Belknap Press
Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire
Key Metrics
- Tim Harper
- Belknap Press
- Paperback
- 9780674292123
- -
- -
- History > Europe - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
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. These revolutionaries 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.
Author Bio
Professor Tim Harper focuses on history of Southeast Asia and lead School of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Professor Harper is also a Director of the Centre for History and Economics, a Publishing Member of Cambridge University Press and a Consulting Editor of Modern Asian Studies.
Tim Harper's research interests are centered on the history of modern Southeast Asia and the region's global connections. His first book, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (1999), was a study of war, communist rebellion and the achievement of independence in Malaya and Singapore.
Since then, he has published, with Christopher Bayly, a two-volume account of the Second World War and its aftermath in South and Southeast Asia, Forgotten Armies (2004) and Forgotten Wars (2007). His recent work has focused on mobility and interactions across Asia, and the sites, networks and ideas that emerged from this, as featured in Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (2020).
Source: University of Cambridge Faculty of History
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