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Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire
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58
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
34/100Critics
44/100Scholars
94/100Author:
Tim Harper
Publisher:
Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
Date:
January 12, 2021
Tim Harper shows on an epic scale how Asia's anti-imperial movements depended on global revolutionary networks, and he traces the lingering power of internationalist utopian dreams in the postcolonial world.
What The Reviewers Say
... the first comprehensive look at this dense web of resistance.
Activists like Pham Hong Thai, working to wrest their homelands from foreign control, are the subject of Harper’s magisterial book, which traces revolutionary struggles across Asia in the years between 1905 and 1931. The locales that interest him are cosmopolitan ports that were at least partly incorporated into Western empires—cities such as Canton, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Saigon, which were magnets for militants on the move.
With the center of gravity of world politics now firmly located in the Indo-Pacific, many are looking for ways to deepen their understanding of the most populous, fastest-growing and potentially most dangerous region in the world. Tim Harper’s Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire is an excellent place to start. It is 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.
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..
