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Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Overthrow of Europe's Empires in the East
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 underneath. 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, 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 empire -Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore, Penang, Batavia, Hanoi, Shanghai 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 exotic sources, Harper's book turns upside down our understanding of 20th-century empire. The reader enters an extraordinary world of stowaways, false identities, secret codes, cheap firearms, posters and conspiracies as young Asians made their own plans for their future.
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 empire -Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore, Penang, Batavia, Hanoi, Shanghai 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 exotic sources, Harper's book turns upside down our understanding of 20th-century empire. The reader enters an extraordinary world of stowaways, false identities, secret codes, cheap firearms, posters and conspiracies as young Asians made their own plans for their future.
826 pages, Hardcover
First published July 2, 2020
89 people are currently reading
2419 people want to read
About the author
Tim Harper
18 books15 followersA specialist in the history of modern Southeast Asia and the region's global connections, Timothy Norman Harper is Director of the Centre for History and Economics, Professor of the History of Southeast Asia, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Magdalene College.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
June 23, 2023
Epic, brilliant history of anticolonial revolutionaries of the early 20th century and how they coalesced into the non-Euro wing of the Comintern; admirable in all sorts of ways but especially in how it traces the multiple identities, the many passports and many addresses and names of its central figures like M.N Roy, Ho Chi Minh and Tan Malaka.
January 19, 2021
This book was tedious to get through, but was well researched and well written. It explains a lot of history that preempted the US involvement which led to WWII. The stage was set in the 20's and early 30's for today's governing of Vietnam, Malaysia, China, India and Indonesia, and Japan's position that it had in those times leading to the WW. Russia's involvement was pivotal in those countries as well. I was surprised at the low ratings that was given by other people who read the book.
March 16, 2021
What should have been a gripping tale about 200 pages shorter is instead a tedious slog to get through. Fascinating research, but there's virtually no narrative here at all, even though Harper clearly knows that his readers desperately want a narrative. The eye-rolling 'reveal' that one of the main characters in the narrative is in fact Ho Chi Minh comes so late in the book that you've already forgotten all his other names, and is the kind of thing that an academic thinks will be really exciting for readers when they don't entirely trust their readers.
October 27, 2021
This dauntingly detailed book on the roots of Asia's anti-colonial movements documents the early influence of anarchism, and how it was ultimately displaced by nationalisms of different stripes—from the Moscow-aligned Leninist nationalism of Ho Chi Minh, to the fascist-inspired Hindutva movement that effectively rules India today. The early vision of a universalist, libertarian anti-colonialism evokes a tantalizing sense of what might have been. 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. Full review on my website:
https://countervortex.org/blog/book-r...
https://countervortex.org/blog/book-r...
February 26, 2021
Whatever horrors the Communist Party of China is now inflicting on its people, and those horrors are intense and many, the British, French, and Dutch inflicted on their colonial subjects in SE Asia and fully cooperated with each other in doing so.
The book is a hard read because it is a super-litany of facts about hard to read names of peoples and places. And the author compounds the problem: most of the revolutionaries used a myriad of aliases; the author expressly chooses to refer to the person only by the alias during the time that the person used the alias; the author provides no “cast of characters” but refers you to use the index to figure our who the character is ; using the index is cumbersome and not comprehensive.
I read the Kindle version; the book is close to 1000 pages.
The book is a hard read because it is a super-litany of facts about hard to read names of peoples and places. And the author compounds the problem: most of the revolutionaries used a myriad of aliases; the author expressly chooses to refer to the person only by the alias during the time that the person used the alias; the author provides no “cast of characters” but refers you to use the index to figure our who the character is ; using the index is cumbersome and not comprehensive.
I read the Kindle version; the book is close to 1000 pages.
September 26, 2023
Well researched and a veritable rabbit hole of fascinating characters. Could easily be expanded into a 10 part encyclopedia. I found myself stopping and doing lots of independent research while reading and taking notes. If you simply want to knock a book off your shelf I would not recommend. To simplify and reduce it would betray the immense value this work has.
February 17, 2021
An historical tour de force covering the loose network of resistance movements and anti-colonial actors in Asia from the early part of the 20th century to the Second World War. Focused mainly on India, China, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia it connects them back to the Soviet Union and the support and encouragement they received (and didn’t) as they navigated between nationalism and communism. It doesn’t pull its punches in describing the personal egos and flaws at play and the netherworlds they inhabited. Sometimes dense to read and to follow the complex interplay between characters, this is however, a huge contribution to a little covered area.
April 15, 2021
Detailed to the point of incoherence. The author fails to help the reader in any way: there is no context setting - just a flow of words and details. So much that you get the feeling that there must be some other book you were expected to have read to make sense of this one. Concepts start being used with barely any explanation or substantiation and jumble one on top of the other.
There is no pause for explanation of who the many personalities are and their relative importance - they appear in steady succession almost without comment. Take Tan Malaka - a influential figure in Indonesia’s struggle for independence for whom the author treats as almost a mystical figure. But despite appearing throughout, he’s more or less buried in this book - his wikipedia page does a far better job explaining who he is, who he influenced, what he did, etc.
And despite all the mind numbing detail - who sailed on what ship, who ran into which customs officers, etc. There are references to what appear to be interesting events - e.g. a shocking act of political violence or upheaval - that are not explained in anyway.
I toughed it through all 658 pages - but do not recommend others follow suit. Need to track down the original review that put this in my list and make sure to never listen to that reviewer again.
There is no pause for explanation of who the many personalities are and their relative importance - they appear in steady succession almost without comment. Take Tan Malaka - a influential figure in Indonesia’s struggle for independence for whom the author treats as almost a mystical figure. But despite appearing throughout, he’s more or less buried in this book - his wikipedia page does a far better job explaining who he is, who he influenced, what he did, etc.
And despite all the mind numbing detail - who sailed on what ship, who ran into which customs officers, etc. There are references to what appear to be interesting events - e.g. a shocking act of political violence or upheaval - that are not explained in anyway.
I toughed it through all 658 pages - but do not recommend others follow suit. Need to track down the original review that put this in my list and make sure to never listen to that reviewer again.
June 29, 2021
This book has probably 100 characters and Harper doesn't seem to notice that it's impossible to keep track of them. There's kind of a big reveal in the last 15 pages about one of his three main characters that is legitimately shocking and interesting, but the 97 other characters just kind of disappear into the swamp. Some of this is deliberate, but it feels kind of dehumanizing, too: I know these guys are in the underground, but should they also be underground to me, especially when they're going to get killed or tortured in an island prison?
This did make me rethink a lot of what I thought I knew about revolutionary anti-colonialist movements; it's legitimately very cool that students in Shanghai in the 1920s liked Lenin more than any other figure in their country, it's cool to understand more about the internicine leftist feuds in India, to imagine how scary the masses of the archipelago of Southeast Asia were to their colonialist overlords, to remember that the U.S. was also a colonialist power. But 650 pages of it is obviously way too much.
This did make me rethink a lot of what I thought I knew about revolutionary anti-colonialist movements; it's legitimately very cool that students in Shanghai in the 1920s liked Lenin more than any other figure in their country, it's cool to understand more about the internicine leftist feuds in India, to imagine how scary the masses of the archipelago of Southeast Asia were to their colonialist overlords, to remember that the U.S. was also a colonialist power. But 650 pages of it is obviously way too much.
March 26, 2025
Global history at its best, Underground Asia is a sprawling, dense, and methodical account of the activities of anti-colonial radicals from Asia in the early 20th century. It tries to capture this circuitry of the global underground, or “village abroad”, that was so central to the struggles of many revolutionaries, who, ironically, after long periods of sojourn and exile, ended up with the nation as their terms of reference. It takes a lot for the reader to keep up with the names and activities because there’s simply so much going on. At all turns, there’s always a double act at play. The slipperiness of the globe-trotting revolutionaries was matched by the buildup of transnational policing. The “war to end all wars” in Europe was met with the brewing of multiple plots (some planning to use the Europeans against themselves; some trying to wriggle free from all European intervention) to plan a war to end all colonialism.
The accolades this book has since received speak to its impeccable research. Being not a historian myself, I don’t have much to say about the substance. What drew my attention is the firmly anti-nationalist historiography that is embodied by this concept of the global underground. For these revolutionaries, and thanks to the advent of steamships, the world was their oyster. Their footprint was as much global as it was underground. People like Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh), M.N. Roy, and Tan Malaka had crossed two, if not three, continents.
They had to move around for education, opportunities, exile, and to be seen (mainly in the metropoles) for fund-raising, solidarity-building, and credential-making (who gets to represent Asia is very much a recurring theme). But they also had to be subterranean to evade attention and capture, not least because many did not have funds, or eventually ran out of it. This subterranean zone of subversion – the “port city slums and the mining and plantation frontiers of the tropical colonies– eventually “became the foci of world-historical change” (p. 93). Harper’s genius is that his patient pen is able to track the most important happenings in this liminal space between the global and the local, the glorious and the glum, as well as events both macro and idiosyncratic. I thought using the case of the “bobbed hair woman”, Wong Sang, who perpetrated a bombing in Kuala Lumpur, to highlight the zeitgeist- one of subject liminality, unclear motives, and explosive violence- is a great literary stroke. Historians remain the best person to make sense of terrorism because they read it not for theory but for the times.
One hopes that, in the end, Harper might be able to offer some reflections. Disappointingly, he didn’t. There was no comment on the irony of revolutions involuting, as metropolitan radicals had to settle for nationalist goals (whether willingly or not, as many were swept away by their more suave and brutal counterparts like Stalin and Sukarno) that ended up burying, for many decades, the kind of anti-nationalist historiography Harper excels in. Or, perhaps, the comparison between past and present, as radicals from the jihadist bent to the far right, all, as their predecessors, leveraged the global underground for invisible growth and/or spectacular violence. Without making a moral equivalence, it’s noteworthy that Bin Laden and the Christchurch shooter have some sort of a global footprint. The online space today is very much a global over-, or underground, depending how one sees it. Yet, writing in early 2025, the jihadist project, the green project, or the far-right project have all seemingly settled (if they weren’t defeated) into familiar nationalist framings and preoccupations. The global village is alluring, but the revolution seems destined to be homebound.
The accolades this book has since received speak to its impeccable research. Being not a historian myself, I don’t have much to say about the substance. What drew my attention is the firmly anti-nationalist historiography that is embodied by this concept of the global underground. For these revolutionaries, and thanks to the advent of steamships, the world was their oyster. Their footprint was as much global as it was underground. People like Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh), M.N. Roy, and Tan Malaka had crossed two, if not three, continents.
They had to move around for education, opportunities, exile, and to be seen (mainly in the metropoles) for fund-raising, solidarity-building, and credential-making (who gets to represent Asia is very much a recurring theme). But they also had to be subterranean to evade attention and capture, not least because many did not have funds, or eventually ran out of it. This subterranean zone of subversion – the “port city slums and the mining and plantation frontiers of the tropical colonies– eventually “became the foci of world-historical change” (p. 93). Harper’s genius is that his patient pen is able to track the most important happenings in this liminal space between the global and the local, the glorious and the glum, as well as events both macro and idiosyncratic. I thought using the case of the “bobbed hair woman”, Wong Sang, who perpetrated a bombing in Kuala Lumpur, to highlight the zeitgeist- one of subject liminality, unclear motives, and explosive violence- is a great literary stroke. Historians remain the best person to make sense of terrorism because they read it not for theory but for the times.
One hopes that, in the end, Harper might be able to offer some reflections. Disappointingly, he didn’t. There was no comment on the irony of revolutions involuting, as metropolitan radicals had to settle for nationalist goals (whether willingly or not, as many were swept away by their more suave and brutal counterparts like Stalin and Sukarno) that ended up burying, for many decades, the kind of anti-nationalist historiography Harper excels in. Or, perhaps, the comparison between past and present, as radicals from the jihadist bent to the far right, all, as their predecessors, leveraged the global underground for invisible growth and/or spectacular violence. Without making a moral equivalence, it’s noteworthy that Bin Laden and the Christchurch shooter have some sort of a global footprint. The online space today is very much a global over-, or underground, depending how one sees it. Yet, writing in early 2025, the jihadist project, the green project, or the far-right project have all seemingly settled (if they weren’t defeated) into familiar nationalist framings and preoccupations. The global village is alluring, but the revolution seems destined to be homebound.
March 13, 2025
Far too long and bogged down with names and events like a lot of leftist history, still an amazing evocation of the vanished world of transnational asian anti colonial revolutionaries that sprung up pretty much as soon Imperial powers finished dividing the world at the end of the 19th century. Reading this you get a deep sense of the milieu they inhabited-bustling port cities with their gangsters, seamen and students, oppressed rural hinterlands, penal colonies, Euorpean capitals where they would seek funds from germany or moscow for violent dreams. The changing ideology of the time is also explored, from demanding equal rights in the imperium, to nationalism to anarchism to communism. The narrative also one of failure, exile, paranoia, and the rise of the next generation who were more effective, but harsher and cruder with their vision of the world. Exotic but melancholy in a lot of ways people are far more connected but borders are far more solidified.
January 8, 2025
The best thing of this book is understanding and recalling other stories. Within its bulk of pages, anyone can find elements of interest; the reading captures you in reflections and personal notes that you feel compelled to jot down. And so the story, rather than ending, continues to replicate itself.
The many pages dedicated to women are an example of this.
“No phenomenon heralded the Asian revolution as much as the advent of the modern girl. Suddenly, across all of Asia, women gained visibility: on the streets, in the factories where they worked, in shops, and on public transport. They began speaking directly, shortening their skirts, applying makeup to their cheeks, and crossing their legs in public.”
The many pages dedicated to women are an example of this.
“No phenomenon heralded the Asian revolution as much as the advent of the modern girl. Suddenly, across all of Asia, women gained visibility: on the streets, in the factories where they worked, in shops, and on public transport. They began speaking directly, shortening their skirts, applying makeup to their cheeks, and crossing their legs in public.”
March 20, 2021
This is a great book that, inexplicably for me, does not have many ratings and comments, but deserves it (the book is Financial Times Best Book of the Year). First, I must warn you that the book is large and covers a number of topics. The author definitely knows what he is talking about and shows well how anti-colonial and resistance movements are developing from India to Shanghai. The author describes the underground structures and networks that support these movements and that mark this part of the world forever. Lots of facts that I want to reach to more readers. I recommend the book and thank the publisher and NetGalley that I had the opportunity to receive a copy of the book.
January 3, 2023
An interesting examination of the Asian activists, freedom fighters, and expats who worked to overthrow imperialism in the early 20th century and in the process laid the groundwork for the success of revolutions after 1945. Although it was sometimes hard to keep track of the various figures who come in and out of the story, Harper does an admirable job of showing how ideas spread, how leaders went in and out of jail and at times disappeared from policemen’s radar as they crossed borders, and how would-be revolutionaries’ political objectives morphed from focusing on internationalism to nationalism
May 22, 2023
A labyrinthine immersion into the complicated and complex community that eventually freed the Asian continent from colonialism.
To be really appreciated Harper's book requires a decent grounding in political science but also Asian, colonial, and 21st century history. This is a rolling and tumbling story with loads of interesting characters criss crossing continents to further their ambitions.
Different readers are likely to come to this topic with some expertise in one or other of the countries discussed, some may have more, but I'm sure there's enough new material here to pique everybody's curiosity.
To be really appreciated Harper's book requires a decent grounding in political science but also Asian, colonial, and 21st century history. This is a rolling and tumbling story with loads of interesting characters criss crossing continents to further their ambitions.
Different readers are likely to come to this topic with some expertise in one or other of the countries discussed, some may have more, but I'm sure there's enough new material here to pique everybody's curiosity.
April 13, 2021
Very good
A very good, in fact fascinating history of Asian revolutionaries and independence fighters (not always the same thing!), men and women, in the early decades of the 20th Century. They came from many countries and from all backgrounds, they travelled all over the world. They cooperated, they were rivals, they fought against long odds. Initially, it is not easy to keep them apart and to remember who was who, but overall, this paints a fascinating story over their successes – and of their failures.
A very good, in fact fascinating history of Asian revolutionaries and independence fighters (not always the same thing!), men and women, in the early decades of the 20th Century. They came from many countries and from all backgrounds, they travelled all over the world. They cooperated, they were rivals, they fought against long odds. Initially, it is not easy to keep them apart and to remember who was who, but overall, this paints a fascinating story over their successes – and of their failures.
April 28, 2021
My sense is that Tim Harper hit on a very fertile issue that would have resulted in a world class piece of work - but for the absence of a talented editor! This is a case of the view not being worth the climb. I am enjoying the newfound knowledge, and I do not know where else one might acquire it, but I am exhausted, and slightly irritated at the author and his publisher!
September 4, 2024
An ambitious, wide ranging sprawl of a book that attempts to document the East, South and Southeast Asian revolutionaries during the dying embers of European empires, with a particular focus on the Indonesian revolutionary Tan Malaka
The author's contempt for communism, particularly Stalin, is clear throughout
The author's contempt for communism, particularly Stalin, is clear throughout
March 30, 2025
A really interesting book that makes the argument that anti-imperial revolutions in Asia in the early 1900s were connected and part of a world of revolutionaries that flowed freely between nations. Really a global history, with connections to the Soviet Union and Mexico, this work is beautifully written and deep on source material.
June 6, 2022
A masterly chronicle of the intricate web of global revolutionary movements which shaped the twentieth century. Brings together a host of characters ranging from Tan Malaka, M N Roy, Savarkar, Rash Behari Bose, Mikhail Borodin, Sun Yat Sen and Ho Chi Minh as never before.
February 4, 2022
Honestly very well written and researched but perhaps a bit too ambitious. It is a bit of a challenge to keep track of all of the narratives.
January 17, 2023
Dry
This was a bit of a slog to get through but lots of information. I would recommend it for those very interested in Asian history.
This was a bit of a slog to get through but lots of information. I would recommend it for those very interested in Asian history.
January 18, 2023
Barely readable and frustrating. A treasure trove of data about anti-colonial movements between 1890 and 1930, totally lacks any narrative structure. A wasted opportunity
January 25, 2023
The best book on this topic. It merges many studies on different aspects into a worthwhile and well-written read. Though it's long, it is well worth the journey.
January 28, 2024
Very dense writing. I got lost in names, countries and continents
March 10, 2025
If i could give 0/5 i would
May 9, 2024
Underground Asia is ultimately an incredibly sad history. It documents a moment in history where time and space were brought together by the necessity to struggle. The cruelty of imperialism meant that the greatest thinkers of a generation were exiled or imprisoned and Harper pays tribute to the power of individual acts and lives against fragile empires. Harper attempts to capture the liminal spaces in the ports and cities of the world, where movements and plots began.
There is tragedy in how these revolutionaries couldn’t enact their revolutions in their homelands and being in isolation become progressively more dogmatic. The left splinters of course and Harper places this against the power of imperial forces, whose records contributed enormously to this book.
What stays with me is the margins of failure. How opportune moments are flipped on their heads and could-have-berms fade into history.
Truly an incredible feat, Harper almost single-handedly revived dozens of histories, weaving them in with each other to demonstrate how this era of resistance was both created and crushed by a globalised system. The amount of research is staggering but translates to a book that is a hard read, often getting lost in names and dates. The thrill of plots kept me engaged in this book, but as a fiction reader I find that this book could be condensed into a series of riveting focused histories. The problem is that these stories are all so closely linked and that Harper builds a perception of a generation in such a complete way.
This review is going no where and I’m sorry!
There is tragedy in how these revolutionaries couldn’t enact their revolutions in their homelands and being in isolation become progressively more dogmatic. The left splinters of course and Harper places this against the power of imperial forces, whose records contributed enormously to this book.
What stays with me is the margins of failure. How opportune moments are flipped on their heads and could-have-berms fade into history.
Truly an incredible feat, Harper almost single-handedly revived dozens of histories, weaving them in with each other to demonstrate how this era of resistance was both created and crushed by a globalised system. The amount of research is staggering but translates to a book that is a hard read, often getting lost in names and dates. The thrill of plots kept me engaged in this book, but as a fiction reader I find that this book could be condensed into a series of riveting focused histories. The problem is that these stories are all so closely linked and that Harper builds a perception of a generation in such a complete way.
This review is going no where and I’m sorry!
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews