Imagined Communities author Anderson’s tour de force account of the complexities of nationalism and national identity in colonial Southeast Asia, and how these histories help us understand the multifaceted aspects of nationalism today. Turning the ‘colonizer-reports-back-on-the colonized’ trope of travel literature on its head, Anderson’s analysis has a particular focus on how Europe and European culture were perceived, written about, and named in colonial literature, and how these impressions of the ‘colonizing Other’ affected the development of national identity.