Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Early Ethio-Japanese Contacts & the Yellow Peril
- 2 Ethiopia's Japanizers
- 3 Japanese Views on Ethiopia
- 4 Promise of Commercial Exchange 1923–1931
- 5 Japan's Penetration of Ethiopia Grows
- 6 The Soviet Union, Italy, China, Japan & Ethiopia
- 7 The Flowering of Ethio–Japanese Relations 1934
- 8 The Sugimura Affair July 1935
- 9 Daba Birrou's Mission to Japan
- 10 The End of Stresa, the Italo–Ethiopian War, & Japan
- Conclusion
- Appendix: The Ethiopian & Meiji Constitutions
- Bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Early Ethio-Japanese Contacts & the Yellow Peril
- 2 Ethiopia's Japanizers
- 3 Japanese Views on Ethiopia
- 4 Promise of Commercial Exchange 1923–1931
- 5 Japan's Penetration of Ethiopia Grows
- 6 The Soviet Union, Italy, China, Japan & Ethiopia
- 7 The Flowering of Ethio–Japanese Relations 1934
- 8 The Sugimura Affair July 1935
- 9 Daba Birrou's Mission to Japan
- 10 The End of Stresa, the Italo–Ethiopian War, & Japan
- Conclusion
- Appendix: The Ethiopian & Meiji Constitutions
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Origin of my work
In February 1991, Greenwood Press published Russia and Italy Against Hitler, in which I described the developing relations in the first half of the 1930s between the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy. For the kremlin, I argued, Italy had a most important role to play in forging the incipient collective security coalition designed to keep Germany in its place and to protect russian and Italian interests in the Balkans. Until 1936, Italy was the one power with the will and the means to stop in its tracks German expansionism through direct political and military intervention against Anschluss in Austria – the gateway to the Balkans.
My current work focuses on Ethio-Japanese relations culminating in the Second Italo-EthiopianWar of 1935 and 1936 and follows on logically from my earlier monograph. How could this be?After all, Ethio–Japanese relations seem obscure and at best tangential to Italo–russian relations and the momentous events of the 1930s.
Soviet historians as well as many in the bourgeois West have long trumpeted the Soviet Union's principled and altruistic position on the Second Italo–Ethiopian War. Marxism-leninism, after all, was steeped in anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-Fascism.these observers say the Soviets consistently and without guile defended Ethiopia's sovereign rights against Italy's colonial predations to the detriment of their relations with Italy. Whileworking on Russia and Italy Against Hitler, I found many contemporary accounts in the communist press supporting this opinion.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Alliance of the Colored PeoplesEthiopia and Japan before World War II, pp. xi - xviiiPublisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011