its territorial claims to former tributary states. Japan used war and treaty negotiations to assert itself as the rightful regional leader, against American and European claims. Unfortunately for all three nations, their aspirations were dashed, as their interests were wedged out by larger global powers.

Scholars of American studies will appreciate Chin's book for its theorization of modern national identity formation. She calls on us to rethink how to study modernity by recognizing how countries have been spurred by their global entanglements to realign their national identities with modernity. Readers will note that she analyzes the transformation of national identity largely from above, leaving room for future work on the different publics that were slow to accept the blending of internationalism with nationalism. Nonetheless, her discussion of the geopolitical origins of modernity in Asia, and not in the political and cultural contexts of Europe, provides a productive approach to studying modernity in Asian countries, which are often seen as lagging behind European nations on this count.