The Russo-Japanese War In Global Perspective ― World War Zero

American military historians were inspired to begin this anthology by the Russian military history collection at the Finnish National Defense Library, and soon brought Russian and Japanese scholars on board. Though Europe's Great War of 1914-18 is generally called the First World War, they contend that such features as the spanning of continents and engagement of millions of people, financing and weapons manufacture by third-party countries, and the enhanced lethality of industrialized combat, first appeared a decade earlier in the 1904-05 war between Russian, an established European power, and Japan, an emerging Asian power. The overall themes are the foreshadow of the war, war on land and sea, the home front, and the impact. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

John W. Steinberg is Associate Professor of History at Georgia Southern University. His book on the education, training, and performance of the Imperial Russian General Staff, 1898-1914 is forthcoming.Bruce W. Menning is a Professor of Strategy at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. A specialist in modern Russian military history, he is the author of Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914.David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye is Associate Professor of Russian and East Asian History at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. He, together with Bruce Menning, edited Reforming the Tsar’s Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution.David Wolff is Senior Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, specializing in Northeast Asian political and diplomatic history. He has held appointments at Princeton and Berkeley. He is the author of To the Harbin Station: The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898-1914.Yokote Shinji is Professor of Russian History and Politics at Keio University. He is most recently author of Higashi Ajia no Roshia (Russia in East Asia).