A clearly written, brilliantly researched examination of the people and movements that shaped Asias course in the 20th century and continue to influence the continent todayHelps western and non-specialist readers grasp some key questions and debates on which the course of Asias revolutions turnedProvides rich if unsettling insights for American readers trying to understand the role of human rights in Asia today. -- Walter Russell Mead * Wall Street Journal * The first comprehensive look at this dense web of resistance. The Asian underground laid long-burning fuses across great distancesattacking colonial officials, organizing strikes, founding schools, plotting insurrections, and raining down tracts and pamphletsProvides an unexpected key to understanding contemporary Asian politics. -- Thomas Meaney * New Yorker * Harpers 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 originalBreaks new ground by showing how a collective consciousness emerged among revolutionaries. * The Economist * MagisterialHarper does not simply challenge the conventional view of Vietnams 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. -- Jeffrey Wasserstrom * New Republic * A magisterial history of anti-imperialism in Asia in the first three decades of the twentieth centuryThe scale and ambition of his work are nothing short of remarkableHarpers book arrives at another moment of rebellion across Asia. -- Adom Getachew * Foreign Affairs * A sweeping accountHarpers broad perspective reveals the interconnectedness of these anti-colonial struggles and their reverberations more than a century laterAsia 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. -- Rudrangshu Mukherjee * The Wire * A continuing reminder of how clandestine forces, hidden yet overwhelmingly powerful, harbour revolutionary potentials that transform a world, in the same way that a seed planted and hidden underground secretly nurtures the roots of a stable tree. -- Regletto Aldrich Imbong * European Journal of East Asian Studies * Tim Harpers Underground Asia is a marvel of a book. I have never seen anything like it. Harper has the storytellers gift. He makes connections across space and time and race and place that most people cant 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-storytellerInteresting 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 submissionThis 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. -- Ajay Singh * 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. -- Bill Weinberg * 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 contextsInnovative in its scopeA rich social and cultural history of an era that saw new national identities forged. -- Peter Zarrow * Journal of Interdisciplinary History *
