. . . . this edited volume is a valuable contribution to the academic endeavor of writing an integrated history of Northeast Asia and highlighting the interplay between the three main actors in the Far East. It presents “a genuine macro-regional history,” not a “medley of national histories” (ix).

Slavic Review

In general, the quality of the scholarship makes this an essential volume for specialists and a helpful one for anybody interested in Russia, China, and Japan’s interactions during all three countries’ late imperial periods and the revolutionary transformations of the first half of the twentieth century.

The Russian Review

In recent years many books on the history of the Far East have been published and attention to the region’s past has clearly increased. However, I agree with the editor of the book under review, Kimitaka Matsuzato, that its title is almost revolutionary because it reflects the current change in the understanding of Russia’s historical role in the region: from a supporting player to one of the main actors in the Far Eastern scene. . . . this book gives a large-scale and impressive picture of Russia’s participation in various spheres of life in the Far East during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Asian Review of World Histories

The book presents an informative selection of empirical case studies based on obscure or hitherto unexplored archival materials. Thus, they are a valuable contribution to the fields of Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Eurasian, and East Asian histories. Furthermore, the volume connects Japanese, English, and Russian historiographies, which alone can be seen as a tremendous achievement given the separation of national histories and respective area studies in international scholarship. The attention to institutions, populations, and press, treated separately from governments, also makes the book a welcome addition to the scholarship of the region.

Ab Imperio

This great collection, including contributions from an impressive cohort of Japanese scholars, uncovers a range of new sources and perspectives to build a history of Northeast Asia out of little-known cross-cultural and transnational encounters. The effect of adding Russia to the regional brew is bracing, serving to re-interpellate and reinterpret the dominantly Asia-centric literature.

David Wolff, Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University