Key points

• Since the Industrial Revolution, global capitalist economy had been developing, with an expand­ing level of world trade.

• The First World War disrupted this development, with a profound negative impact on the inter­national economic system, which was initially masked by the vibrancy of the US economy in the 1920s.

• In 1929, the Wall Street stock-market crash induced a world depression, illustrating the degree to which national economics were affected by international economic forces.

• Depressions in many countries around the world resulted in extremist political movements gaining strength, many of which were of an extreme right-wing nature.

The origins of World War Two in Asia and the Pacific

Europeans sometimes display a tendency to regard World War Two as primarily a European phenom­enon. In fact, war was already under way in Asia before September 1939. So to understand how con­flicts in Asia and Europe merged into a 'world war' (albeit with distinct 'theatres'), we must clearly examine interwar developments in Asia, particularly in Japan and China.

In some respects Japan's position in Asia during the first decades of the twentieth century was akin to Germany's in Europe. After unification, Germany underwent rapid modernization and industrializa­tion. It had sought an enlarged empire, challenging those of France and Britain in the years prior to 1914. Germany emerged from the First World War aggrieved at the treatment meted out by the victors and determined to reverse key aspects of the Ver­sailles Settlement—a 'revisionism' heightened by the catastrophic consequences of the Depression. Under an extreme right-wing regime, Germany sought a solution to its problems through outward expansion, and found its path eased by the weakness of the states geographically closest to it. Much of this could also be said of Japan.

Japan and the 'Meiji Restoration'

During the reign of Emperor Meiji (from around 1868 to 1912), Japan's rulers fostered rapid indus­trialization, borrowing a model from Western Europe and North America. This was accompanied by a modernization of Japanese society and political life: the feudal agricultural system was abolished; the army was reorganized and conscription introduced, heralding the disintegration of the Samurai caste; education and foreign travel were encouraged; and a new parliamentary system was implemented. Like Germany's, Japan's rulers in the late nineteenth cen­tury developed imperialistic inclinations. Unlike Germany, Japan did not naturally possess within its own frontiers an abundance of the raw materials for industrialization. Both, however, shared a belief that their population was growing so rapidly that the populace would soon outstrip the state's geo­graphical and financial capacity to support it. Thus Hitler sought Lebensraum (living space) for the Ger­man people in Central and Eastern Europe, while Japan looked towards China as the most suitable sphere for expansion.

Japanese expansion in China

Just as Germany profited from the decline of its imperial neighbours (in Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Russia), Japan's expansionism was likewise eased by the state of near-extinction in which China lan­guished. China, once a great dynastic empire, by the late nineteenth century had almost ceased to func­tion as a state. The last emperor was toppled in 1911, and China slid into a protracted state of civil war. As provincial warlords fought one another, the Nation­alist Guomindang movement under Sun Yat Sen (and latterly Chiang Kai Shek) clashed with Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party, which ultim­ately triumphed in 1949. Such internal chaos, and the absence of strong central government, provided fresh opportunities for foreign 'profiteers'. China had long been infiltrated by outside powers, anxious for a share of its 'exotic' goods—tea, spices, opium, silk—and to trade with the world's most populous state. Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth century had the most extensive China trade, but Tsarist Russia was also heavily involved in railway-building in northern China. Japan took particular interest in the region of Manchuria, and clashed with Russia during 1904-5 in a war which marked the first major defeat in modern times of a European power by an Asian state. Japan's position in China was strengthened still further as a result of the First World War, during which Japan fought against Ger­many, using the opportunity to secure Germany's Chinese possessions.

Although Japan had opposed Germany, both felt dissatisfied by the terms of the Versailles settlement. Japan had tried, and failed, to have the principle of racial equality written into the terms of the treaties. That the Western powers were indeed racially preju­diced against the Japanese seemed to be confirmed by America's 1924 immigration legislation, which virtually prevented further Japanese immigration into the US. The Japanese government also felt that the country had not received adequate territory in recognition of its part in the war. As the 1920s pro­gressed, Tokyo additionally protested against the way in which America and Britain sought, through the Washington treaties, both to limit Japan's naval construction and to prevent China falling more effectively under Japanese domination.

Some Japanese policy-makers remained commit­ted to an internationalist policy during the 1920s. In particular they believed that Japan should behave as a responsible member of the international com­munity, and take an active role in the League of Nations. But increasingly the army gained promin­ence in Japanese political life. The officer class (especially that part of it stationed in northern China following Japan's victory in the 1904-5 war with Russia) pressed ever more forcibly for Japanese expansion in China. Japan's experience of social upheaval strengthened the appeal of militarism. In the late 1920s, Japan suffered from two destabilizing tremors, one literal, the other figurative. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths and the destruction of about 2,000,000 homes. The volcanic eruption seemed to symbolize the volatility of Japanese society during a period of rapid modernization. The second, metaphorical, great tremor to hit Japanese society was the Depres­sion. As in Europe, the socio-economic conditions of Japan's depression provided fertile soil for right-wing extremism. Outward expansionism looked even more attractive, and Japanese political and military leaders increasingly talked of establishing a 'co-prosperity sphere' in Asia. This phrase was a euphemism for Japanese economic hegemony (if not outright rule) over various neighbouring states. Such imperialistic aspirations were fuelled by rising Japanese nationalism, the ideological foundation of which was Shintoism: a belief in the divinity and infallibility of the emperor, to whom each citizen owed personal allegiance.