Anticolonial internationalism as a field of study has received significant purchase in the last decade among scholars of world history. Several have made connections between insurgent geographies in the age of Empire, while also attending to the complex lives and global imaginations of those inhabiting them. Japan within this has received particular attention as a site of Asian modernity and anti-Western critique. Building on these works, Joseph McQuade’s "Fugitive of Empire" closely follows the life of the Indian revolutionary Rash Behari Bose as he led and campaigned for India’s independence in locations across India and Japan. Lucidly written, McQuade’s authoritative biography is also a survey of anticolonial nationalism in India from the late nineteenth century to 1947, the year of India’s independence and the violence of Partition.

Neither an unknown nor a forgotten figure in both countries, Rash Behari was born on 25th May 1886 in a small village in rural Bengal. Following chronologically, the book aims to bring Bose’s story “to a wider, global audience, for whom the revolutionary’s remarkable life will be almost entirely unknown” (p. xvii). Yet in doing so, the author is cautious not to reconcile the tensions and hypocrisies that existed within Bose’s views, but rather, he lets them “sit, sometimes uncomfortably, alongside each other” (p. 229). This is particularly a useful method for it allows us entry into the complex intellectual formation of anticolonial thinkers that were simultaneously local and global, and that resisted easy political categorization. In fact, McQuade’s biography is original in its careful engagement in chapter 6 and 7 with Bose’s religious worldviews and Hindu nationalism.

Beginning with the event that arguably gave Bose notoriety, chapter 1 reconstructs the moments leading up to and following the attempted assassination of Lord Hardinge, the viceroy of India, in 1912. It situates it within the larger context of the dissatisfactions and failures of the Swadeshi movement in 1905 from which emerged a wave of violent anticolonial operations. The chapter then goes into some detail into the makings of colonial knowledge and methods of surveillance that marked this period. The Criminal Intelligence Department carried out more than hundred investigations, made several arrests among groups they inherently distrusted yet failed to identify the perpetrators given the flawed system of intelligence gathering that prioritized information from short-term agents. Instead, as McQuade shows, what gave Bose’s identity away was a series of forensic examinations of the used bomb that revealed a similarity with another bomb that was used for another assassination attempt in Lahore in 1913.

Chapter 2 then goes back in time to give us the broad social, political, and economic background of Bose’s formative years that shaped his early interactions with anticolonial radicals such as Lala Har Dayal, Srish Chandra Ghosh, and Sachindranath Sanyal. For Bose, coming of age at a time of instability caused by famines, food scarcity, and epidemics – linked directly to the economic and political policies of taxation, wars, and destruction of indigenous industries – provided a damning indictment of colonial rule (p. 39). McQuade here highlights two particular moments that served as inspiration and had a transformative impact on Bose’s world view – first, the partition of Bengal, and second, Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905.

The failure of the February rebellion’s attempt to disarm British troops in Lahore in 1915, and Bose’s eventual escape and relocation to Japan is the subject of chapters 3 and 4. Here, McQuade places central the importance that a mass mutiny by Indian soldiers held in the anticolonial visions of men like Rash Behari Bose. This in a way also anticipated the shortcomings of revolutionary activity in north India given their lack of funds and ammunition. A recurring theme within these chapters, and the book largely, is the close ties that the expansion of imperial surveillance and the creation of modern security states (for instance, the establishment of Singapore’s Criminal Intelligence Department in 1918, which later becomes the Internal Security Department) had with the crisscross of revolutionary activity and networks across south and southeast Asia. In a way, the book is also a study of imperial intelligence efforts in the twentieth century.

Now in Tokyo, we are introduced to a range of characters who impacted Bose’s life in Japan in important ways – Mitsuru Toyama, a far-right ultra nationalist and founding members of the secret society Genyosha; Shumei Okawa, an ardent advocate of pan-Asianism; and more importantly, Kokko and Aizo Soma, whose daughter Toshiko Bose would marry in 1918. Following this, chapter 5 pays close attention to Bose’s turn to internationalism. Within the interwar context of the anticolonialism of the Vietnamese radical Ho Chi Minh, M.N. Roy’s communist internationalism, and Woodrow Wilson’s right to self-determination, Bose no longer saw Indian independence as a purely national issue, but instead as an objective with global and world historical significance that could only be achieved with the help of Japan. Through a discussion of the Pan-Asiatic Federation, McQuade correctly suggests that Bose’s critique of the Eurocentrism of the League of Nations lent itself to a different form of cultural chauvinism that Japanese ultranationalists at the time were also using to justify imperial presence in Korea, China and beyond (p. 156).

These tensions and contradictions are further explored in the remaining two chapters of the book. Bose founded the Indian Independence League in Tokyo in 1942, grounded on ideals of universal brotherhood based on racial equality, yet he remained silent about the brutal militarism of his Japanese allies. In fact, his support for Japan during the Second World War widened the intellectual rift between him and his colleagues in India, particularly with those in the Indian National Congress. For instance, he selectively endorsed Nazi Germany’s anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, burning of ‘Un-German’ books in his writings in ‘New Asia’, but fell short of neither supporting the most brutal aspects of Nazism nor explicitly criticizing it (pp. 176–7).

The fault lines that emerged in Indian anticolonialism between the secular pluralism and non-violence of the Congress versus the more militant nationalism of the Hindu right is brought to forefront through Bose’s interactions with V.D. Savarkar and Subhas Chandra Bose. Like Savarkar, Bose also conceived of a ‘Hindu India’ but differed in his definition of Hindus as all those born and domiciled in India (p. 189). Yet, he also detested Savarkar’s decision to cooperate with the British during the war. At this point, McQuade returns to the significance that militarization held in Bose’s anti-imperial efforts by discussing the legacies of the Indian National Army and his choice of Subhas Bose as his successor.

The book, however, misses out in its engagement with pan-Islamism, an internationalism that had significant impacts on Indian anticolonialism and pan-Asianism alike. While the author points to Bose’s condemnation of Indian Muslims for causing communalism (p.189), a critical analysis of Bose’s non-reading of pan-Islamism would have added to the important interventions that this book already makes. Furthermore, the book would benefit from a reading of Bengali and Japanese primary and secondary sources, a limit that the author admits to. Notwithstanding these minor suggestions, McQuade’s book is a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of world history and should be lauded for its reach to both specialist and non-academic readers. It puts forward a convincing case for studying the intellectual environment of the twentieth century for what it was rather than what it should be.