The Age of Globalization Read online

  First published by Verso as Under Three Flags in 2005

  © Benedict Anderson 2005

  This edition published by Verso

  © Benedict Anderson 2005, 2007, 2013

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN (US): 9781781681985

  ISBN (UK): 9781781685075

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  v3.1

  It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians.

  We cannibals must help these Christians

  Queequeg

  In homage to Herman Melville

  In memory of Tsuchiya Kenji

  For Kenichiro, Carol and Henry

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1 PROLOGUE: THE ROOSTER’S EGG

  The New Science

  The Riches of Local Knowledge

  Forest Brothers

  Strange Beauties

  Comparative Reflections

  2 ALLÁ … LÀ-BAS

  Transnational Libraries

  Nitroglycerine in the Pomegranate

  A Legacy from Baltimore?

  A Student of Homeopathy

  Là-Bas

  Flaubert and a Future Murderer

  Untried Pleasures

  The Luxury of French

  Writing Revenge

  The Children of Rodolphe

  Laughter and Suicide

  Collaboration and Emulation

  3 IN THE WORLD-SHADOW OF BISMARCK AND NOBEL

  Passage to Europe

  Bismarck and the New Geography of Imperialism

  Le Drapeau Noir

  Cacique Spain

  The Orders: Dispossessed and Possessed

  Black Wings

  A Bosom Friend

  The First Homecoming

  A Schism within Émigré Nationalism

  A Missing Library?

  Interpreting El Filibusterismo: Transcontinentalism and Prolepsis

  Transpositions

  Dansons la Ravachole

  An Enigmatic Smile

  4 TRIALS OF A NOVELIST

  Chernychevsky’s Question

  Conrad Country

  La Liga Filipina

  The Second Homecoming

  A Tropical Siberia

  Martí’s Insurrection

  Rizal to Cuba?

  New Conjunctures

  Leaving Dapitan

  Last Journeys

  Weylerismo in Manila

  Three Reflections

  5 MONTJUICH

  Tarrida’s Crusade

  Paris Radicalized

  The Parti Ouvrier Belge and Germinal

  The Dreyfus Affair

  Patriot of the Antilles: Doctor Betances

  Angiolillo: From Foggia to Santa Águeda

  Into the Maelstrom

  Go East, Young Man

  Who is the Enemy?

  A Gentleman Globalized

  Blumentritt

  The Antilleans

  The Japanese

  Chinese Connections

  Pawa: Internationalizing the War

  Malatesta to Manila

  Afterglow West: Isabelo de los Reyes

  Afterglow East: Mariano Ponce

  POSTSCRIPT

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Acknowledgments

  Many people and institutions have given me indispensable help in preparing this book. Among the individuals, my biggest debt has been to my brother Perry for tirelessly hunting up materials to broaden and complicate my thinking and for characteristically meticulous and perspicacious criticisms. Second only to him have been Carol Hau and Ambeth Ocampo. Others whom I would like deeply to thank are Patricio Abinales, Ronald Baytan, Robin Blackburn, Karina Bolasco, Jonathan Culler, Evan Daniel, Neil Garcia, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis, Carl Levy, Fouad Makki, Franco Moretti, Shiraishi Takashi, Megan Thomas, Tsuchiya Kenichiro, Umemori Naoyuki, Wang Chao-hua, Wang Hui, Susan Watkins, Joss Wibisono, and Tony Wood.

  The four institutions which have kindly made rare materials available to me are the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis in Amsterdam, the National Library of the Philippines, the Library of the University of the Philippines, and the Library of Ateneo de Manila University, especially the staff of the Pardo de Tavera Collection. I owe them all a debt of gratitude.

  Introduction

  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,” “Venezuelan” with “American,” and “Indonesian” with “Swiss.” Each shining with its own separate, steady, unitary light.

  When night fell in revolutionary Haiti, yellow-fevered Polish troops under General Charles Leclerc, sent by Napoléon to restore slavery, heard their adversaries in the near distance singing the “Marseillaise” and “Ça ira!” Responding to this reproach, they refused an order to massacre black prisoners.1 The Scottish Enlightenment was decisive for framing the American anticolonial insurrection. The Spanish American nationalist independence movements are inseparable from the universalist currents of liberalism and republicanism. In their turn Romanticism, democracy, Idealism, Marxism, anarchism, even, late in the day, fascism were variously understood as globe-stretching and nation-linking. Nationalism, that element with the highest valency of all, combined with all these others in different ways and in different times.

  This book is an experiment in what Melville might have called political astronomy. It attempts to map the gravitational force of anarchism between militant nationalisms on opposite sides of the planet. Following the collapse of the First International, and Marx’s death in 1883, anarchism, in its characteristically variegated forms, was the dominant element in the selfconsciously internationalist radical Left. It was not merely that in Kropotkin (born twenty-two years after Marx) and Malatesta (born thirty-three years after Engels) anarchism produced a persuasive philosopher and a colorful, charismatic activist–leader from a younger generation, not matched by mainstream Marxism. Notwithstanding the towering edifice of Marx’s thought, from which anarchism often borrowed, the movement did not disdain peasants and agricultural laborers in an age when serious industrial proletariats were mainly confined to Northern Europe. It was open to “bourgeois” writers and artists—in the name of individual freedom—in a way that, in those days, institutional Marxism was not. Just as hostile to imperialism, it had no theoretical prejudices against “small” and “ahistorical” nationalisms, including those in the colonial world. Anarchists were also quicker to capitalize on the vast transoceanic migrations of the era. Malatesta spent four years in Buenos Aires—something inconceivable for Marx or Engels, who never left Western Europe. Mayday celebrates the memory of immigrant an
archists—not Marxists—executed in the United States in 1887.

  This book’s temporal focus on the final decades of the nineteenth century has still other justifications. The near-simultaneity of the last nationalist insurrection in the New World (Cuba, 1895) and the first in Asia (the Philippines, 1896) was no serendipity. Natives of the last important remnants of the fabled Spanish global empire, 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. Both were eventually crushed, within a few years of each other, by the same brutish would-be world hegemon. But the coordination did not take place directly between the broken hill-country of Oriente and Cavite, but was mediated through “representatives,” above all in Paris, and secondarily in Hong Kong, London and New York. Newspaper-reading Chinese nationalists eagerly followed events in Cuba and the Philippines—as well as the Boer nationalist struggle against Ukanian imperialism, which Filipinos also studied—to learn how to “do” revolution, anticolonialism, and anti-imperialism. Both Filipinos and Cubans found, to different degrees, their most reliable allies among French, Spanish, Italian, Belgian and British anarchists—each for their own, often non-nationalist reasons.

  These coordinations were made possible because the last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the onset of what one could call “early globalization.” The invention of the telegraph was rapidly followed by many improvements, and the laying of transoceanic submarine cables. The “wire” was soon taken for granted by city people all over the planet. In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt sent off a round-the-globe telegram to himself which reached him in nine minutes.2 The inauguration of the Universal Postal Union in 1876 vastly accelerated the reliable movement of letters, magazines, newspapers, photographs, and books around the world. The steamship—safe, speedy, and cheap—made possible unprecedentedly massive migrations from state to state, empire to empire, and continent to continent. A thickening latticework of railways was moving millions of people and commodities within national and colonial borders, linking remote interiors to each other and to ports and capitals.

  During the eight decades between 1815 and 1894 the world was largely at conservative peace. Almost all states outside the Americas were headed by monarchies, autocratic or constitutional. The three longest and bloodiest wars took place on the periphery of the world-system—civil wars in China and the United States, the Crimean War on the northern littoral of the Black Sea, and the horrifying struggle of the 1860s between Paraguay and its powerful neighbors. Bismarck’s crushing defeats of Austro-Hungary and France were achieved with lightning speed and without any huge loss of life. Europe had such vast superiority in industrial, financial, scientific, and financial resources that imperialism in Asia, Africa, and Oceania forged ahead without much effective armed resistance, except in the case of the Mutiny in India. And capital itself moved quickly and pretty freely across existing national and imperial boundaries.

  But beginning in the early 1880s the preliminary tremors were being felt of the earthquake that we remember variously as the Great War or the First World War. Tsar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 by bomb-throwing radicals calling themselves The People’s Will was followed over the next twenty-five years by the killing of a French president, an Italian monarch, an Austrian empress and an heir-apparent, a Portuguese king and his heir, a Spanish prime minister, two American presidents, a king of Greece, a king of Serbia, and powerful conservative politicians in Russia, Ireland, and Japan. Of course, a much larger number of attentats failed. The earliest and most spectacular of these assassinations were carried out by anarchists, but nationalists soon followed in their wake. In most cases the immediate aftermath was a mass of draconian “anti-terrorist” legislation, summary executions, and a sharp rise in torture by police forces, public and secret, as well as militaries. But the assassins, some of whom could well be described as early suicide-bombers, understood themselves as acting for a world-audience of news agencies, newspapers, religious progressives, working-class and peasant organizations, and so on.

  Imperialist competition, till 1880 still largely between the United Kingdom, France, and Russia, was beginning to be intensified by such newcomers as Germany (in Africa, Northeast Asia, and Oceania), the United States (across the Pacific and into the Caribbean), Italy (in Africa), and Japan (in East Asia). Resistance was also beginning to show a more modern and effective face. In the 1890s, Spain had to send the hitherto largest military force to cross the Atlantic in its attempt to smash Martí’s insurrection in Cuba. In the Philippines, Spain held on against a nationalist uprising but could not defeat it. In South Africa, the Boers gave the British Empire the shock of its aging life.

  Such is the general proscenium on which the main actors in this book played their various nomadic parts. One could put this point more vividly, perhaps, by saying that the reader will encounter Italians in Argentina, New Jersey, France, and the Basque homeland; Puerto Ricans and Cubans in Haiti, the United States, France, and the Philippines; Spaniards in Cuba, France, Brazil, and the Philippines; Russians in Paris; Filipinos in Belgium, Austria, Japan, France, Hong Kong, and Britain; Japanese in Mexico, San Francisco, and Manila; Germans in London and Oceania; Chinese in the Philippines and Japan; Frenchmen in Argentina, Spain, and Ethiopia. And so on.

  In principle, one could open the study of this vast rhizomal network anywhere—Russia would take one eventually to Cuba, Belgium would lead one to Ethiopia, Puerto Rico would bring one to China. But this particular study embarks from the Philippines for two simple reasons. The first is that I am deeply attached to it, and have studied it, on and off, for twenty years. The second is that in the 1890s, though on the outer periphery of the world-system, it briefly played a world-role which has since eluded it. A subordinate reason is the material available to me. The three men whose lives anchor the study—born within three or four years of each other in the early 1860s—lived in the holy time before the advent of the photocopy, the fax, and the internet. They wrote copiously—letters, pamphlets, articles, academic studies, and novels—in undeletable pen and ink, on paper that was expected to have a near-infinite life. (The United States Archives today refuses to accept anything xeroxed—it will become illegible within twenty years—or in electronic form—it will be unreadable, or readable only at prohibitive cost, even sooner, thanks to the hurtling pace of technological innovation.)

  Nonetheless, a study that, however superficially, takes one to Rio de Janeiro, Yokohama, Ghent, Barcelona, London, Harar, Paris, Hong Kong, Smolensk, Chicago, Cádiz, Port-au-Prince, Tampa, Naples, Manila, Leitmeritz, Cayo Hueso, and Singapore requires its own combinative narrative style. In this style there are two central elements: second (historically) is Eisenstein’s montage, while the first is that of the roman-feuilleton pioneered by Charles Dickens and Eugène Sue. The reader is thus requested to imagine that she is reading a black-and-white film or a novel manqué of which the conclusion is over the tired novelist’s horizon.

  There is one further burden on the good reader. In the late nineteenth century there was as yet no ugly, commercially debased “international language.” Filipinos wrote to Austrians in German, to Japanese in English, to each other in French, or Spanish, or Tagalog, with liberal interventions from the last beautiful international language, Latin. Some of them knew a bit of Russian, Greek, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese. A wire might be sent around the world in a matter of minutes, but real communication required the true, hard internationalism of the polyglot. Filipino leaders were peculiarly adapted to this Babelish world. The language of the political enemy was also their private language, though understood by less than 5 percent of the Philippine population. Tagalog, the native language used in Manila and its immediate periphery, was not understood by most Filipinos, and in any case was useless for international communication. Many native speakers of rival local la
nguages, especially Cebuano and Ilocano, preferred Spanish, even though this language was, in the Philippines, a clear marker of elite, even collaborationist status. To give the reader the most vivid sense of a vanished polyglot world, this study quotes liberally from the different languages in which these people wrote to each other and to non-Filipinos. (All the translations in this book are my own, unless stated otherwise.)

  The formal structure of the book is governed by its method and its objects. It has a clear-cut, if arbitrary, beginning in the quiet, remote Manila of the 1880s, and then gradually fans out across Europe, the Americas, and Asia towards an even more arbitrary finis for which no “conclusion” seems feasible. It is anchored, if that is the best word for it, in the young lives of three prominent Filipino patriots born in the early 1860s: novelist of genius José Rizal, pioneering anthropologist and polemical journalist Isabelo de los Reyes, and coordinating organizer Mariano Ponce.

  Chapters 1 and 2 are contrasting studies of two remarkable books: Isabelo’s El folk-lore filipino (Manila, 1887) and Rizal’s enigmatic second novel El Filibusterismo (Ghent, 1891). They investigate the ways in which: (1) the anthropologist openly deployed the work of contemporary European ethnologists and folklorists, combined with his own local research, to undermine the intellectual credibility of the colonial authorities, both clerical and lay; (2) the novelist borrowed alchemically from key figures of the French, Dutch, and Spanish literary avant-gardes to write what is probably the first incendiary anticolonial novel written by a colonial subject outside Europe.

  The following chapter begins the move away from amateur literary criticism to the field of politics. El Filibusterismo is still the main topic, but it is explicated through the filter of Rizal’s reading and experiences in Europe between 1882 and 1891, as well the fallout from his brilliant first novel Noli me tangere, which made him the symbol of Philippine resistance to colonial rule, and won him the bitter enmity of many in high places. It also deals with the political conflicts that sharpened among the Filipino activists in Spain. El Filibusterismo is argued to be a kind of global novel by contrast with its predecessor. Its characters are no longer simply the Spanish and their native subjects, but include nomads from France, China, the United States, and even, some personages suspect, Cuba. The shadows of Bismarck in Europe and East Asia, Nobel’s innovation in industrial explosives, Russian nihilism, and the anarchism of Barcelona and Andalusia are all apparent in its pages.