Asia Pacific in World Politics

frankly devoted to gaining economic or strategic advantages and political prestige by appropriating the backward lands of Asia, Africa, the Balkans and the Pacific. Imperialism ity, diplomacy its superficial expression. If this is true, as it appears to be, then the story of international relations before 1914 cannot be interpreted simply as a matter of narrowly European vendettas and erratic personalities. More attention must be given to the mines and railway concessions, the colonial markets and naval bases, in which the diplomats themselves were so vitally interested. By emphasizing the fact that the Great Powers are not nations but nation-empires, and by de voting a series of chapters to the reasons for international rivalry in arenas of conflict such as North Africa, the Near East, the Middle East, the Far East, and the Pacific, the writer has endeavored to concentrate attention on the things for which diplomats have contended, rather than on the diplomats them selves.