Tim Harper’s Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire is a triumph! In this riveting account of underground Asia, Harper seamlessly weaves together narratives of Asian resistance to imperialism through global events in the early decades of the twentieth century. Indians and Chinese in Japan, Vietnamese in China, Asians in Europe and North America, the lure of Bolshevism, revolutionaries in exile – a recurring thread in the book – are at the centre of these networks explored in the book. It is refreshing to read such an erudite account from the perspective of the underbelly, of those anticolonial revolutionaries who fought against empires in all its guises. It was these figures, Harper argues, who communicated through cheap printing presses and networked from below to subvert European empires (p. 19).
The book brings together the Indian revolutionaries so well explored in Maia Ramnath’s „Haj to Utopia“, the anti-imperial alliances examined by Priyamvada Gopal in „Insurgent Empire“, and the underbelly of the intelligence services covered extensively in Daniel Brückenhaus’ „Policing Transnational Protest“.1 Focusing on a range of figures born around 1890 – a particular generation, Harper asserts (pp. 18, 50) – many of the characters that inhabit Harper’s book are familiar: there is the Indian M.N. Roy (1887–1954), the Indonesian Tan Malaka (1897–1949), the Chinese Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), and the Vietnamese Nguyen Ai Quoc (1890–1969). Alongside these well-known figures, Harper brings to life a myriad of lesser known men and women who, each in their own way, played significant roles in the movements to overthrow imperial rule in their native lands and across Asia, many of whom were caught, killed, or imprisoned.
One of the real strengths of Underground Asia is this: any one of these figures could have been the subject of a full-length biography or book – and some of them have, Harper acknowledges (p. xxx) – but in bringing them together into a broader narrative of resistance, Harper elucidates the very visceral nature of transnationalism. To be clear, for many of these figures, ideas of transnationalism – alliances and solidarities across nations – were less intellectual exercises, exchanges of intellectual ideologies, but stemmed from very real experiences of migration, of being forced underground and into exile (p. 19). Backed by impressive, detailed historical context and archival research, these stories bring to life narratives of resistance, stories of dreamers, revolutionaries, utopians, and terrorist freedom fighters in port cities across Asia from Singapore to Hong Kong, Shanghai to Batavia, Calcutta to Bombay, and from within the European and North American metropoles. In these cities, they negotiated ideas of transnationalism, nationalism, and terrorism in conversation with communism, anarchism, and various strands of anti-imperial socialism.
The book’s fourteen chapters, with a prelude and epilogue bookending it, are structured chronologically, spanning the period from 1905 to 1927, but each chapter traverses the globe, signifying travel and exile, and illuminates the underground networks that existed at the time.
Chapters 1 to 3 cover the period from 1905 to 1909. After its victory over Russia in 1905, Japan became a „first haven for exiles from tumultuous events elsewhere in Asia“ (p. 34). „It was here“, Harper argues, „that Asian intellectuals first came to know each other, and to learn to speak to each other“ (p. 35), often through the printed press, and articulated ideas of „Asia“ as „a field of concerted action“ (p. 40). The violent logic of European colonialism, however, soon forced many of these revolutionaries into exile in the heart of the empires in Europe and North America.
Chapters 4 and 5 cover the half-decade before the First World War, an important period that saw the emergence of the Indian Ghadar Party in North America – soon to become a global movement – the intermingling of Asian exiles in Paris, encountering Russian revolutionaries also in exile, and the embrace of anarchism „through a broad spectrum of thought, a path rather than a doctrine“ (p. 86) by figures such as Kotoku Shusui, Li Shizeng, and Lala Har Dayal. Anarchist strands of propaganda by the deed as well as pacifism weaved its way into these Asian movements.
The First World War was central to the development of underground Asia. In chapters 6 to 9, Harper explores the clash of empires, and how Asian revolutionaries found new allies in the Germans and the Turks in their struggles. The Dutch Indian nationalist Douwes Dekker associated closely with the Indian nationalists in Europe and became central to plotting missions in South East Asia. In British Malaya and Singapore, Chinese traders preferred Germans rather than British (pp. 242–243). M.N. Roy was involved in Ghadarite conspiracies to send arms through Java to India. „Asian“ alliances were strengthened by the war, Harper notes. The US entry into the war in 1917 and the October revolution in Russia, however, changed the course for „underground Asia“ (p. 333).
Out of the ashes of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the ensuing civil war, and the rise of the Comintern set in motion new forces for Asian revolutionaries. Harper covers these important years in chapters 10 to 14. If the preceding years had focused on certain key figures in exile, colonial peasants and workers now became central to the struggle against empire. Attracted by Lenin’s promise of self-determination, Moscow became a „new Mecca” as communist parties sprung up in China and the Netherlands Indies, and a group of veteran Indian revolutionaries set up the Indian Communist Party in exile in Tashkent in October 1920.
At the Comintern congresses of 1920 to 1925, many of these figures emerged from the underground and became connected through communist ideology (pp. 478–484). A striking image from the book shows M.N. Roy, Tan Malaka, Sen Katayama, and Nguyen Ai Quoc at the fourth congress of the Communist International in Moscow in November 1922. Influenced by Bolsheviks, they adapted communism’s revolutionary appeal to their own historical and national contexts, they denounced Lenin’s derogatory description of the „backward” countries of the east, and they demonstrated that Asia was central to world revolution against empire. In some cases, their refusal of Marxist-Leninism brought them at odds with Stalinism only a few years later. Anarchism still held some ground in Asia, and Trotskyism found its way, too.
Harper’s study is impressive by all standards. However, it is not always clear that there is a cohesive „underground Asia”. In fact, Irish, South African, and Egyptian nationalists often fought against empire alongside Indians; North Africans alongside Asian Muslims allied along ideas of pan-Islamism; Cubans and Puerto Ricans alongside Filipinos. Is there anything inherently Asian to these forms of resistance? Did they articulate a particular Asian experience that excluded other anticolonial struggles? This is only to suggest that there is a much wider story of anticolonial, underground resistances to tell – one that spans across several continents, empires, and historical contexts – but this does not detract from the book. In fact, the interweaving of these stories would be daunting for most historians, but Harper writes with flair and flow, bringing the figures alive, bringing underground Asia to the surface to be seen.
Harper’s account fittingly ends in 1927. If exile had characterised the pre-WWI era, many revolutionaries now returned to the native lands, and „there was a sense of the passing of an old guard and the rise of new leaders“ (p. 657). Stalin’s shift away from the united front strategy towards class against class also tore apart many Asian nationalist movements. The Chinese civil war broke out, prompting Roy to travel to China, only to return to Berlin and fall into disgrace with the Comintern, and failed uprisings in Java and Sumatra. At the same time, this was also when the underground went overground in the League Against Imperialism, an organisation that, publicly, brought together many of these Asian revolutionaries who had worked for independence for decades. Perhaps this generation of Asian revolutionaries had reached maturity and paved the way for new anti-imperial alliances? In fact, to Harper’s great credit, this is what Underground Asia ultimately suggests. Often forgotten, these Asian revolutionaries „were pathfinders for a world without empire and for an Asian future“ (p. 20).
Note:
1 Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia. How the Ghadar movement chartered global radicalism and attempted to overthrow the British empire, Berkeley Calif. 2011; Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire. Anticolonial resistance and British dissent, London 2019; Daniel Brückenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest. Liberal Imperialism and the surveillance of anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945, New York 2017.