Underground Asia
Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
