Sheila Miyoshi Jager. The other great game: the opening of Korea and the birth of modern East Asia.

    A paean to Japanese militarism. What Sheila Miyoshi Jager calls "the opening of Korea" is the annexation and the brutal occupation by the Japanese. Chinese and Koreans are barely considered as people; only as objects of the Japanese policy. Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905), which acquired Japan a half of Sakhalin island from Russia but also got Japan a free hand in its robbery of Chinese Manchuria and Korea at the cost of several hundred thousand casualties and reign of terror over subjugated populations is celebrated as a great triumph of its foreign policy. United States, the friendship of which is upheld by Sheila Miyoshi as a cornerstone of its victory and achievement, in fact wrestled from the Japanese the fruits of its victory over Russia at the end in the Peace of Portsmouth. Yet, it led Japan into a swirl of militaristic expansion, which ended with the wars with the USSR and the USA and its ultimate defeat.  

Kenneth W. Harl. Empires of the Steppes.

 Historical science demonstrates a regressive tendency -- from history as science to semi-medieval chronicles telling mostly about the rulers and their campaigns. Kenneth Harl is not alone; he follows in the footsteps of Simon Montefiore, Frankopan and Adrian Goldsworthy in an almost total absence of scientific reflection. 

 I looked up his book thinking that I can learn about the origins of the steppe cultures, the structure and economics of their societies, historical, technological and environmental reasons for them springing from the tribal cradles into the world arena and the reasons their for their decline. I did not find any. Even the decline of nomadic empires in Harl's book ends by the death of Tamerlane and he declares that the nomadic warriors became obsolete with the emergence of gunpowder weapons. Not so; the origins of Mughal Empire in India, Safavid and Hajar Persia and spectacular conquest of the Ming Empire by Manchus were all the triumphs of steppe warriors with gunpowder and all against their settled neighbors.