Cundill Prize Finalist
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.

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).

Reviews
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. -- Walter Russell Mead * Wall Street Journal *
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. -- Thomas Meaney * New Yorker *
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 *
Superbly original...Breaks new ground by showing how a collective consciousness emerged among revolutionaries. * The Economist *
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. -- Jeffrey Wasserstrom * New Republic *
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. -- Adom Getachew * Foreign Affairs *
A sweeping account...Harper's broad perspective reveals the interconnectedness of these anti-colonial struggles and their reverberations more than a century later...Asia scholars and students of international affairs will find this revisionist history to be of exceptional value. * Publishers Weekly *
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. -- Rudrangshu Mukherjee * The Wire *
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. -- Regletto Aldrich Imbong * European Journal of East Asian Studies *
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, Cornell University
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, Harvard University
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, author of Unruly Waters
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. -- Ajay Singh * Indian Express *
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. -- Bill Weinberg * Fifth Estate *
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. -- Peter Zarrow * Journal of Interdisciplinary History *


Awards
Short-listed for Cundill Prize in History 2021 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9780674292123
Author Tim Harper
Format Paperback
Page Count 864
Imprint The Belknap Press
Publisher Harvard University Press
Weight(grams) 998g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 156mm * 38mm