“Under Three Flags” by Benedict Anderson

As a natural law anarchist I tend to take a dim view of nationalism. However, I am a bit more ambivalent about anti-colonial national movements. Their tendencies to strike at rigid, racist imperial structures certainly seem like a step in the right direction. Especially when they achieved pan-ethnic unity, their amorphous, decentralized, and horizontal leadership structures often created the kind of polycentric institutions I am most fond of. This book combines anti-colonialism, nationalism, anarchism, journalism, art, and literature from the Third World in the nineteenth century. Anderson uses as a focus the Philippine struggle for independence against imperial Spain, but in doing so also traverses the globe from Manilla to Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, London, Cuba, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, and America. He discusses trends from high journalism and art that encouraged anarchist actions to actual “propaganda of the deed” where assassins killed in the name of furthering and publicizing their cause. He concentrates on a couple of Filipino writers and activists not well known to history. Isabelo de los Reyes was a collector of Philippine folklore: not just folklore as in myths and fairy tales, but “saber popular” or indigenous, local knowledge that survived westernization and colonization. He spoke Ilocano, as well as Tagalog, Spanish, English, and French and would slip between them in his stories as he slipped between life in Manilla, Madrid, and Paris. Jose Rizal is more well known today: a hero still, in the Philippines at least, as a poet and their first novelist. His second novel, depicting a strange jeweled bomb placed at a colonial ball, presaged the wave of anarchist and nationalist bombings that were to later rock Europe and colonial outposts in the fin de siecle period. These Filipino writers were cosmopolitan, multi-lingual, and avid readers, imbuing their own writings and philosophies with anarchist luminaries like Bakunin, Proudhon, and Kropotkin. They mingled with anarchists from the Continent and Cuba in their several stints in Montjuich Prison, the most notorious in Spain and an incubator and meeting place for radicalism. A motto, taken from Kropotkin, was “permanent revolt by means of the spoken word, writing, the dagger, the gun, and dynamite…. For us everything good which is outside legality.” This book is a detailed history of the last days of the Spanish Empire as told through the lens of Filipino revolutionaries.

“Imagined Communities” by Benedict Anderson

Today the world is so demarcated by the distinct borders of nation-states that it seems that it was always so. Since WWII every successful revolution has been defined in nationalistic terms. Today, most people, even before race or religion, think of themselves as belonging to a particular nationality. “Members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

Before the 18th century, the communities of religion and empire played a much larger role in defining one’s identity. Religions transcended borders, uniting people of different ethnicities. Emperors and kings had subjects, not citizens, and the kingdoms were organized with a distinct center of power that radiated outward with loose, mutable boundaries. The kingdom’s affairs were the king’s, not his subjects’, concern. Rulers often came from another land brought in through marriage, the court language was often foreign to the locality, and most wars were fought with mercenaries with little impact on the peasantry. Everyday language was spoken, but only for the elite was it written and often not in the vernacular tongue. “77% of the books printed before 1500 were still in Latin.” However, that was all changing. The gradual use of the printing press to unite the lower classes in a standardized language did much to unite a locality, even within the smaller communities of larger empires. Newspapers were unifying events, repeated every day. Reading the local paper became a communal act. “If manuscript knowledge was scarce and arcane lore, print knowledge lived by reproducibility and dissemination.” And as the printers sought profits through newer markets, more and more people were pulled into the web of the local vernacular. Where people still spoke in distinct regional dialects, a unifying written language was slowly established. “Print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation.”

Particularly in the peripheries of the empire, in the colonies, a new elite was forming, not beholden or belonging to the kingdom’s center. Often these would be creole descendants of the first immigrants or coopted native nobles. There was a glass ceiling to their rise, however, and that boundary was the colonial borders, distinct from the empire’s vaster domain. “No matter how Anglicized a Pal became, he was always barred from movement outside its perimeter- laterally, say, to the Gold Coast or Hong Kong, and vertically to the metropole. ‘Completely estranged from the society of his own people’ he might be, but he was under life sentence to serve them…. No one in their right mind would deny the profoundly racist character of nineteenth-century English imperialism. But the Pals also existed in the white colonies- Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa.” This phenomenon of locals and creoles being trapped even within their own empire also happened in the Spanish American colonies and gave both of these empires unofficial internal borders, compounded by unique customs, geography, and economies. Schooling also set up a distinct tract of homogenization among the younger local elites. “Government schools formed a colossal, highly rationalized, tightly centralized hierarchy, structurally analogous to the state bureaucracy itself. Uniform textbooks, standardized diplomas and teaching certificates, a strictly regulated gradation of age-groups, classes and instructional materials, in themselves created a self-contained, coherent universe of experience. But no less was the hierarchy’s geography. Standardized elementary schools came to be scattered about in villages and small townships of the colony; junior and senior middle-schools in larger towns and provincial centres; while tertiary education (the pyramid’s apex) was confined to the colonial capital.” Similar to religious pilgrimage, students were set on a path where disparate elites from all over the colonial realm were homogenized and instructed to mimic the ways of the home country. However, the colonial capital was their summit, they were expected to go no further, that was the end of their journey. Royal governors and senior clergy were sent from the metropole to lord over a vast bureaucracy of elite locals, who saw themselves as distinct from the natives, but also from their home country.

Anderson makes the case that three institutions: the census, the map, and the museum, all proliferating in the nineteenth century, also gave locals a greater sense of particular community within the larger whole. When the creole revolutions did happen, it was not for control of the whole empire, like in wars of the past, but simply to break away. They did not seek to conquer the old metropole, but to form their own capital equal to it, a new parallel center of power. 

“A Life Beyond Boundaries” by Benedict Anderson

Anderson was a multi-disciplinary academic, who spent most of his time in the field studying Southeast Asia. His specialities were Indonesia, Siam, and the Philippines. The title of the book refers to the fact that he considered himself a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world. He was born in China to a British woman and an Irishman. After spending WWII stuck in California, he grew up in Ireland, before earning scholarships to Eton and Cambridge. He then began his lifelong passion with Southeast Asia at Cornell. This memoir is witty and expansive in breath. He writes about being banned from Indonesia by Suharto, how he stumbled onto the idea of nationalism’s genesis in his book, “Imagined Boundaries”, while thinking about the role of historical fiction, like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, in shaping narratives, and how he got to meet and translate for the foremost Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul, and Indonesian novelist, Eka Kurniawan, of today. Along the way, he learned Indonesian, Dutch, Javanese, Thai, Spanish, and Tagalog well enough to write in scholarly journals. His life, he confessed, was one shaped by luck and circumstance, but one where he also took advantage and leapt at unique opportunities to push the academic disciplinary boundaries to new directions in which he willed them.