Amrith - Gazing at the Stars Review of Anderson Under Three Flags (2008)

REVIEWS

Gazing at the Starsby 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 politicalimagination of Philippine nationalism and its intersection with latenineteenth-century anarchism. It is an effort by one of the pioneeringhistorians of nationalism to resituate his subject in the history of earlyglobalization. Its focus is the gravitational field (p. 1) of political ideas and

political relations that brought into interaction all manner of politicalprojects in the late nineteenth century, linking insurrectionary nationalismsacross the globe. It reads like a loosely plotted political thriller, and this isprobably the effect its author intended.

Anderson renarrates the history of Filipino nationalism, situating itsdevelopment in the global circulation of ideas, inspirations, technologies andpeoples that accelerated so rapidly from the 1870s. The emphasis, in hisearlier Imagined Communities, on the modular nature of the nation-stateform is tempered here by a more sophisticated view of borrowings andappropriations, and by a greater willingness to consider the continuingimportance of non-nationalist forms of political identification.1 National-isms, all nationalisms, appear here as mutually constituted, moving awayfrom Andersons earlier notion that newer nationalisms simply replicatedthe models of older ones.

At the heart of the book are three remarkable Filipinos, intellectuals andpolyglot cosmopolitans all. Isabelo de los Reyes (18641938) was a folkloristand journalist, the author of El folk-lore Filipino (1887) and the champion offolklore as a new science for the Philippines. As an ethnologist, Isabeloopenly deployed the work of contemporary European ethnologistsand folklorists, combined with his own local research, to undermine theintellectual credibility of colonial authorities, both clerical and lay (pp. 56).

Himself from the Ilocano ethnic group, Isabelo adopted a sensitivelyambiguous stance in his description of Ilocano culture, writing as both aninsider 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

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would today call Tribal minorities . . . facing a future of possiblyviolent assimilation, even extermination (p. 17).

Isabelo vanishes from Andersons narrative after a compelling earlyappearance. He reappears at the end of the book, when we are told that,after a period of detention in the notorious Montjuich fortress, Isabeloreturned to the Philippines in 1901, carrying in his bags the first texts ofMarx and the leading anarchist thinkers, perhaps even of Darwin, to enterthe Philippines (p. 226). Soon he established a Barcelona-style, free-wheeling central Union Obrera Democratica which erupted in a seriesof strikes which alarmed the Philippines new American masters.

Jose Rizal (186196) is much better known. The father of the Philippinenation, he is celebrated on street names, statues and postage stamps, his lifenarrated 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 forEurope, where he spent the next ten years, roving between Spain, where hestudied ophthalmology, France, Germany, and England. As he flourishedas a writer, Rizal borrowed alchemically from key figures of the French,Dutch, and Spanish literary avant-gardes to write what is probably the firstincendiary 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 novelin creating a national reading public. In 1893, Rizal published ElFilibusterismo, to which Anderson here devotes much attention. By allaccounts it is an odd novel, the plot revolving around the vanished hero ofNoli me tangere returning from the dead to plot to blow up the cream ofManila society, using a pomegranate-shaped chandelier stuffed withnitroglycerine. As Anderson points out, the novel displayed the scope ofRizals global imagination: the book is littered with casual references toEgypt, Poland, Peru, Germany, Russia, Cuba, Persia, the Carolines, Ceylon,the Moluccas, Libya, France, China, and Japan, as well as Arabs andPortuguese, Canton and Constantinople (p. 53). Rizal returned to Asia in1892, 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 hisfamily and his followers in Sandakan (on Borneo, in the present-dayMalaysian state of Sabah). Anderson suggests that it might have proved alaunching pad for revolution, like Jose Marts Florida; but it was not to be.Rizals brief attempt at political organization, his La Liga Filipina, madelittle headway. He came in for increasing criticism from the restiveleadership of the underground Katipunan movement, but neverthelesspaid with his life in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Katipunan uprising,which took him by surprise. Rizal was executed in Manilas public square in1896, leaving a moving testament.

Towards the end of the book, the figure of Mariano Ponce makes arelatively 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 withhis mentor Del Pilar, behind the Barcelona-based journal, La Solidaridad.From 1897 to 1900, Ponce served as an ambassador for the fledglingPhilippine republic, charged with raising funds and arms (with little success)in Hong Kong and then in Yokohama. Ponce in many ways stands as anepilogue to the book, drawing on an expansive and cosmopolitan world ofcontacts and connections in his voluminous correspondence, in the service ofa revolution that took the cosmopolitan literati by surprise, led by men lesscosmopolitan and less connected than Rizal or Ponce.

These lives are woven together by many threads, many of them meetingnot in the Philippines but in Europe. For a start, in writing primarily inSpanish, Rizal, Isabelo and Ponce were already amongst the minuteproportion of the Philippines population literate in that language, and thuspart of a small and closed elite. They also shared more expansive globalconnections. They all corresponded with Ferdinand Blumentritt, forexample, who is a quiet but powerful presence in the book; they read andwrote 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 sympatheticIsabelo: he was scathing about Isabelos workmanlike productivity.

Reading Under Three Flags, one marvels at the promiscuous blendof ideas, ideologies and tactics that nourished Filipino nationalism.Anderson shows, convincingly, that colonized intellectuals from a distantarchipelago 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 beinternationalists. It is a term that has dropped away from scholarlydiscussion, displaced by a voluminous writing on transnationalism,globalism and cosmopolitanism. Yet Anderson shows convincingly howRizal, Isabelo and Ponce all operated very much within the evolving world-system of nation-states. Isabelo imagined his field of work as that ofinternational folklore studies, comprising myriad national folklore societies.For Rizal, it was international literature, comprising the best of nationalliteratures. Ponce imagined, poignantly, an international society, a concertof civilized national governments, into which club he sought entry for thePhilippines as a nation amongst others. The whole story fits into what thehistorian Selcuk Esenbel has aptly called the international relations ofnationalism, that is, the alternative, ambivalent arena of internationalrelations that ran parallel to, and constrained by, the inter-state relationsforged by formal treaties and diplomacy.3

The narrative builds around a sense of impending violence and politicaleruption. Beginning in the early 1880s, Anderson writes, the preliminarytremors were being felt of the earthquake that we remember variouslyas the Great War or the First World War (p. 3). Fair enough, but forthe 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 anarchistbombings and assassinations propaganda by the deed had a clearimpact on the political imagination of anti-colonial activists: Cubans,Filipinos, and Dominicans. He suggests that the spate of politicalassassinations that began with Tsar Alexander IIs assassination in 1881were acted out for a world-audience of news agencies, newspapers, religiousprogressives, working-class and peasant organizations (p. 4). But theconnection between propaganda by the deed and Rizal is tenuous.Anderson clearly sees the plot of El-filibusterismo, with the dramaticbomb 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 near-simultaneity of the last nationalist insurrection in the New World (Cuba,1895), and the first in Asia (the Philippines, 1896), and this was noserendipity (p. 2). Anderson argues that:

Cubans (as well as Puerto Ricans and Dominicans) and Filipinos did notmerely read about each other, but had crucial personal connections and,up to a point, coordinated their actions the first time in world historythat such transglobal coordination became possible (p. 2).

Yet this is not demonstrated with any conviction. Beyond the generalinspiration that Cuban agitators might have provided to Filipinonationalists abroad, and despite a number of personal connections whichAnderson uncovers, it is not clear that there was any very substantiveconnection between the Cuban and the Filipino revolts of the 1890s.Moreover, at no point does Anderson show reciprocal influence, from thePhilippines back to Cuba, which undermines his argument about the globalcentrality of the Philippines at this moment. Indeed, as T. J. Clark haswritten, Anderson also has a hard time getting anarchism within a thousandmiles of Jose Mart.4 The links in Andersons global chain often seem indanger of coming apart. Remember, too, that when the insurrection finallycame to the Philippines, it came too soon; precisely those Filipinos whomAnderson locates within the global networks of anarchist and radicalthought, felt unprepared for the Kaputinan revolt, and indeed Rizal paidwith 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 isconcerned with. I wonder if the Philippines, by virtue of its exceptionalism(which Anderson explains at length) are really the best place to begin areconstruction of a world of global connections in the late nineteenthcentury. If the world of global anarchist thought, with its journals and itssalons, constitutes one particular instance of early globalization, it is in facta 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 ofreligious belief, he wrote, prematurely, in Imagined Communities, thesuffering which belief in part composed did not disappear . . . What then wasrequired was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, con-tingency into meaning;5 in nationalism lay the new faith. In Under ThreeFlags, he writes that in their turn Romanticism, democracy, Idealism,Marxism, anarchism, even, late in the day, fascism were variouslyunderstood as globe-stretching and nation-linking (p. 1). Surely, though,no beliefs or practices were more globe-stretching and nation-linking, inthis 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 tookthousands of Javanese, Sumatran, Burmese and Punjabi Muslims to theHejaz, to Cairo, and to other points across the Muslim world. If we think ofdiasporas much older than the diaspora of Filipino literati that Andersondescribes, it becomes clear that there are other periodizations of earlyglobalization. As Engseng Ho points out in his recent brilliant work on theHadrami diaspora, for 500 years the diasporic space of the Indian Oceanwas held together by a skein of common references, books in religion,language and law; by scholars whose itineraries and generations span thespace . . . and by intellectual genealogies of teachers licensing students toteach those texts.6 As early as 1603, Ho writes, Abd al-Qadir al-AydarussThe Travelling Light Unveiled indicates the linkages across space and timemade 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 parallelcolumns, sharing the space of a common time.7

It may only have been in the second half of the nineteenth century thatFilipino intellectuals were able to participate in a global exchange of ideas,but this was emphatically not the case for, say, Egyptians, Indians orHadramis. The steamship revolution only accelerated the mobility across theIndian Ocean that Hadramis, for instance, had long practised. ThusAnderson might have taken more account than he does of the work ofhistorians who trace a much deeper genealogy of globalization, using thenotion of archaic globalization to argue that Andersons early globaliza-tion of the later nineteenth century already had deep roots in particularcultural regions.8

Yet the intellectual and cultural world of Eurasian Islam, too, benefitedfrom the technological transformations of early globalization lauded byAnderson. The Universal Postal Union in 1876, Anderson argues, vastlyaccelerated the reliable movement of letters, magazines, newspapers,photographs, and books around the world (p. 4). The circulation of thekinds 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, Jamalad-din al-Afghani and Mohammed Abduh began, in Paris, their anti-colonial journal of modernist Islam, al-Urwa al-wuthqa indeed, al-Afghaniwas even better travelled than Rizal, and tried to exploit the interstices of theinternational state system (without huge success), invoking Russian supportfor 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 journalslike al-Muayyad and Rashid Ridas al-Manar circulating throughout theMuslim world, to the outer reaches of the Dutch East Indies.10 Thecirculation of these journals demonstrates the development of an increasinglyglobal Muslim reading public. Their articles, too, drew on a vast range ofideas and ideologies exegesis of the Koran, law, social reform, politicaleconomy, public and private hygiene, marriage practices and internationalaffairs.11

By privileging connections that were channelled through Europe, throughthe shadowy political worlds of Barcelona and Paris, Anderson overlooks awhole other world of inter-Asian connections, until Under Three Flagssuddenly takes us to Hong Kong towards the end. To get at that otherworld, it is impossible to avoid the intellectual networks of global Islam.12

Ever generous to his readers, Anderson almost invites us to imagine ourown endings to this book, as his storys conclusion is over the tirednovelists 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 Rizaland Isabelo espoused, is the notion that the insurrection in the Philippineswas a powder keg for Asian revolution. This is what I sense Anderson meanswhen he speaks of the Philippines world historical significance in theseyears. His brief reference to Rebecca Karls work on the politicalimagination of Chinese radicals suggests he would like us to see thePhilippine revolution as a starting point for Asias revolutions of thetwentieth century. Karl argues that the conceptual connections Chineseintellectuals made to the Philippine events from 1899 to 1903 helped Chineseintellectuals recognize revolution as a modern mode of being in thecontemporary world.13 The Indian press, too, commented upon and readlessons into events in the Philippines. Taken together with the Japanesevictory over Russia in 1905, and the beginnings of the Swadeshi movementin India, the Philippine revolution can be seen as transforming theconditions 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 ofcolonial administrations elsewhere in Asia. Few have captured this as well asthe great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer in the final volume ofthe Buru Quartet, House of Glass. The protagonist, Jacques Pangemannan, anative political spy for the colonial state, sifts through the archives of theDutch 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 anti-

colonial 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 organizecivilly their villages.We have there elements for all branches of science, industry, art, etc. Theelectric plant has been established by Filipino engineers. The telegraphicline also by Filipino telegraphists. The Post and Telegraph stamps I sendyou enclosed have been engraved by Filipino lithographists. Fine arts: wehave artists known in Europe and America, as Juan Luna and FelixResurreccion Hidalgo . . .18

And yet despite this, he wrote in another letter, we are now fighting againsta strong prejudice against our capacity for a self-government.19 Poncesletter suggests quite how powerful had become the global norms to whichany new state had to conform: those who failed to conform would inviteintervention by the club of nation-state for violating its rules, as thePhilippines would soon find. The degree to which Ponce had internalized theexpectations attendant on any state, in an international state system, is agood indication of why any anarchist inspiration nourishing Asiannationalisms quickly vanished everywhere and without exception uponthe acquisition of state power.

The last ending that I imagine for Andersons unfinished novel lies muchfurther in the future. It lies in a throwaway phrase in the discussion ofIsabelo de los Reyes, in which Anderson writes that it was Isabelosconception of the Philippines offering something, parallel and equal to thatof any other pais, to humanity, that would much later make the UnitedNations both possible and plausible (p. 15). This is interesting in itself, forproviding an alternative genealogy of the development of the UN, so oftenderived purely from Western ideas about the rights of man. But it isinteresting, too, for another reason.

One gnawing question that arises from the flourishing of work on thetrans-national origins of nationalism is how it took so long for these, nowseemingly obvious, connections to emerge in historical scholarship. A simpleanswer, that national histories served the needs of national states in theworld-historical period of their dominance, is indisputable. But there is alsoa straight line we might draw between Isabelo de los Reyes folklore studiesand the kind of structural anthropology that informed the newly-formedUnited Nations Educational Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)as it sought to lend legitimacy to the study of world history and thepreservation of world heritage. It is a project Isabelo would haverecognized; indeed it was his own project, to document and preserve thecultural heritage of the Philippines in all of its diversity.

Writing his Race et Histoire for UNESCO in 1952, Claude Levi-Straussmade an argument in favour of diversity as a value in itself:20 this has clearroots in the (French as well as British) colonial fascination with the alterityof 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 theassumption of racial superiority inherent in the colonial civilizing mission.Yet nations/cultures were, on this view, culturally pure, distinct, easilyseparable and here is the post-colonial perspective coming in absolutelyequal.

What ended up being naturalized by a whole host of intellectual andpedagogical moves from that post-war age, is a perspective that Andersonsets out elegantly in the opening pages of Under Three Flags21:

If one looks up at a moonless, dry-season, tropical night sky, one seesa glittering canopy of stationary stars, connected by nothing butdarkness visible and the imagination. The serene beauty is so immensethat it takes an effort of will to remind oneself that these stars areactually in perpetual, frantic motion, impelled hither and yon by theinvisible 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 nationalismwith Hungarian . . . each shining with its own separate, steady, unitarylight (p. 1).

Setting out to retell the history of Filipino nationalism in terms of franticmotion, Andersons book ends up showing the intellectual and politicalroots of the process by which the cosmopolitan origins of nationalism andthe many non-national modes of political imagination that gripped largenumbers of people were, quite literally, erased.

Ultimately, Anderson holds out the hope of writing a counter-history, inFoucaults sense, of the modern world. Anderson implicitly highlights thehybrid, impure and potentially liberating circulations of early globalizationin order to question the contemporary order of things (late globalization?).On the other hand, global history has become something like the flavour ofthe month, and already serves, as nationalist histories once did, to praise thepowerful. Andersons intervention may come too late.

Andersons political astronomy is a seductive way of trying to rethinkthe history of nations and their entanglements with each other; it is bound toinspire many extensions and imitations. But we need also to stick withpolitical archaeology, with the mud and the dirt intact, scraping to findlayers of global connection from below as well as from on high. ReadingUnder Three Flags, I often wondered: what about the ideas of the tens ofmillions of workers, migrants, pilgrims and merchants who were on themove in the age of early globalization? They may not have had theerudition of Rizal, nor access to the journals of the anarchist avant-garde,but the history of their ideas, embodied in social and cultural practices, issurely as important a part of the story of early globalization as theeffusions of the literati. Global history needs to do more than gaze at thestars.

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

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism, (1983), revised edition, London, 1991.

2 Ambeth R. Ocampo, Rizal Without the Overcoat, Pasig City, 2000.3 Selcuk 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 TwentiethCentury, 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: PopularMovements in the Philippines, 18401910, Manila, 1979.

16 See Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race andHygiene in the Philippines, Durham, NC, 2006.

17 Mariano Ponce, Cartas Sobre La Revolucion, 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 theintellectually slothful, and the result of complex (even murky) processes of academic and non-academic engagement, somehow became real and overwhelming. Having helped create theseFrankensteins monsters, we are obliged to praise them for their beauty . . .: ConnectedHistories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia, Modern Asian Studies31: 3, 1997, p. 742.

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Amrith - Gazing at the Stars Review of Anderson Under Three Flags (2008)