In 1945, year zero for "Nationalism in Asia", most of the region it describes was impoverished, backward and exhausted. After the calamitous Pacific War, China, India and Indonesia were in a final showdown with the great European colonial powers that had exploited them for decades. Korea had shrugged off Imperial Japan but was sliding toward a civil war that would divide the peninsula into two bitterly opposed, dirt-poor enemies. Japan was humiliated, in ruins and under occupation, brought so low by its defeat in World War II that few believed it could ever rise again.
Nationalism in Asia: A History Since 1945, by Jeff Kingston
336 pages
Wiley-Blackwell, Nonfiction.