Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China by Shellen XiaoWu, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2023, xvi + 309 pp.

Interpreting the trajectory of modern China has long been a fundamental goal of scholars of China.In recent decades, books like Fairbank (1987), Fitzgerald (1996), Lary (2007), and Zarrow (2005) have sought to present grand narratives of China's experiences in the modern era.Others, like Wong (1997) or Chong (2012) take an explicitly comparative and international approach to analyzing China's modern state-building efforts.Few studies, however, have situated China's political development since the 19th century in the broad patterns of global history.Shellen Xiao Wu's book Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China succeeds in doing so by offering an original interpretation of scientific, agricultural, and state-building efforts by China, Japan, the United States, and Germany over the past 200-plus years.Specifically, the book illustrates how these developments were not siloed within national trajectories but instead had meaningful transnational connections.Through the presentation of innumerable examples, Wu challenges the reader to rethink theories of intellectual, economic, and political change that too often rest on the assumption of autonomous nation-states.She also succeeds in her goal of highlighting the individual contributions to the global historical forces that tend to receive the most attention in narratives of this kind.This success is manifest in how the book chronicles the lives and actions of many scholars, agronomists, officials, and geographers (among other professions) whose work, both intellectual and practical, transcended national borders.The sheer number of individuals discussed is evidence itself of the transnational nature of the knowledge networks Wu analyzes.However, the book does not simply recount these individual lives.The author also argues that these biographies shed light on how international professional networks shaped conceptions of frontier, agriculture, nation, geopolitics, and modernity in the countries covered by the book.Playing a central role in this narrative is the concept of geo-modernity, which Wu defines as "clearly demarcated borders and the use of the latest science and technology to develop borderlands through agriculture and the intensive exploitation of natural resources" (p.2).Geo-modernity encompasses a host of cultural and scientific ideas and practices and, the author argues, serves as the basis for geopolitics, or the strategic plans and actions of national governments.In other words, the nation-state system that matured in the 20th century owes its existence, at least in part, to the transnational networks comprised of individual experts, theorists, and officials who organically developed new ways of conceiving humanity's relationship to space and land.These new approaches included efforts at altering the agricultural viability of soil,