The End of Britain's Asian Empire

Forgotten Wars

'An outstanding narrative account ... If there are lessons from history they are surely to be found in this book' Richard Overy

The story is told with a refreshing candour&hellip; [an] outstanding narrative account of the end of empire

Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper jointly wrote the highly praised Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-45 which is a prelude to this book.

This extraordinary book is a vivid, highly original account of the creation of a new Asia after the Second World War - an unstoppable wave of nationalism that swept the British Empire aside.  It tells the definitive story of how India, Pakistan, Burma and Malaysia came into existence and how British interference in Vietnam and Indonesia fatally shaped those countries' futures.

Britain's Asian Empire and the War with Japan

Forgotten Armies

Christopher Bayly is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. Tim Harper is a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

The vast crescent of British-ruled territories from India down to Singapore appeared in the early stages of the Second World War a massive asset in the war with Germany, providing huge quantities of soldiers and raw materials and key part of an impregnable global network denied to the Nazis. Within a few weeks in 1941-2 a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, almost effortlessly taking the 'impregnable fortress' of Singapore with its 80,000 strong garrison, and sweeping through South and Southeast Asia to the frontier of India itself. This revolutionary, absolutely gripping book brings to life the entire experience of South and Southeast Asia in this extraordinary period, telling the story from an Indian, Burmese, Chinese or Malay perspective as much as from that of the British or Japanese. Effectively it is the story of the birth of modern South and Southeast Asia and the hopes and fears of the dozens of 'forgotten armies' marching through the jungle battlefields, so many dying for causes swept away by the reality that emerged in 1945. Even as the British successfully fought back in the bloodiest battles in South and Southeast Asia's history, there was no going back to colonial rule.

Tim Harper

Magnificent - it reads like a thriller and was difficult to put down.

Compelling and highly original ... The Asia that we see today - of nationalist states that owe a great deal of their identity to anti-imperialism - is the product of the 'underground' that these individuals forged in the 1910s and 1920s and which Harper describes with skill and empathy in this monumental work.

A magnificent, sweeping history of Asian revolutionary movements ... Harper makes the intriguing point that as imperialism fostered globalisation, drawing together Aden, Alexandria and Bombay with Calcutta, Hong Kong, Penang and Singapore, so this same process allowed Asia's anti-colonial activists to establish connections with each other ... Harper has a fine eye for the telling detail.

Brilliant, superbly original ... Underground Asia breaks new ground by showing how a collective consciousness emerged among revolutionaries on this shifting terrain ... Though many of the revolutionaries Harper evokes are now forgotten - or, for some Asian nations, too inconvenient to remember - their underground stories still echo through time.

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, Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, Harvard University

Tim Harper's Underground Asia is a marvel of a book. I have never seen anything like it. Harper has the storyteller's gift. He makes connections across space and time and race and place that most people can't dream to emulate. 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, Professor of History, Cornell University

Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire

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 below by young radicals from across Asia. They gathered in the great cities of Asia - Calcutta, Singapore, Batavia, Hanoi, Tokyo, Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong - and plotted the end of the colonial regimes with ceaseless ingenuity, both through persuasion and terrorism. Many were caught and killed or imprisoned, but others would go on to rule their newly independent countries. 
 
Drawing on an amazing array of sources, Underground Asia turns upside-down our understanding of twentieth-century empire. The reader enters an extraordinary world of stowaways, false identities, secret codes, cheap firearms, assassinations and conspiracies, as young Asians made their own plans for their future.

Tim Harper

Praise for Underground Asia

Magnificent - it reads like a thriller and was difficult to put down.

Compelling and highly original ... The Asia that we see today - of nationalist states that owe a great deal of their identity to anti-imperialism - is the product of the 'underground' that these individuals f ...

A magnificent, sweeping history of Asian revolutionary movements ... Harper makes the intriguing point that as imperialism fostered globalisation, drawing together Aden, Alexandria and Bombay with Calc ...

Magnificent - it reads like a thriller and was difficult to put down.

Compelling and highly original ... The Asia that we see today - of nationalist states that owe a great deal of their identity to anti-imperialism - is the product of the 'underground' that these individuals f ...

A magnificent, sweeping history of Asian revolutionary movements ... Harper makes the intriguing point that as imperialism fostered globalisation, drawing together Aden, Alexandria and Bombay with Calc ...

Magnificent - it reads like a thriller and was difficult to put down.

Compelling and highly original ... The Asia that we see today - of nationalist states that owe a great deal of their identity to anti-imperialism - is the product of the 'underground' that these individuals f ...

A magnificent, sweeping history of Asian revolutionary movements ... Harper makes the intriguing point that as imperialism fostered globalisation, drawing together Aden, Alexandria and Bombay with Calc ...

Books by Tim Harper

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