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ONE OF THE WORLD'S GREAT EXPERTS on Southeast Asia, and a leading theorist of nationalism whose Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism became required reading for students in a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, Benedict Anderson was born in Kunming, China, to an Irish father who worked for the Chinese Customs Service and an English mother. The family left China for Ireland ahead of the massive Japanese invasion of northern China in 1941, but submarine warfare in the Atlantic led them to stay in California until after the war. Anderson won scholarships to Eton and then to Cambridge, where he took a first in Classics, read widely, discovered Japanese cinema, and was radicalized in demonstrations by students from former colonies against the Anglo-French invasion of Suez. Later, he came to especially value this traditional education and the learning of languages, noting that he took his old-fashioned education for granted, having no idea that he was a member of almost the last generation to benefit from it. He attributed his success to this education and his cosmopolitan experience of marginality, as an English boy in California, an Anglo-Protestant in Catholic Ireland, and a scholarship boy among the privileged at Eton. Others were more inclined to credit his amazing ability to learn languages and immerse himself in foreign cultures and his insatiable curiosity about a wide range of topics that enabled him to see his objects of investigation in a different light.
After graduation from Cambridge, he had no concrete plans, until a school friend who was joining the Foreign Service arranged for him to take over for him as a teaching assistant in Government at Cornell, where he was to teach...