Tim Harper is University Senior Lecturer in Imperial and Extra-European History at Cambridge University.

Born in 1965, he grew up in Manchester and was an undergraduate at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He has been a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge since 1990.

Harper's first book, THE END OF EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF MALAYA(1999), came out his doctoral work on war, communist insurgency and the achievement of independence in Malaya and Singapore.

Since then, he has published widely on the history of Southeast Asia and of the British Empire, but also on contemporary society and politics in Southeast Asia. He is a contributor to a recent collection on Globalization in World History (2002).

His most recent work, co-written with Chris Bayly, is FORGOTTEN ARMIES: THE FALL OF BRITISH ASIA, 1941-45 (2004).

He continues to spend a lot of time travelling and researching in the Southeast Asia. He has held visiting positions in universities in Malaysia, Singapore and the United States, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Co-author: Chris Bayly

Following the immense praise for Bayly and Harper's FORGOTTEN ARMIES its authors now tackle with the same verve, controversy and wit the even more contentious issue of how new nations were born from the wreck of Britain's empire in southeast Asia.

The almost continual fighting that followed Japan's defeat scarred everywhere in the region - from the violent British occupation of south Vietnam to the horrors of Partition in India; from the hasty retreat from Burma to the Malayan 'Emergency', one of the first and most dramatic counter-insurgency wars of the twentieth century.

FORGOTTEN WARS explores the lives of politicians, soldiers and ordinary people as the travails of decolonisation merged with the hatreds of the Cold War.