Japan was a country isolated from the rest of the world for most of her history. Japan is an island, making it difficult to access, and this fact also separated it from most of the history of other Asian nations. This began to change when the first European ships arrived and sought trade with different parts of Asia. Japan resisted for a time, but eventually the Japanese began to see certain defense and trade advantages in making alliances with different countries. Britain was one of the European countries seeking an alliance with Japan, and both Japan and Britain investigated such an alliance for the same reason--a fear of Russia and a desire to keep Russia at bay. The United States was the first to try to open Japan to the outside world, but Britain made diplomatic agreements with Japan that would last through the first two decades of this century and that would help shape the pre-World War I international scene. At the end of the nineteenth century, the first of several Anglo-Japanese alliance treaties came into being, offering each of the signatories some of what they wanted and creating a relationship that would last into the twentieth century. The British and the Japanese renewed their agreement twice, each time seeking some change in the basic agreement while reaffirming the need for an alliance.
In the era after the end of the empire of Napoleon III in 1871, Bismarck set out to keep France powerless and isolated, and his first step was to develop the Three Emperors' League of Germany, Austria, and Russia. This only lasted five years, ending when Britain opposed Russian expansion toward the Dardanelles and Austria. Germany would continue to try to prevent an alliance between Russia and France. Britain was changing her stance. Through most of the nineteenth century, Britain had taken a complacent isolationist policy based on the continuance of her own security, but as the militarist spirit increased in Germany and...