Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State by Moon-Ho Jung

This sprawling narrative tracks a massive cast of Asian revolutionaries, unionists, anti-imperialists, and leftists as their campaigns drove them to seek inspiration and allies in the United States, London, Japan, Brussels, Hong Kong, and Moscow, with hosts of military and intelligence agents working to suppress them following in hot pursuit. Jung traces the previously obscure journeys of idealists (such as Har Dayal, Isabelo de los Reyes, Pablo Manlapit, Taraknath Das, and Katayama Sen) who challenged the structures of racial injustice and capitalist exploitation imposed by British and U.S. imperialism to demonstrate the inextricable entwinement of once separated historical strands: (1) the U.S. formal launch into transpacific empire during the 1890s; (2) the transnational, transracial, sometimes coalitional array of Filipino, South Asian, Japanese, and Chinese who opposed imperialism and capitalism; and (3) the aligning of the United States and Britain to secure their empires by developing military and intelligence agencies tasked...