I believe it is the convention in academic circles, when confronted by such a comprehensive tome as this one, to express a sense of obligation to the author for putting in the time, energy, and thought. Without a doubt, Tim Harper's Underground Asia is the result of much painstaking research, extraordinary narrative talent, and a practiced eye for detail. So much detail. Which is what makes the book fascinating, exhausting, and blurry all at once.

Harper sets himself the task to chase around the world the revolutionaries-in-motion from and in Asia, whose early twentieth-century political and social undertakings were as relentlessly national as they were inevitably international. These endeavors, over the course of several globally consequential decades, overlapped with, fed, and nourished one another in many different nodes of activism: Mexico City, Cape Town, San Francisco, Havana, across the Pacific, and more. The various revolutionaries learned from one another, assassinated their own and each other's enemies, opposed similar foes, and attended common schools and training sites, all the while embracing a variety of ideologies and tactics to achieve independence and more for their states and their peoples. It is a tale populated by multitudes, some well-known, a few quite infamous, and others almost entirely lost to the mists of time.

Harper brings it all to cinematic life. We are in the hotel restaurant biting into our breakfast toast even as the Vietnamese bomb thrower is cocking his arm to toss his deadly missive. We are sailing the turbulent seas, the crossings of which result in the journal Ghadar (Mutiny) that links Indian independence and roiling discontents in the world's many imperialist centers of oppression and rule. We ride on the Nippon Maru when a man named Naren becomes M. N. Roy and a man named Mr. White becomes the Reverend C. A. Martin, whose task it is to spy for the British upon Naren, Bose, and others as they work for the Comintern. We go from the Kremlin to Baku and back, where a motley collection of random radicals from Asia tentatively become Leninist comrades in collaboration with the nascent Soviet Union. We are rubber-soled, straw-sandaled detectives attempting to ferret out Korean anticolonials who flit among the shadows of Shanghai's International Settlements. There we are in Kobe with Sun Yat-sen speaking at a girls’ school about the promises of pan-Asianism. And then, we are in the jungles of Malaya, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, where the battles for states and peoples are fought, lost and won; where such literary luminaries as Tan Malaka and others make their names and lose their lives; and where, ultimately, Asia cannot cohere, whether underground or above, and only the voices of those who struggled and died are able to whisper of their historical presences above the noise of their memories or forgettings. We are there for all of it in Harper's captivating storytelling prose.

To what end, though? What we are meant to discover is what many of us already have known for decades: that revolutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Asia were always global. Many of us (myself included) have written books linking early Asian revolutionary activists, thinkers, and thought to one another and to global struggles, movements, and ideas. Much historiography of the last two decades has been built upon the foundation of global commonality and transnational solidarity. As an academic intervention, then, Harper's is less rather than more. Magisterial as the book is, readable as it might be, the intellectual argument is neither novel nor startling, even while the packaging is shiny and apparently new. The pictures are marvelous.

While the marshaling of detail and the discipline with which it is ordered and presented are impressive, it is not clear what Harper intended his contribution to be, other than the encyclopedic nature of his quest. I absolutely acknowledge that for many readers and commentators, the will to achieve the readable encyclopedic is enough to recommend the book with no hesitation and little critique. For me, it submerges the historical into a morass of detail, flattening different pasts and trajectories into happenstance. That histories and futures overlap, are shared, and are forged together in similar global conditions is an important point that scholars ignore at the risk of parochialisms that serve no one well; and yet, to render these shared histories into a series of contingent journeys of individuals is to render inexplicable the global conditions of capitalism and imperialist-colonial oppression that called these individuals into movements and the movements into being and that helped direct the various modes in which the movements were pursued and fought. While a coherence called “underground Asia” might be said to have existed, it could only have existed through the structural establishment of global conditions of possibility. In Harper's majesty, the latter are atomized while the former are romanticized, leading to stellar storytelling and yet poor capacity for critical interpretive intervention.