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.
Undergound 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.
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
Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents List of Illustrations and Photographic Credits Maps Foreword Prelude: On the Threshold of Free Asia (1924) Hypo-Colony Evening at the Victoria Hotel A Man Without a Country The Bicycle Party A Swan Escaped from Its Cage Sharing the Same Sickness The Devil’s Snare The Asphyxia of Empire The World, Steerage Class In the Country of the Lost Under Western Eyes The Birth of the Underground Anglo-Indian Jericho Across the Black Water ‘At Home’ in South Kensington Down and Out in Paris and Tangier A Republic of Asia If I Were a Dutchman Graveyard of Empires The Hunt for Fat Babu A Modern Rishi The Wedding of the Bomb A Flare That Lights the Way Vancouver to Budge Budge A Postcard from London The Battle for the Underground Waiting for the Just King A Lonely Man in a Small Country Panic in Suburbia Lahore to Mandalay Isla Socorro to Balasore Dismal Nationalism Alone in Shanghai The Merchant of Kobe Reverend Martin Heads East The Plot Against America The Human Nation of the World Rebuilding Babylon Barefoot into the Streets The Packet-Liner Revolution A Man with No Past Deli: The City of Gold Days in the Hotel Lux Red Jihad Nights in the Great World Isolation Colonies The Man Who Would Be King Wild Learning Berlin to Kanpur Europe Is Not the World First Falling Leaves The Birth of Aslia The Bobbed-Hair Woman The Battle of Nanjing Road June Days A Thunderbolt to Clean the Air Beneath the Walls of Wuchang The Coming of the Just King Faith and Treason in Doomed Cities No Harvest but a Thorn Living in Normal Time The Orchestra at the World’s End Fierce Births, and Deaths . . . And Dreams, and Visions, and Disenchantment Notes Principal Archival Sources Acknowledgements Index Images
