History is forged through the travel of ideas across continents--as well as by bombs. The Age of Globalization is an account of the unlikely connections that made up late nineteenth-century politics and culture, and in particular between militant anarchists in Europe and the Americas, and anti-imperialist uprisings in Cuba, China and Japan. Told through the complex intellectual interactions of two great Filipino writers--the political novelist José Rizal and the pioneering folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes--The Age of Globalization is a brilliantly original work on how global exchanges shaped the nationalist movements of the time.

An intellectual memoir by the author of the acclaimed Imagined Communities Benedict Anderson is one of the leading historians of nationalism and Southeast Asia. His seminal book Imagined Communities has changed the way we think about the reason why people live, die and kill in the name of nationhood.Born in China, Anderson spent his childhood in California and Ireland, was educated in England and finally found a home at Cornell University, where he immersed himself in the growing field of Southeast Asian studies. After field work in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, he was banned from Suharto's Indonesia for disputing the legitimacy of the 1965 coup. In his memoir, he brings to life the intellectual formation of a life spent open to the world, resisting the easy comforts of imagined homes: the joys of learning languages; the importance of field work; the influence of the New Left upon global think-ing; and the satisfactions of...