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Overview
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
“Superbly original…Breaks new ground by showing how a collective consciousness emerged among revolutionaries.”
—The Economist
“A clearly written, brilliantly researched examination of the people and movements that shaped Asia’s course in the 20th century and continue to influence the continent today.”
—Walter Russell Mead, Wall Street Journal
“The most gripping work of history I have ever read. It is a truly profound meditation on the struggles for freedom that shaped modern Asia…a flat out literary masterpiece.”
—Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters
European empires had not yet reached their zenith when Asian radicals planted the seeds of their destruction. They gained energy and recruits after the Bolshevik Revolution, which sparked visions of a free and radically equal world. Thanks to cheap printing presses and the new possibility of international travel, these utopian revolutionaries built clandestine webs of resistance from London and Paris to Calcutta, Bombay, Hanoi, and Shanghai. Tim Harper takes us into this shadowy world, following the interconnected lives of Asian Marxists, anarchists, and nationalists such as M. N. Roy, Ho Chi Minh, and Tan Malaka.
Underground Asia shows for the first time how these national liberation movements crucially depended on global action and reveals how these insurgencies shape the region to this day.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780674292123 |
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Publisher: | Harvard University Press |
Publication date: | 04/04/2023 |
Pages: | 864 |
Sales rank: | 629,054 |
Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.60(d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations and Photographic Credits xi
Maps xv
Foreword xxvii
Prelude: On the Threshold of Free Asia (1924) Hypo-Colony 3
Evening at the Victoria Hotel 6
A Man Without a Country 10
The Bicycle Party 14
1 In Search of a Lost Country (1905)
A Swan Escaped from Its Cage 23
Sharing the Same Sickness 33
The Devil's Snare 44
The Asphyxia of Empire 50
2 Fugitive Visions (1905-1909)
The World, Steerage Class 55
In the Country of the Lost 65
Under Western Eyes 73
The Birth of the Underground 85
3 Empire's Inner Demons (1905-1909)
Anglo-Indian Jericho 97
Across the Black Water 106
'At Home' in South Kensington 117
Down and Out in Paris and Tangier 128
4 The Fury of Enlightenment (1909-1912)
A Republic of Asia 135
If I Were a Dutchman 148
Graveyard of Empires 156
The Hunt for Fat Babu 163
5 Pundits of the Seas (1912-1914)
A Modern Rishi 171
The Wedding of the Bomb 184
A Flare That Lights the Way 188
Vancouver to Budge Budge 197
6 The Great Asian War (1914)
A Postcard from London 207
The Battle for the Underground 217
Waiting for the Just King 226
A Lonely Man in a Small Country 234
7 Ghost Ships (1915)
Panic in Suburbia 241
Lahore to Mandalay 254
Isla Socorro to Balasore 260
Dismal Nationalism 272
8 The New Great Game (1915-1917)
Alone in Shanghai 279
The Merchant of Kobe 290
Reverend Martin Heads East 297
The Plot Against America 304
9 Victory! (1917-1919)
The Human Nation of the World 317
Rebuilding Babylon 330
Barefoot into the Streets 341
The Packet-Liner Revolution 354
10 To the New Mecca (1919-1921)
A Man with No Past 363
Deli: The City of Gold 371
Days in the Hotel Lux 377
Red Jihad 395
11 Rebels in Rubber Soles (1921-1922)
Nights in the Great World 417
Isolation Colonies 436
The Man Who Would Be King 441
Wild Learning 454
12 The Next World War (1922-1924)
Berlin to Kanpur 469
Europe Is Not the World 478
First Falling Leaves 485
The Birth of Aslia 497
13 Anarchy Loosed (1925-1926)
The Bobbed-Hair Woman 507
The Battle of Nanjing Road 521
June Days 528
A Thunderbolt to Clean the Air 540
14 The Long March of the Underground (1926-1927)
Beneath the Walls of Wuchang 555
The Coming of the Just King 568
Faith and Treason in Doomed Cities 579
No Harvest but a Thorn 604
Epilogue: Out of Exile
Living in Normal Time 617
The Orchestra at the World's End 632
Fierce Births, and Deaths… 641
And Dreams, and Visions, and Disenchantment 650
Notes 659
Principal Archival Sources 807
Acknowledgements 811
Index 815