Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire

by Tim Harper

Overview

An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year

A major historian tells the dramatic and untold story of the shadowy networks of revolutionaries across Asia who laid the foundations in the early twentieth century for the end of European imperialism on their continent.

This is the epic tale of how modern Asia emerged out of conflict between imperial powers and a global network of revolutionaries in the turbulent early decades of the twentieth century.

In 1900, European empires had not yet reached their territorial zenith. But a new generation of Asian radicals had already planted the seeds of their destruction. They gained new energy and recruits after the First World War and especially the Bolshevik Revolution, which sparked utopian visions of a free and communist world order led by the peoples of Asia. Aided by the new technologies of cheap printing presses and international travel, they built clandestine webs of resistance from imperial capitals to the front lines of insurgency that stretched from Calcutta and Bombay to Batavia, Hanoi, and Shanghai. Tim Harper takes us into the heart of this shadowy world by following the interconnected lives of the most remarkable of these Marxists, anarchists, and nationalists, including the Bengali radical M. N. Roy, the iconic Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, and the enigmatic Indonesian communist Tan Malaka. He recreates the extraordinary milieu of stowaways, false identities, secret codes, cheap firearms, and conspiracies in which they worked. He shows how they fought with subterfuge, violence, and persuasion, all the while struggling to stay one step ahead of imperial authorities.

Underground Asia shows for the first time how Asia’s national liberation movements crucially depended on global action. And it reveals how the consequences of the revolutionaries’ struggle, for better or worse, shape Asia’s destiny to this day.

Previous praise for Tim Harper

Praise for Forgotten Wars:
“[A] compelling book.”—Philip Delves Broughton, Wall Street Journal
“Lucid…majestic.”—Peter Preston, The Observer
“Authoritative.”—Pankaj Mishra, New Yorker

Praise for Forgotten Armies:
“Panoramic… Vivid.”—Benjamin Schwarz, New York Times Book Review
“A spectacular book.”—Martin Jacques, The Guardian

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674724617
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	01/12/2021
Pages:	864
Sales rank:	1,134,168
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Tim Harper is Professor of the History of Southeast Asia and Director of the Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge. His books include The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya and, with Christopher Bayly, Forgotten Armies and Forgotten Wars (both from Harvard).

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

Editorial Reviews

11/02/2020

Harper (The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya), a University of Cambridge historian, delivers a sweeping account of the “connected wave of revolution” that spread across Asia from the turn of the 20th century to the early years of China’s communist insurgency in the 1920s. Harper details anti-imperialist movements led by Sun Yat-sen of China, Indonesian liberation hero Tan Malaka, and Vietnamese revolutionaries Phan Boi Chau and Ho Chi Minh. Other Indian revolutionaries besides Mohandas Ghandi get their due, as Harper documents efforts by M.N. Roy, Maulana Barkatullah, and Har Dayal to throw off the yoke of British colonialism. A pivotal moment in the history of the Chinese communist revolution emerges in Sun Yat-sen’s acceptance in 1923 of Soviet aid offered by Mikhail Borodin, a Comintern official who advocated an alliance between Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party and Chinese communists and helped to found the Whampoa Military Academy in Canton (present-day Guangzhou), which enrolled “young radicals” from China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Harper’s broad perspective reveals the interconnectedness of these anti-colonial struggles and their reverberations more than a century later, yet the staggering level of detail may be overwhelming to lay readers. Nevertheless, Asia scholars and students of international affairs will find this revisionist history to be of exceptional value. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Forgotten Wars: Authoritative.

New Yorker - Pankaj Mishra

Praise for Forgotten Wars: Lucid... majestic.

The Observer - Peter Preston

Praise for Forgotten Armies: Panoramic… Vivid.

New York Times Book Review - Benjamin Schwarz

Praise for Forgotten Wars: [A] compelling book.

Wall Street Journal - Philip Delves Broughton

Praise for Forgotten Armies: A spectacular book.

The Guardian - Martin Jacques

Magisterial…Harper does not simply challenge the conventional view of Vietnam’s history but also other Great Man accounts of liberation struggles in different Asian countries, from Indonesia to India, the Philippines to China. He does this through life stories of intriguing individuals, downplayed or completely ignored in standard histories because their approaches diverged sharply from those of the figures now seen as the key saviors of their countries, or because they moved between and influenced activists in different locales, meaning their actions do not fit in a single national frame.

New Republic - Jeffrey Wasserstrom

It is breathtaking in its sweep, matchless in its command of diverse sources spread across different archives, remarkable in its empathy for the lives and emotions of forgotten men and women, and for the clarity of its prose.

The Wire - Rudrangshu Mukherjee

A continuing reminder of how clandestine forces, hidden yet overwhelmingly powerful, harbour revolutionary potentials that transform a world, in the same way that a seed planted and hidden underground secretly nurtures the roots of a stable tree.

European Journal of East Asian Studies - Regletto Aldrich Imbong

Harper succeeds in conveying a genuine sense of this ‘underground’ world, bringing many lesser-known figures to the fore and placing the likes of Sun Yat-sen, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Tan Malaka, and Ho Chi Minh in new contexts…Innovative in its scope…A rich social and cultural history of an era that saw new national identities forged.

Journal of Interdisciplinary History - Peter Zarrow

A magisterial history of anti-imperialism in Asia in the first three decades of the twentieth century…The scale and ambition of his work are nothing short of remarkable…Harper’s book arrives at another moment of rebellion across Asia.

Foreign Affairs - Adom Getachew

A timely book for a moment of re-emerging popular rebellion, from the militant farmer protests in India to the pro-democracy upsurges in Thailand, Burma, and Hong Kong.

Fifth Estate - Bill Weinberg

Harper’s magnificent, sweeping study of Asian revolutionary movements from 1905 to 1927 is packed with sharp insights and entertaining details. The book argues convincingly that this was the period when anti-colonial activists in China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam fatally undermined European imperialism in Asia.

Financial Times

Tim Harper’s Underground Asia is a marvel of a book. I have never seen anything like it. Harper has the storyteller’s gift. He makes connections across space and time and race and place that most people can’t dream of emulating. No one understands the warp and weft of the absolute powder-keg explosion of the beginnings of nationalism in Asia writ-large better than Tim Harper.

Eric Tagliacozzo

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…Helps western and non-specialist readers grasp some key questions and debates on which the course of Asia’s revolutions turned…Provides rich if unsettling insights for American readers trying to understand the role of human rights in Asia today.

Wall Street Journal - Walter Russell Mead

Underground Asia is 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, it is an astonishing feat of archival detective work, and it is a flat out literary masterpiece.

Sunil Amrith

Underground Asia is a monumental and magnificent study of anti-colonial revolutionaries who forged solidarities across the globe to mount a connected onslaught against the British, French, and Dutch empires. Written with verve and panache, this is riveting narrative history at its very best that would evoke the envy of the finest novelists.

Sugata Bose

Superbly original…Breaks new ground by showing how a collective consciousness emerged among revolutionaries.

The Economist

The first comprehensive look at this dense web of resistance. The Asian underground laid long-burning fuses across great distances—attacking colonial officials, organizing strikes, founding schools, plotting insurrections, and raining down tracts and pamphlets…Provides an unexpected key to understanding contemporary Asian politics.

New Yorker - Thomas Meaney

Tim Harper is a rare historian-storyteller…Interesting anecdotes propel a powerful story that lends credence to the belief that the empires were quite rattled by the audacity of these groups of men and women who could not be repressed into submission…This book has truly brought alive all those characters who were either erased or faded away from memory and paid them a tribute they richly deserved.

Indian Express - Ajay Singh