REVIEWS Gazing at the Stars

by Sunil S. Amrith
Benedict Anderson Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination, Verso, London/New York, 2005, 255 pp, ISBN: 9781844670376, 14.99.

Under Three Flags is an engaging, provocative history of the political imagination of Philippine nationalism and its intersection with late nineteenth-century anarchism. It is an effort by one of the pioneering historians of nationalism to resituate his subject in the history of early globalization. Its focus is the gravitational field (p. 1) of political ideas and political relations that brought into interaction all manner of political projects in the late nineteenth century, linking insurrectionary nationalisms across the globe. It reads like a loosely plotted political thriller, and this is probably the effect its author intended. Anderson renarrates the history of Filipino nationalism, situating its development in the global circulation of ideas, inspirations, technologies and peoples that accelerated so rapidly from the 1870s. The emphasis, in his earlier Imagined Communities, on the modular nature of the nation-state form is tempered here by a more sophisticated view of borrowings and appropriations, and by a greater willingness to consider the continuing importance of non-nationalist forms of political identification.1 Nationalisms, all nationalisms, appear here as mutually constituted, moving away from Andersons earlier notion that newer nationalisms simply replicated the models of older ones. At the heart of the book are three remarkable Filipinos, intellectuals and polyglot cosmopolitans all. Isabelo de los Reyes (18641938) was a folklorist and journalist, the author of El folk-lore Filipino (1887) and the champion of folklore as a new science for the Philippines. As an ethnologist, Isabelo openly deployed the work of contemporary European ethnologists and folklorists, combined with his own local research, to undermine the intellectual credibility of colonial authorities, both clerical and lay (pp. 56). Himself from the Ilocano ethnic group, Isabelo adopted a sensitively ambiguous stance in his description of Ilocano culture, writing as both an insider and an outsider. Notably, and unlike most of his contemporaries, Isabelo used folklore to highlight the abyss between all of these people [lowland Catholics, both colonizers and colonized] and those whom we
History Workshop Journal Issue 66 The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.

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would today call Tribal minorities . . . facing a future of possibly violent assimilation, even extermination (p. 17). Isabelo vanishes from Andersons narrative after a compelling early appearance. He reappears at the end of the book, when we are told that, after a period of detention in the notorious Montjuich fortress, Isabelo returned to the Philippines in 1901, carrying in his bags the first texts of Marx and the leading anarchist thinkers, perhaps even of Darwin, to enter the Philippines (p. 226). Soon he established a Barcelona-style, freewheeling central Union Obrera Democratica which erupted in a series of strikes which alarmed the Philippines new American masters. Rizal (186196) is much better known. The father of the Philippine Jose nation, he is celebrated on street names, statues and postage stamps, his life narrated in school textbooks to this day.2 Rizal was a mestizo, partly indio, partly Chinese, and partly Spanish (p. 132); he departed Manila in 1882 for Europe, where he spent the next ten years, roving between Spain, where he studied ophthalmology, France, Germany, and England. As he flourished as a writer, Rizal borrowed alchemically from key figures of the French, Dutch, and Spanish literary avant-gardes to write what is probably the first incendiary anti-colonial novel written by a colonial subject outside Europe (p. 6). Anderson has already used Rizals first novel, Noli me tangere (1887) in Imagined Communities as an instance of the centrality of the novel in creating a national reading public. In 1893, Rizal published El Filibusterismo, to which Anderson here devotes much attention. By all accounts it is an odd novel, the plot revolving around the vanished hero of Noli me tangere returning from the dead to plot to blow up the cream of Manila society, using a pomegranate-shaped chandelier stuffed with nitroglycerine. As Anderson points out, the novel displayed the scope of Rizals global imagination: the book is littered with casual references to Egypt, Poland, Peru, Germany, Russia, Cuba, Persia, the Carolines, Ceylon, the Moluccas, Libya, France, China, and Japan, as well as Arabs and Portuguese, Canton and Constantinople (p. 53). Rizal returned to Asia in 1892, setting up shop in Hong Kong with a flourishing ophthalmic practice. In the 1890s he began to flirt with the idea of establishing a settlement for his family and his followers in Sandakan (on Borneo, in the present-day Malaysian state of Sabah). Anderson suggests that it might have proved a Mart s Florida; but it was not to be. launching pad for revolution, like Jose Rizals brief attempt at political organization, his La Liga Filipina, made little headway. He came in for increasing criticism from the restive leadership of the underground Katipunan movement, but nevertheless paid with his life in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Katipunan uprising, which took him by surprise. Rizal was executed in Manilas public square in 1896, leaving a moving testament. Towards the end of the book, the figure of Mariano Ponce makes a relatively brief appearance: born in 1863, from the province of Bulacan,

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Ponce too trained as a doctor in Spain. He was a driving force, together with his mentor Del Pilar, behind the Barcelona-based journal, La Solidaridad. From 1897 to 1900, Ponce served as an ambassador for the fledgling Philippine republic, charged with raising funds and arms (with little success) in Hong Kong and then in Yokohama. Ponce in many ways stands as an epilogue to the book, drawing on an expansive and cosmopolitan world of contacts and connections in his voluminous correspondence, in the service of a revolution that took the cosmopolitan literati by surprise, led by men less cosmopolitan and less connected than Rizal or Ponce. These lives are woven together by many threads, many of them meeting not in the Philippines but in Europe. For a start, in writing primarily in Spanish, Rizal, Isabelo and Ponce were already amongst the minute proportion of the Philippines population literate in that language, and thus part of a small and closed elite. They also shared more expansive global connections. They all corresponded with Ferdinand Blumentritt, for example, who is a quiet but powerful presence in the book; they read and wrote for the same journals, circulated along the same diasporic networks, imbibed the same influences, and were not without their personal rivalries Rizal evidently felt rather superior to the altogether more sympathetic Isabelo: he was scathing about Isabelos workmanlike productivity. Reading Under Three Flags, one marvels at the promiscuous blend of ideas, ideologies and tactics that nourished Filipino nationalism. Anderson shows, convincingly, that colonized intellectuals from a distant archipelago could stand at the vanguard of artistic and political modernism Rizal and Isabelo both innovated at the forefront of their respective fields, fiction and folklore. Indeed, the best term to describe both of them might be internationalists. It is a term that has dropped away from scholarly discussion, displaced by a voluminous writing on transnationalism, globalism and cosmopolitanism. Yet Anderson shows convincingly how Rizal, Isabelo and Ponce all operated very much within the evolving worldsystem of nation-states. Isabelo imagined his field of work as that of international folklore studies, comprising myriad national folklore societies. For Rizal, it was international literature, comprising the best of national literatures. Ponce imagined, poignantly, an international society, a concert of civilized national governments, into which club he sought entry for the Philippines as a nation amongst others. The whole story fits into what the historian Selc uk Esenbel has aptly called the international relations of nationalism, that is, the alternative, ambivalent arena of international relations that ran parallel to, and constrained by, the inter-state relations forged by formal treaties and diplomacy.3 The narrative builds around a sense of impending violence and political eruption. Beginning in the early 1880s, Anderson writes, the preliminary tremors were being felt of the earthquake that we remember variously as the Great War or the First World War (p. 3). Fair enough, but for the argument in the book this is problematic; it is a little too easy.

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What Anderson tries to do is to show that the rising tide of anarchist bombings and assassinations propaganda by the deed had a clear impact on the political imagination of anti-colonial activists: Cubans, Filipinos, and Dominicans. He suggests that the spate of political assassinations that began with Tsar Alexander IIs assassination in 1881 were acted out for a world-audience of news agencies, newspapers, religious progressives, working-class and peasant organizations (p. 4). But the connection between propaganda by the deed and Rizal is tenuous. Anderson clearly sees the plot of El-filibusterismo, with the dramatic bomb conspiracy at the heart of the story, as part of the spirit of the times: but is it any more than that? This reader is unconvinced. The most important connection of all, for Anderson, lies in the nearsimultaneity of the last nationalist insurrection in the New World (Cuba, 1895), and the first in Asia (the Philippines, 1896), and this was no serendipity (p. 2). Anderson argues that: Cubans (as well as Puerto Ricans and Dominicans) and Filipinos did not merely read about each other, but had crucial personal connections and, up to a point, coordinated their actions the first time in world history that such transglobal coordination became possible (p. 2). Yet this is not demonstrated with any conviction. Beyond the general inspiration that Cuban agitators might have provided to Filipino nationalists abroad, and despite a number of personal connections which Anderson uncovers, it is not clear that there was any very substantive connection between the Cuban and the Filipino revolts of the 1890s. Moreover, at no point does Anderson show reciprocal influence, from the Philippines back to Cuba, which undermines his argument about the global centrality of the Philippines at this moment. Indeed, as T. J. Clark has written, Anderson also has a hard time getting anarchism within a thousand Mart .4 The links in Andersons global chain often seem in miles of Jose danger of coming apart. Remember, too, that when the insurrection finally came to the Philippines, it came too soon; precisely those Filipinos whom Anderson locates within the global networks of anarchist and radical thought, felt unprepared for the Kaputinan revolt, and indeed Rizal paid with his life for it despite knowing nothing of it. Reading Under Three Flags as a historian of South and Southeast Asia, I cannot but note how small a slice of early globalization the book is concerned with. I wonder if the Philippines, by virtue of its exceptionalism (which Anderson explains at length) are really the best place to begin a reconstruction of a world of global connections in the late nineteenth century. If the world of global anarchist thought, with its journals and its salons, constitutes one particular instance of early globalization, it is in fact a relatively marginal one; there were other, perhaps more important, globalizations afoot.

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Religion has always been a blind spot for Anderson. With the ebbing of religious belief, he wrote, prematurely, in Imagined Communities, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear . . . What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning;5 in nationalism lay the new faith. In Under Three Flags, he writes that in their turn Romanticism, democracy, Idealism, Marxism, anarchism, even, late in the day, fascism were variously understood as globe-stretching and nation-linking (p. 1). Surely, though, no beliefs or practices were more globe-stretching and nation-linking, in this period, than the universal religions: Islam and Christianity in particular, but also Buddhism and Hinduism in Asia. The mobility that took Rizal to Barcelona, Paris and London took thousands of Javanese, Sumatran, Burmese and Punjabi Muslims to the Hejaz, to Cairo, and to other points across the Muslim world. If we think of diasporas much older than the diaspora of Filipino literati that Anderson describes, it becomes clear that there are other periodizations of early globalization. As Engseng Ho points out in his recent brilliant work on the Hadrami diaspora, for 500 years the diasporic space of the Indian Ocean was held together by a skein of common references, books in religion, language and law; by scholars whose itineraries and generations span the space . . . and by intellectual genealogies of teachers licensing students to teach those texts.6 As early as 1603, Ho writes, Abd al-Qadir al-Aydaruss The Travelling Light Unveiled indicates the linkages across space and time made possible by diasporic networks: his chronicle lists deaths of jurists, scholars and saints, stories of flood, fire, rain, lightning, earthquakes, eclipses, comets. The juxtaposition of these accounts on the flat pages, Ho notes, give the book the feel of a newspaper pace print capitalism where events separated geographically jostle each other in parallel columns, sharing the space of a common time.7 It may only have been in the second half of the nineteenth century that Filipino intellectuals were able to participate in a global exchange of ideas, but this was emphatically not the case for, say, Egyptians, Indians or Hadramis. The steamship revolution only accelerated the mobility across the Indian Ocean that Hadramis, for instance, had long practised. Thus Anderson might have taken more account than he does of the work of historians who trace a much deeper genealogy of globalization, using the notion of archaic globalization to argue that Andersons early globalization of the later nineteenth century already had deep roots in particular cultural regions.8 Yet the intellectual and cultural world of Eurasian Islam, too, benefited from the technological transformations of early globalization lauded by Anderson. The Universal Postal Union in 1876, Anderson argues, vastly accelerated the reliable movement of letters, magazines, newspapers, photographs, and books around the world (p. 4). The circulation of the kinds of journals Anderson writes about was probably small in comparison

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to the flourishing Arabic language press that stretched from Cairo to Java, via entrepots like Singapore. At the very time Jose Rizal was in Paris, Jamal ad-din al-Afghani and Mohammed Abduh began, in Paris, their anticolonial journal of modernist Islam, al-Urwa al-wuthqa indeed, al-Afghani was even better travelled than Rizal, and tried to exploit the interstices of the international state system (without huge success), invoking Russian support for an anti-colonial revolt in South Asia.9 As Michael Laffan has shown, by the 1890s Cairo was the centre of an empire of print, with journals like al-Muayyad and Rashid Ridas al-Manar circulating throughout the Muslim world, to the outer reaches of the Dutch East Indies.10 The circulation of these journals demonstrates the development of an increasingly global Muslim reading public. Their articles, too, drew on a vast range of ideas and ideologies exegesis of the Koran, law, social reform, political economy, public and private hygiene, marriage practices and international affairs.11 By privileging connections that were channelled through Europe, through the shadowy political worlds of Barcelona and Paris, Anderson overlooks a whole other world of inter-Asian connections, until Under Three Flags suddenly takes us to Hong Kong towards the end. To get at that other world, it is impossible to avoid the intellectual networks of global Islam.12 Ever generous to his readers, Anderson almost invites us to imagine our own endings to this book, as his storys conclusion is over the tired novelists horizon (p. 5). I can imagine four such, and he hints at them all. The most sympathetic, for a believer in the kinds of politics that Rizal and Isabelo espoused, is the notion that the insurrection in the Philippines was a powder keg for Asian revolution. This is what I sense Anderson means when he speaks of the Philippines world historical significance in these years. His brief reference to Rebecca Karls work on the political imagination of Chinese radicals suggests he would like us to see the Philippine revolution as a starting point for Asias revolutions of the twentieth century. Karl argues that the conceptual connections Chinese intellectuals made to the Philippine events from 1899 to 1903 helped Chinese intellectuals recognize revolution as a modern mode of being in the contemporary world.13 The Indian press, too, commented upon and read lessons into events in the Philippines. Taken together with the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905, and the beginnings of the Swadeshi movement in India, the Philippine revolution can be seen as transforming the conditions of possibility for anti-colonial revolt across the continent, culminating in the Chinese revolution of 1911, and beyond. Certainly, the Philippine revolution caused much anxiety on the part of colonial administrations elsewhere in Asia. Few have captured this as well as the great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer in the final volume of the Buru Quartet, House of Glass. The protagonist, Jacques Pangemannan, a native political spy for the colonial state, sifts through the archives of the Dutch Administration trying to find out more about Rizal and the Philippine

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revolution, lest its lessons be ignored in the Indies.14 The long-term impact on the political imagination elsewhere in Asia is difficult to gauge, but Anderson does us a service by suggesting this as an area for further research. A more local version of Rizals after-life reads rather differently. Here, too, the story of the Philippine revolution is appropriated into a universal narrative, but a very different one; one for which Anderson has little time. Reynaldo Ileto has argued that although Rizal was definitely a product of the colonial order who, through modern education, heralded the birth of modern Southeast Asian nationalism, the signs he scattered about, his gestures, works, his absences even, and finally, the mode of his death, generated meanings linked to other largely hidden narratives of the Philippine past. Ileto suggests that Rizals death was widely read as an enactment of a pasyon story, one of the religiously inspired, metrical romances that nourished the political and religious imagination of most Filipinos. Rizals crucifixion, represented the expression of modern anticolonial sentiments in the Christian idiom of self-sacrifice and salvation. As Ileto puts it, it was the peoples familiarity with the narrative of Christ that gave meaning to a life-and-death struggle for independence a struggle imagined as a single redemptive event.15 A far cry, this, from Rizal as a beacon of secular revolution with an anarchist tinge. The third ending I would like to write for Andersons epic is straightforwardly tragic: the brief revolution giving way to a new American imperium, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Filipino lives. The American empire in the Pacific quickly acquired a taste for blood. Pax Americana ushered in a new, hygienic colonial modernity, imposed from the laboratory and in the market place as much as from the barrel of a gun. Filipinos participation in modernity, on this view, would come not from their contribution to world culture or world literature, but in learning well the lessons of their masters.16 But in some sense the revolution ended even before it was crushed by the big stick of Theodore Roosevelt. In this context, I turn to Mariano Ponces correspondence: his plaintive justification, from Hong Kong and Yokohama, of the Philippine states legitimacy suggests, rather tragically, the powerful discipline exerted by the nation-state form itself.17 Writing to a Japanese journalist in 1899, Ponce wished to give him . . . some details more about the progressive steps of our Government, towards the development of our country. In all Luzon Island we organized postal and telegraphic communications; we put in all principal towns electrical light for public service; all wild tribes living in the interior of mountains, as the Igorrotes, Tinmguianes, Itas, etc.., whom the Spaniards, during their four centuries of sovereignty, could not bring to

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the civilized life, now accept our Government and allow us to organize civilly their villages. We have there elements for all branches of science, industry, art, etc. The electric plant has been established by Filipino engineers. The telegraphic line also by Filipino telegraphists. The Post and Telegraph stamps I send you enclosed have been engraved by Filipino lithographists. Fine arts: we have artists known in Europe and America, as Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo . . .18 And yet despite this, he wrote in another letter, we are now fighting against a strong prejudice against our capacity for a self-government.19 Ponces letter suggests quite how powerful had become the global norms to which any new state had to conform: those who failed to conform would invite intervention by the club of nation-state for violating its rules, as the Philippines would soon find. The degree to which Ponce had internalized the expectations attendant on any state, in an international state system, is a good indication of why any anarchist inspiration nourishing Asian nationalisms quickly vanished everywhere and without exception upon the acquisition of state power. The last ending that I imagine for Andersons unfinished novel lies much further in the future. It lies in a throwaway phrase in the discussion of Isabelo de los Reyes, in which Anderson writes that it was Isabelos conception of the Philippines offering something, parallel and equal to that of any other pais, to humanity, that would much later make the United Nations both possible and plausible (p. 15). This is interesting in itself, for providing an alternative genealogy of the development of the UN, so often derived purely from Western ideas about the rights of man. But it is interesting, too, for another reason. One gnawing question that arises from the flourishing of work on the trans-national origins of nationalism is how it took so long for these, now seemingly obvious, connections to emerge in historical scholarship. A simple answer, that national histories served the needs of national states in the world-historical period of their dominance, is indisputable. But there is also a straight line we might draw between Isabelo de los Reyes folklore studies and the kind of structural anthropology that informed the newly-formed United Nations Educational Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as it sought to lend legitimacy to the study of world history and the preservation of world heritage. It is a project Isabelo would have recognized; indeed it was his own project, to document and preserve the cultural heritage of the Philippines in all of its diversity. Writing his Race et Histoire for UNESCO in 1952, Claude Levi-Strauss made an argument in favour of diversity as a value in itself:20 this has clear roots in the (French as well as British) colonial fascination with the alterity of colonized societies, with cataloguing the strange and the alien, but also Anderson shows us with the work of indigenous ethnologists. Like Isabelo

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de los Reyes, Levi-Strauss, writing in the post-war moment, was critical of the assumption of racial superiority inherent in the colonial civilizing mission. Yet nations/cultures were, on this view, culturally pure, distinct, easily separable and here is the post-colonial perspective coming in absolutely equal. What ended up being naturalized by a whole host of intellectual and pedagogical moves from that post-war age, is a perspective that Anderson sets out elegantly in the opening pages of Under Three Flags21: If one looks up at a moonless, dry-season, tropical night sky, one sees a glittering canopy of stationary stars, connected by nothing but darkness visible and the imagination. The serene beauty is so immense that it takes an effort of will to remind oneself that these stars are actually in perpetual, frantic motion, impelled hither and yon by the invisible power of the gravitational fields of which they are ineluctable, active parts. Such is the Chaldean elegance of the comparative method, which, for example, allowed me once to juxtapose Japanese nationalism with Hungarian . . . each shining with its own separate, steady, unitary light (p. 1). Setting out to retell the history of Filipino nationalism in terms of frantic motion, Andersons book ends up showing the intellectual and political roots of the process by which the cosmopolitan origins of nationalism and the many non-national modes of political imagination that gripped large numbers of people were, quite literally, erased. Ultimately, Anderson holds out the hope of writing a counter-history, in Foucaults sense, of the modern world. Anderson implicitly highlights the hybrid, impure and potentially liberating circulations of early globalization in order to question the contemporary order of things (late globalization?). On the other hand, global history has become something like the flavour of the month, and already serves, as nationalist histories once did, to praise the powerful. Andersons intervention may come too late. Andersons political astronomy is a seductive way of trying to rethink the history of nations and their entanglements with each other; it is bound to inspire many extensions and imitations. But we need also to stick with political archaeology, with the mud and the dirt intact, scraping to find layers of global connection from below as well as from on high. Reading Under Three Flags, I often wondered: what about the ideas of the tens of millions of workers, migrants, pilgrims and merchants who were on the move in the age of early globalization? They may not have had the erudition of Rizal, nor access to the journals of the anarchist avant-garde, but the history of their ideas, embodied in social and cultural practices, is surely as important a part of the story of early globalization as the effusions of the literati. Global history needs to do more than gaze at the stars.

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Sunil Amrith teaches history at Birkbeck College, University of London and is an editor of History Workshop Journal. He is currently working on the history of Tamil migration to Southeast Asia.

NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (1983), revised edition, London, 1991. 2 Ambeth R. Ocampo, Rizal Without the Overcoat, Pasig City, 2000. 3 Selc uk Esenbel, Japans Global Claim to Asia and the World of Islam: Transnational Nationalism and World Power, 190045, American Historical Review 109: 4, 2004. 4 T. J. Clark, In a Pomegranate Chandelier, London Review of Books 28: 18, September 2006. 5 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 11. 6 Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean, Los Angeles/Berkeley, 2006, p. 118. 7 Ho, Graves of Tarim, p. 118. 8 See the essays in Globalization in World History, ed. Anthony G. Hopkins, London, 2001. 9 Nikki Keddie, Sayyid Jamal ad-din al-Afgani: a Political Biography, Berkeley, 1972. 10 Michael Laffan, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: the Umma Below the Winds, London, 2002. 11 The classic intellectual history remains Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 17981939, Cambridge, 1983. 12 For an exemplary history of inter-Asian connections in the Indian Ocean world, see Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: the Indian Ocean in an Age of Global Empire, Cambridge, MA, 2006. 13 Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Durham, NC, 2002, p. 84. 14 Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Rumah Kaca, Kuala Lumpur, 1990, esp. pp. 5763. 15 Reynaldo Ileto, Filipinos and their Revolution: Event, Discourse and Historiography Manila, 1998, pp. 758, p. 2. See also Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 18401910, Manila, 1979. 16 See Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race and Hygiene in the Philippines, Durham, NC, 2006. 17 Mariano Ponce, Cartas Sobre La Revoluc ion, 18971900, Manila, 1932. 18 Mariano Ponce to J. Kamiya, 8 March 1899, in Ponce, Cartas. 19 Mariano Ponce to Mr Yamagata, 23 Feb. 1899, in Ponce, Cartas. 20 Claude Levi-Strauss, Race and History [1956], in Race, Science and Society, ed. L. C. Dunn, et al., Paris, 1975. 21 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a pioneer of connected history puts it equally forcefully: It is as if these conventional geographical units of analysis, fortuitously defined as givens for the intellectually slothful, and the result of complex (even murky) processes of academic and nonacademic engagement, somehow became real and overwhelming. Having helped create these Frankensteins monsters, we are obliged to praise them for their beauty . . .: Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia, Modern Asian Studies 31: 3, 1997, p. 742.

doi:10.1093/hwj/dbn030