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).
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…Helps western and
non-specialist readers grasp some key questions and debates on
which the course of Asia’s revolutions turned…Provides rich if
unsettling insights for American readers trying to understand the
role of human rights in Asia today.
*Wall Street Journal*
The first comprehensive look at this dense web of resistance. The
Asian underground laid long-burning fuses across great
distances—attacking colonial officials, organizing strikes,
founding schools, plotting insurrections, and raining down tracts
and pamphlets…Provides an unexpected key to understanding
contemporary Asian politics.
*New Yorker*
Harper’s magnificent, sweeping study of Asian revolutionary
movements from 1905 to 1927 is packed with sharp insights and
entertaining details. The book argues convincingly that this was
the period when anti-colonial activists in China, India, Indonesia
and Vietnam fatally undermined European imperialism in Asia.
*Financial Times*
Superbly original…Breaks new ground by showing how a collective
consciousness emerged among revolutionaries.
*The Economist*
Magisterial…Harper does not simply challenge the conventional view
of Vietnam’s history but also other Great Man accounts of
liberation struggles in different Asian countries, from Indonesia
to India, the Philippines to China. He does this through life
stories of intriguing individuals, downplayed or completely ignored
in standard histories because their approaches diverged sharply
from those of the figures now seen as the key saviors of their
countries, or because they moved between and influenced activists
in different locales, meaning their actions do not fit in a single
national frame.
*New Republic*
A magisterial history of anti-imperialism in Asia in the first
three decades of the twentieth century…The scale and ambition of
his work are nothing short of remarkable…Harper’s book arrives at
another moment of rebellion across Asia.
*Foreign Affairs*
A sweeping account…Harper’s broad perspective reveals the
interconnectedness of these anti-colonial struggles and their
reverberations more than a century later…Asia scholars and students
of international affairs will find this revisionist history to be
of exceptional value.
*Publishers Weekly*
It is breathtaking in its sweep, matchless in its command of
diverse sources spread across different archives, remarkable in its
empathy for the lives and emotions of forgotten men and women, and
for the clarity of its prose.
*The Wire*
Tim Harper’s Underground Asia is a marvel of a book. I have never
seen anything like it. Harper has the storyteller’s gift. He makes
connections across space and time and race and place that most
people can’t dream of emulating. No one understands the warp and
weft of the absolute powder-keg explosion of the beginnings of
nationalism in Asia writ-large better than Tim Harper.
*Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University*
Underground Asia is a monumental and magnificent study of
anti-colonial revolutionaries who forged solidarities across the
globe to mount a connected onslaught against the British, French,
and Dutch empires. Written with verve and panache, this is riveting
narrative history at its very best that would evoke the envy of the
finest novelists.
*Sugata Bose, Harvard University*
Underground Asia is 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, it is an astonishing feat of
archival detective work, and it is a flat out literary
masterpiece.
*Sunil Amrith, author of Unruly Waters*
Tim Harper is a rare historian-storyteller…Interesting anecdotes
propel a powerful story that lends credence to the belief that the
empires were quite rattled by the audacity of these groups of men
and women who could not be repressed into submission…This book has
truly brought alive all those characters who were either erased or
faded away from memory and paid them a tribute they richly
deserved.
*Indian Express*
A timely book for a moment of re-emerging popular rebellion, from
the militant farmer protests in India to the pro-democracy upsurges
in Thailand, Burma, and Hong Kong.
*Fifth Estate*
Harper succeeds in conveying a genuine sense of this ‘underground’
world, bringing many lesser-known figures to the fore and placing
the likes of Sun Yat-sen, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Tan Malaka, and Ho
Chi Minh in new contexts…Innovative in its scope…A rich social and
cultural history of an era that saw new national identities
forged.
*Journal of Interdisciplinary History*
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