This crucial interdisciplinary work brings together historians and international relations specialists to re-examine fourteen events in twentieth-century East Asia that shaped world and regional politics. In a series of case studies framed by conceptual essays the authors examine key moments and their wider significance, including the Chinese Exclusion Acts in the United States; the Japanese racial equality proposal at the Versailles conference of 1919; anti-colonial movements in Southeast Asia before 1945; and the changing nature of sovereignty in the Pacific Islands.