British Intelligence and the Japanese Challenge in Asia, 1914-1941.(Book Review)

By ANTONY BEST (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002; pp. xiii + 269. 45 [pounds sterling]).

THE growth of intelligence studies, stimulated by the partial availability of intelligence files in the Public Record Office, has encouraged reassessments of its contribution to political and diplomatic history. As Antony Best remarks, a number of monographs investigating British policy in East and South-East Asia have appeared over the past thirty years, but a broader survey has been lacking. Best has now produced a valuable study, ranging chronologically from the era preceding Japan's entrance into the Great War, in support of Great Britain, and Japan's more dramatic participation in the Second World War with the attacks on Malaya and Pearl Harbor; geographically Best ranges from the western Pacific to India with an occasional brief excursion into the Middle East. Between 1902 and 1923 Britain and Japan were joined formally in the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Strains within …