Samurai To Soldier: Remaking Military Service In Nineteenth-century Japan (studies Of The Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)
by D. Colin Jaundrill /
2016 / English / PDF
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InSamurai to Soldier
Samurai to Soldier, D. Colin Jaundrill rewrites the
military history of nineteenth-century Japan. In fifty years
spanning the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the rise of
the Meiji nation-state, conscripts supplanted warriors as Japan's
principal arms-bearers. The most common version of this story
suggests that the Meiji institution of compulsory military
service was the foundation of Japan’s efforts to save itself from
the imperial ambitions of the West and set the country on the
path to great power status. Jaundrill argues, to the contrary,
that the conscript army of the Meiji period was the
culmination―and not the beginning―of a long process of
experimentation with military organization and
technology.Jaundrill traces the radical changes to Japanese
military institutions, as well as the on-field consequences of
military reforms in his accounts of the Boshin War (1868–1869)
and the Satsuma Rebellions of 1877. He shows how pre-1868
developments laid the foundations for the army that would secure
Japan’s Asian empire.
, D. Colin Jaundrill rewrites the
military history of nineteenth-century Japan. In fifty years
spanning the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate and the rise of
the Meiji nation-state, conscripts supplanted warriors as Japan's
principal arms-bearers. The most common version of this story
suggests that the Meiji institution of compulsory military
service was the foundation of Japan’s efforts to save itself from
the imperial ambitions of the West and set the country on the
path to great power status. Jaundrill argues, to the contrary,
that the conscript army of the Meiji period was the
culmination―and not the beginning―of a long process of
experimentation with military organization and
technology.Jaundrill traces the radical changes to Japanese
military institutions, as well as the on-field consequences of
military reforms in his accounts of the Boshin War (1868–1869)
and the Satsuma Rebellions of 1877. He shows how pre-1868
developments laid the foundations for the army that would secure
Japan’s Asian empire.