Underground Asia explores a clandestine global network of anti-imperialist revolutionaries and their struggles against empire in early twentieth century Asia. The text looks beyond any one nation-state; instead, it shifts attention to the interpersonal network that was forged between various revolutionaries that spanned Asia, Europe, and the Americas from the 1890s until the 1930s. Harper argues that fugitives from India, Vietnam, China, and elsewhere inhabited the same underground ecosystems, building a shared sense of Asian identity and working together against imperial authorities. He highlights an early era of anti-imperialism that was not tethered to the idea of liberated nation-states. Underground Asia shows how a network of anarchists, Communists, and Islamists from various nationalities collaborated to bring an end to empire in Asia.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Review Essay 110
Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA. 2021. ISBN 9780674724617.
Review by Matthew J. Douthitt, Penn State University
14 November 2024 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/RE110 | Website: rjissf.org | X: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Benjamin V. Allison | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Underground Asia explores a clandestine global network of anti-imperialist revolutionaries and their struggles against empire in early twentieth century Asia. The text looks beyond any one nation-state; instead, it shifts attention to the interpersonal network that was forged between various revolutionaries that spanned Asia, Europe, and the Americas from the 1890s until the 1930s. Harper argues that fugitives from India, Vietnam, China, and elsewhere inhabited the same underground ecosystems, building a shared sense of Asian identity and working together against imperial authorities. He highlights an early era of anti-imperialism that was not tethered to the idea of liberated nation-states. Underground Asia shows how a network of anarchists, Communists, and Islamists from various nationalities collaborated to bring an end to empire in Asia.
Underground Asia contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to break free from the limiting restraints of nationalist history and forge a more global view of Asia. Histories of twentieth century nationalism often have the same recurring cast of national heroes: Sun Yat-sen (China), Mahatma Gandi (India), and Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), to name a few.[1] However, at least since the 1990s, scholars have been more critical of using the nation-state as a historical framework and have sought to explore transnational movements and exchanges beyond geopolitical borders.[2] As earlier scholarship—namely the works of Prasenjit Duara—notes, early twentieth century discourse on Asian civilization often transcended Western notions of the nation-state and advanced a utopian vision of pan-Asian civilization.[3] Harper’s study builds on these concepts and is a major milestone in this growing historiographical corpus of transnational works on Asia, proposing that the anti-imperial revolutions that shook early twentieth century Asia are better understood not as national incidents but as a transnational phenomenon.[4]
Underground Asia is a large book with even larger ambitions. The geographic scope stretches across most of the world, stopping only briefly to highlight nodes of revolutionary activity along a global, clandestine network. The text explores cosmopolitan imperial centers like London, hotbeds of revolutionary activity in Canton, the struggle of the Asian diaspora along the US-Mexico border, and numerous other locations across the globe. While familiar nationalists make frequent appearances, they are presented as part of a larger network that was populated with myriad lesser-known individuals who were crucial in undermining empire from the bottom-up. The text contains hundreds of anecdotes of anti-imperialism traveling along this global network, from propaganda distribution to high-profile assassinations. While similar network analyses have been used to chart political and revolutionary ideologies in recent scholarship,[5] Harper’s work remains innovative because of its immense geographic scale.
A history of this size and magnitude requires linguistic proficiencies that no single scholar can be reasonably expected to possess. Harper navigates this issue by making extensive use of imperial archives from the British, French, and Dutch empires. He skillfully sorts through the colonial rhetoric and produces a convincing narrative of empire’s rebellious underbelly. Unsurprisingly, Harper displays a greater mastery over the sources from his area of expertise in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. While it is possible to generate numerous additional archives in other languages that might have provided even more examples for Harper’s narrative, these would have only strengthened rather than altered Harper’s argument. At its core, Underground Asia’s assertion that twentieth century revolutions were transnational events is persuasive.
Underground Asia lays out its arguments over fourteen chronological chapters, which detail roughly three major shifts in Asian anti-imperialism. Chapters 1 -5 describe the rise of the pan-Asian revolutionary network from the turn of the century until the middle of the First World War. While multiple political ideologies percolated in the Asian underground, the global proliferation of anarchism takes center stage at this early phase. Harper defines the goals of the Asian anarchist movement as anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist, and the “quintessential ideology of exile” (88). A recurring theme throughout the book is the movement of people and ideas. Underground Asia sketches a clandestine world where fugitives were on the move and constantly in motion, traveling the globe on Japanese liners. While this movement ran through many cities, metropolitan areas in Japan became the primary stopping-off points for anti-imperialists across Asia. Japan’s victory in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War provided a template for Asian resistance against European incursion. As Harper details, the students and exiled revolutionaries who arrived on Japanese shores forged a collective identity centered around a utopian vision of a unified Asia that could throw off the yoke of European imperialism. Japan’s growing imperial ambitions and its collaboration with Western powers at the start of the First World War, however, eventually soured Japan’s image in the minds of aspiring revolutionaries (33-41).[6]
The outbreak of the First World War, which is covered in the subsequent four chapters, marked the next major shift in anti-imperial ideology. As war broke out across Europe, the Asian underground sought allies against a common enemy. These chapters describe the formation of the Ghadar Movement, a political movement started by Indian revolutionaries who were living abroad that pursued popular uprisings against the British Empire. After the outbreak of the First World War, Indian anti-imperialists and pan-Islamicists sought support from Germany and the Ottomans for their rebellions in British overseas colonies. Harper depicts a cat-and-mouse game between imperial states and Asian revolutionaries that played out on a global scale as international police forces became more efficient at tracking highly-mobile revolutionaries and snuffing out anti-imperial conspiracies.
The final phase, comprising the last five chapters of the book, details the rising international influence of Communist ideology. In the wake of the October Revolution in 1917, socialist intellectuals were already convening in international cities around the world. Moscow, the so-called “holy land of revolution” at the heart of the new Soviet Union, became the new rallying point for émigrés of various political stripes (380). Much of the latter parts of the text are devoted to the Soviet-supported Comintern and the spread of Communism in Asia. Harper describes the contentions within the Comintern about how to support the multitude of nationalist—but often not explicitly Communist—revolutionaries across Asia. One of the chief concerns for Soviet advisors was maintaining unity between the Guomindang and the growing Communist movement in China. The Asian underground, however, reaches a dramatic conclusion in the book’s final chapter and epilogue. 1927 was the year of seismic shifts in the underground according to the text. By that year, the Guomindang turned against its left-wing detractors and primarily concerned itself with securing the party’s position over its domestic rivals. Harper rightfully points to this moment—both in China and elsewhere in Asia—as the beginning of the end of international, anti-imperialism in Asia. As attested in other scholarship, Chinese diasporic revolutionaries split into rival faction after the 1926–1928 Northern Expedition in the Americas, Malaysia, Philippines, and elsewhere.[7] Even the Indian independence movement lost its secular, internationalist bend. [8] Over time, pan-Asianist ideologies dissolved and were replaced with “more territorial, more exclusive, ethnic and religious nationalisms” (639). The era of international revolution had come to a close.
Throughout the book, Harper highlights the powerful sense of cosmopolitanism that pervaded this era of Asian revolution. Free movement, at least initially, was a hallmark of European imperialism. The imperial system encouraged the movement of goods and personnel that fueled the growth of empire. Ironically, this freedom of movement also enabled anti-imperialists and their radical ideals to spread across territorial borders. [9] As Harper illustrates, those living in exile could still freely traverse the world as stowaways, by falsifying their identities, or simply by crossing porous colonial borders. Lingering like a shadow over the free-flowing cosmopolitanism that undergirds Harper’s story is the slow march of travel restrictions that now typify the modern nation-state. While radicals circled the globe, a counterrevolutionary force of double-agents and international law enforcement were following close behind and strengthening their positions. In Harper’s words:
[The First World War] propelled the final stage of the division of the globe: the construction of modern borders and systems of identification, and the creation of a new relationship of people to the state as documented individuals. The old concept, central to visions of imperial citizenship, of the British Empire as a zone of free movement was at an end (209).
Historians of borderlands have used similar methodologies to analyze the oppressive rise of the modern nation-state and international policing.[10] Underground Asia contributes to the conversation by illuminating the final decades of imperial cosmopolitanism before national borders solidified in the lead up to the Second World War.
Harper’s Underground Asia encourages us to think about historical events at a global level. It succeeds in escaping the confines of nation or empire, and its narrative will certainly be of value to scholars with a focus on twentieth century nationalism and revolution. Moreover, Harper’s ability to bring hundreds of different stories of anti-imperial resistance to light through brilliant storytelling is perhaps the text’s greatest strength. Any number of these anecdotes can serve as a foundation for a standalone study. Underground Asia proves to be an essential resource for future scholarly writing; furthermore, it leaves enough room to be expanded upon by historians of Korea, Japan, and China.
Matthew J. Douthitt is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Penn State University. His dissertation explores the transnational influences of Chinese nationalist uprisings and incidents of extraterritorial violence preceding and in the decade following the Xinhai Revolution of 1911.
[1] Harper makes reference to this historiographic problem in his foreword. See: Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA, 2021) xxvii; Sun Yat-sen is popularly remembered as the “Father of Chinese Revolution,” for a more popular interpretation of Sun’s supposed revolutionary contributions, see: Jackie Chan, director. Xinhai Geming 辛亥革命 (English Title: 1911). JCE Movies Limited, 2011
[2] With the rise of globalization in the 1990s, historical writing has become increasingly transnational. For a brief overview see: Georg Iggers, Q. Edward Wang, Supriya Mukherjee, A Global History of Modern Historiography, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2016) 245; also see: Prasenjit Duara, “Nationalists Among Transnationals: Overseas Chinese and the Idea of China, 1900–1911” in Ungrounded Empires:The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, eds. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini (New York and London: Routledge, 1996): 39-60; Philip A. Kuhn, “Why China Historians Should Study the Chinese Diaspora, and Vice-versa,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 20:2 (2006): 163-172; Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 239-288
[3] See: Prasenjit Duara, “The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism” Journal of World History 12:1 (Spring, 2001), 99-130; Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
[4] See: Anna Belogurova, The Nanyang Revolution: The Comintern and Chinese Networks in Southeast Asia, 1890–1957 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Chien-Wen Kung, Diasporic Cold Warriors: Nationalist China, Anticommunism, and the Philippine Chinese, 1930s–1970s (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022); Zhongping Chen, Transpacific Reform and Revolution: The Chinese in North America, 1898-1918 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023).
[5] Belogurova, The Nanyang Revolution; Kung, Diasporic Cold Warriors; Chen, Transpacific Reform and Revolution.
[6] For more on Japanese-influence on transnational identities see also: Duara, “The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism” 117-122
[7] Kung, Diasporic Cold Warriors goes into detail about the “anti-communist” ideologies about the Chinese community in the Philippines that carried into the Cold War (19-43); see also: Him Mark Lai, Chinese American Transnational Politics. Madeline Y. Hsu, ed., (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
[8] Intellectuals, like M.N. Roy, were ultimately supplanted by the less-radical Indian nationalist like Gandhi.
[9] Yin Cao, “Bombs in Delhi and Beijing: The Global Spread of Bomb-Making Technology and Revolutionary Terrorism in Modern China and India,” Journal of World History 30: 4, (December 2019):559-589; Robert Bickers, The Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
[10] For a convincing thesis on movement, the formation of borders, and resistance to the authoritarian powers of the state, see: James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. (Yale University Press, 2009).