Chapter 5 discusses how industrial whaling was disseminated from Norway and Russia to the Japanese Empire in the late nineteenth century. It is argued that industrial whaling, invented by Norwegian whaler Svend Foyn in the 1860s, was taken up by Russian and Japanese whalers as a way to colonise the coastal waters and marine resources around the Korean Peninsula. Industrial whaling techniques allowed whalers to hunt even the largest whale species, such as blue and fin whales, which had a devastating effect on the feedback loops of the marine ecosystem. After a Japanese victory in the Russo–Japanese War of 1905, western Japanese whaling companies used colonial tactics to bring industrial whaling to the main islands. The chapter argues that the rise of industrial whaling altered the interaction between humans and cetaceans forever, leading to the swift destruction of the cetosphere. While industrial whaling was successfully disseminated in colonial Korea, Japanese fishermen were more resistant and began protesting the new methods even in regions that had long proto-industrial whaling histories. However, the fiercest protest against industrial whaling occurred in former non-whaling regions such as Hokkaido and the Northeast.

The chapter asks why an avowed pacifist wrote so many works, not all completely negative, about war. It begins with Tolstoy’s personal connection to the military, through both his family background and his own service. It describes the two wars in which he fought: the Long Caucasian War (1817–64) and the Crimean War of 1853–6, and it explains how he came to write War and Peace about the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. It then turns to other conflicts (the 1877–8 Russo-Turkish War and the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War) and military alliances (among others, the 1891–1917 Franco-Russian Alliance) in which Russia was involved during Tolstoy’s lifetime. Russia had been an empire since the conquest of Kazan in 1552, and all its external wars during Tolstoy’s lifetime were related to imperialism. Tensions with Germany simmered over many years. Finally, the failure after emancipation in 1861 to integrate the peasants into a new, just society created conditions for civil war that intensified in the late 1870s and led to the assassination, in 1881, of Alexander II and the revolution of 1905. The essay summarizes Tolstoy’s reactions to all these different kinds of war and warlike conditions.

During the reign of Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II (1894-1917), the advocates of freedom clashed sharply and frequently with the forces of order. The standing of the authorities suffered greatly with the humiliating loss of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. As the war was fought, domestic political unrest was also coming to a head. On “Bloody Sunday” in January 1905 hundreds of workers who had gathered to petition for better conditions and modest political reforms were shot down outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, opening a year of revolutionary protest and strikes. The era’s passionate political life forced writers and artists to confront anew how their art related to politics at home. Some joined the fray with striking works of political satire; others retreated to rarified aesthetics. Young rebellious writers under Maxim Gorky’s lead captivated the public with neo-Realism. Visual artists embraced experimentation; they and a group of writers took up aesthetic Modernism under the twin banners of Symbolism and Decadence. Innovations in music and dance – notably the Ballets Russes – found admirers at home and abroad. Avant-garde artists embraced humor and publicity, in the process introducing Russia to a new melding of art and celebrity.

By the end of the first tumultuous decade of the twentieth century, all sides of Russia’s cultural polygon would distance themselves from the tradition of Realism of prior decades. The center of gravity of Russian high culture would shift to Modernism – and Russia’s writers and artists would establish and defend a new claim to independent positions of authority within the country’s political and social hierarchy. In the immediate period of 1905 and its aftermath, left-leaning illustrators and authors, especially satirists, took aim at the old regime itself, enlisting ghouls, goblins, winged phantoms, and, most of all, the figure of death to mock the tsarist regime that had failed so miserably on several fronts. Other artists and writers, also seeking to rebel against the autocratic and the Orthodox, celebrated and adopted the occult and the Gothic as expressions of their own artistic and personal freedom. The lauded illustrator of Lermontov’s Demon, Mikhail Vrubel, turned the demon into an icon of artistic rebellion. The overt and open political rebellion of cultural figures coupled with the celebration of the Gothic represented a further step in the empowerment of a Russia defined by culture. The Russia of officialdom, in contrast, suffered successive defeats.

The American Civil War presented an exceptional state of affairs in modern warfare, because strong personalities could embed their own command philosophies into field armies, due to the miniscule size of the prior US military establishment. The effectiveness of the Union Army of the Tennessee stemmed in large part from the strong influence of Ulysses S. Grant, who as early as the fall of 1861 imbued in the organization an aggressive mind-set. However, Grant’s command culture went beyond simple aggressiveness – it included an emphasis on suppressing internal rivalries among sometimes prideful officers for the sake of winning victories. In the winter of 1861 and the spring of 1862, the Army of the Tennessee was organized and consolidated into a single force, and, despite deficits in trained personnel as compared to other Union field armies, Grant established important precedents for both his soldiers and officers that would resonate even after his departure to the east. The capture of Vicksburg the following summer represented the culminating triumph of that army, cementing the self-confident force that would later capture Atlanta and win the war in the western theater.

By 1918, Japan had achieved lofty goals conceived more than fifty years previously by those known in the West as the oligarchs, and in Japan as genro (elder statesmen). Over the next twenty-five years, these gains were lost as Japan experienced crises at home and launched disastrous military adventures abroad. In Japan, power had long adhered to those close to the emperor, who, himself, seldom ruled and who stood for no particular ideology. Japanese society consisted of many autonomous, competing groups. The father of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), Yamagata Aritomo, equipped it with several advantages in this competition, allowing it to eventually seize control of the state. The IJA led the nation into war with Manchuria, then China, and then the Allies. Its organizational culture produced tough, proficient, and courageous soldiers, who won three conventional conflicts. But its culture left it unable to deal with military losses; it was a culture that prized reputation over public honesty, ritualized death and placed its own judgment above question. According to its own creed, the IJA should have “done its utmost to protect the state.” Instead its soldiers are remembered in Japan and much of the world as “beasts.”

This chapter discusses the precarious status of Germany’s formal colonial empire and its tenuous hold in its spheres of interest in the Ottoman Empire, Japan, and Venezuela by 1905. It also explores how tensions during the Second Venezuela crisis, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Tangier crisis solidified British perceptions of German menace in need of containment. Germany’s formal colonies were a bitter disappointment in need of major reforms, while neglect and disengagement defined German relations with Japan. Meanwhile German investment in the Anatolian and Baghdad railroads in the Ottoman Empire generated new points of friction with Britain and Russia. A British-led Anglo-German intervention in Venezuela was perceived in the United States as a German provocation. Similarly, the Russo-Japanese War and Tangier crisis generated much British hostility toward Germany fueled by overblown fears of its navy that worked to bring about an Entente with France and agreement with Russia. Once again, a vast gulf separated the reality of Germany’s meagre capacities and its fragile finances from exaggerated images of menace often drawn from German naval propaganda.