Born in China, Benedict 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. He was expell
ed from Suharto's Indonesia after revealing the military to be behind the attemp
ted coup of 1965, an event which prompted reprisals that killed up to a million
communists and their supporters. Banned from the country for thirty-five years,
he continued his research in Thailand and the Philippines, producing a very fine
study of the Filipino novelist and patriot Jose Rizal in The Age of Globalisati
on.
