Underground Asia
Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2021
AN ECONOMIST AND HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020
'Compelling and highly original ... The Asia that we see today is the product of the 'underground' which Harper describes with skill and empathy in this monumental work' Rana Mitter, Literary Review
The story of the hidden struggle waged by secret networks around the world to destroy European imperialism
The end of Europe's empires has so often been seen as a story of high politics and warfare. In Tim Harper's remarkable new book the narrative is very different: it shows how empires were fundamentally undermined from below. Using the new technology of cheap printing presses, global travel and the widespread use of French and English, young radicals from across Asia were able to communicate in ways simply not available before. These clandestine networks stretched to the heart of the imperial metropolises: to London, to Paris, to the Americas, but also increasingly to Moscow.
They created a secret global network which was for decades engaged in bitter fighting with imperial police forces. They gathered in the great hubs of Asia - Calcutta, Singapore, Batavia, Hanoi, Tokyo, Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong - and plotted with ceaseless ingenuity, both through persuasion and terrorism, the end of the colonial regimes. Many were caught and killed or imprisoned, but others would go on to rule their newly independent countries.
Drawing on an amazing array of new sources, Underground Asia turns upside-down our understanding of twentieth-century empire. The reader enters an extraordinary world of stowaways, false identities, secret codes, cheap firearms, assassinations and conspiracies, as young Asians made their own plans for their future.
'Magnificent - it reads like a thriller and was difficult to put down' Peter Frankopan, History Today
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.