"Empires
on the Pacific is to be celebrated as one of the best
accounts available of the war against Japan."
— Toronto Globe & Mail
Empires on the Pacific smashes the standard narrative
of World War II in the Pacific theater, showing America's
aim to replace Britain as East Asia's New Imperial Power.
Robert Smith Thompson offers a long overdue explanation of
what America's war against Japan was really about —
in a word: China. The over-reaching British Empire was waning
yet unwilling to relinquish its foothold in China, while an
increasingly ambitious Japan was determined to dominate the
region by conquering China. Enter the young upstart, America.
For Franklin Delano Roosevelt and for the United States, the
war with Japan had little to do with revenge for Pearl Harbor.
Japan would have to be vanquished so that it would never again
be an imperial rival. Thompson's recasting of the Asian conflict
profoundly alters our understanding of World War II in the
Pacific and of what followed in Korea and in Vietnam. Revisionist
history at its best, Empires on the Pacific is a
far-reaching book that requires us to re-evaluate what we
thought we knew about twentieth-century American history and
what many still consider our last "good war."
Robert Smith Thompson teaches at the University
of South Carolina. His book A Time for War: FDR and the
Path to Pearl Harbor was the first serious work to argue
that FDR provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor as a way of justifying
America's entry into war. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina.
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