This book investigates the 'warlord' period in China, focusing on the pivotal year 1924.

Offers a new interpretation of the Chinese nationalists, placing their war of resistance against Japan in the context of their efforts to establish control over their own country and providing a critical reassessment of regional Allied Warfare.

Has the emergence of nationalism made warfare more brutal? Does strong nationalist identification increase efficiency in fighting? Is nationalism the cause or the consequence of the breakdown of imperialism? What is the role of victories and defeats in the formation of national identities? The relationship between nationalism and warfare is complex, and it changes depending on which historical period and geographical context is in question. In 'Nationalism and War', some of the world's leading social scientists and historians explore the nature of the connection between the two. Through empirical studies from a broad range of countries, they explore the impact that imperial legacies, education, welfare regimes, bureaucracy, revolutions, popular ideologies, geopolitical change, and state breakdowns have had in the transformation of war and nationalism.

This interdisciplinary book is the first systematic study of the relationship between nationalism and war and, as such, makes an original contribution to theories of nationalism and state formation. It offers a dynamic and interactive framework by which to understand the role of warfare in its changing manifestations in the rise of nation-states, the formation of national communities, definitions of political rights and duties, and the transformation from a world of empires to one of nation states. Nationalism and War scrutinizes existing approaches that view both nations and nationalism as recent products of martial state-building that began with the military revolutions in Europe, and argues that nationalism and national communities emerged independently in the Middle Ages to shape both war-making and state-building. This book also explores the connection between war commemoration and the creation of nations as sacralized communities that offer meaning and purpose to a world marked by unpredictable change. It shows how nationalist military revolutions led to the downfall of Empires in total war and the mass production of postcolonial nation states. But problems of security have also inspired recurring patterns of re-imperialization. This book refutes claims that we are now in a global and post-national era where traumatic accounts have replaced the heroic narratives that once sustained nation-states. Finally, it appraises approaches that claim there is an inherent connection between nationalism and collective violence, arguing such connections are largely contingent.

A new perspective on how the nation-state emerged and proliferated across the globe, accompanied by a wave of wars. Andreas Wimmer explores these historical developments using social science techniques of analysis and datasets that cover the entire modern world.

Chinese leaders once tried to suppress memories of their nation’s brutal experience during World War II. Now they celebrate the “victory”—a key foundation of China’s rising nationalism. For most of its history, the People’s Republic of China discouraged public discussion of the war against Japan. It was an experience of victimization—and one that saw Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek fighting for the same goals. But now, as China grows more powerful, the meaning of the war is changing. Rana Mitter argues that China’s reassessment of the war years is central to its newfound confidence abroad and to mounting nationalism at home. China’s Good War begins with the academics who shepherded the once-taboo subject into wider discourse. Encouraged by reforms under Deng Xiaoping, they researched the Guomindang war effort, collaboration with the Japanese, and China’s role in forming the post-1945 global order. But interest in the war would not stay confined to scholarly journals. Today public sites of memory—including museums, movies and television shows, street art, popular writing, and social media—define the war as a founding myth for an ascendant China. Wartime China emerges as victor rather than victim. The shifting story has nurtured a number of new views. One rehabilitates Chiang Kai-shek’s war efforts, minimizing the bloody conflicts between him and Mao and aiming to heal the wounds of the Cultural Revolution. Another narrative positions Beijing as creator and protector of the international order that emerged from the war—an order, China argues, under threat today largely from the United States. China’s radical reassessment of its collective memory of the war has created a new foundation for a people destined to shape the world.

The New Nationalism and the First World War is an edited volume dedicated to a transnational study of the features of the turn-of-the-century nationalism, its manifestations in social and political arenas and the arts, and its influence on the development of the global-scale conflict that was the First World War.