The origins of nationalism and anti-globalization are traced by the bestselling author of Imagined Communities.

In this sparkling new work, Benedict Anderson provides a radical recasting of themes from Imagined Communities, his classic book on nationalism, through an exploration of fin-de-siècle politics and culture that spans the Caribbean, Imperial Europe and the South China Sea.

A jewelled pomegranate packed with nitroglycerine is primed to blow away Manila's 19th-century colonial elite at the climax of El Filibusterismo, whose author, the great political novelist José Rizal, was executed in 1896 by the Spanis authorities in the Philippines at the age of 35. Anderson explores the impact of avant-garde European literature and politics on Rizal and his contemporary, the pioneering folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes, who was imprisoned in Manila after the violent uprisings of 1896 and later incarcerated, together with Catalan anarchists, in the prison fortress of Montjuich in Barcelona. On his return to the Philippines, by now under American occupation, Isabelo formed the first militant trade unions under the influence of Malatesta and Bakunin.

Anderson considers the complex intellectual interactions of these young Filipinos with the new "science" of anthropology in Germany and Austro-Hungary, and with post-Communard experimentalists in Paris, against a background of militant anarchism in Spain, France, Italy and the Americas, José Marti's armed uprising in Cuba and anti-imperialist protests in China and Japan. In doing so, he depicts the dense intertwining of anarchist internationalism and radical anti-colonialism.

Under Three Flags is a brilliantly original work on the explosive history of national independence and global politics.

Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (born August 26, 1936) is Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government & Asian Studies at Cornell University, and is best known for his celebrated book Imagined Communities, first published in 1983. Anderson was born in Kunming, China to James O'Gorman and Veronica Beatrice Mary Anderson, and in 1941 the family moved to California. [1] In 1957, Anderson received a Bachelor of Arts in Classics from Cambridge University, and he later earned a Ph.D. from Cornell's Indonesian Studies program. He is the brother of historian Perry Anderson.