| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Perry Anderson Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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Perry, welcome to Berkeley.
Nice to be here.
Where were you born and raised?
Well, by accident, I was born in London, but I was conceived in China, so I should have been born in China. My father spent virtually all of his adult life as a customs official in China, and my brother was born there. My first very early infancy was spent in China. But the family was actually in the United States -- my father was on leave in California -- in 1941, and while we were here, Pearl Harbor occurred, and the Japanese took over the International Settlement in Shanghai, which was the headquarters of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs. From that point we obviously couldn't go back, and so my father spent the rest of the war working for military intelligence here in San Francisco. So my first experience and some of my schooling life was actually in the States.
How, in retrospect, do you think your parents shaped your character?
That's a very interesting question. I find it slightly difficult to answer, because my father died when I was the age of seven, and I only really rediscovered his full life, career, and character from doing historical research in the 1990s. It was a very cosmopolitan household; I suppose that would be the decisive thing. After the American experience, the family went back to Ireland, and then I was sent to school in England. And then, you know, we were sent abroad. So from a very early age, I got a sense of the importance of other cultures and other nations.
This global perspective is something that you carry forward in all of your work. I'm curious, in going back and researching your father many years later, what insight emerged?
It taught me a great deal about inter-war China, and it taught me a great deal about the foreign role -- it wasn't just a British role or an American role. The Imperial Maritime Customs actually had Russians, Germans, Japanese -- it was a real international consortium, basically managing Chinese tax affairs for the Chinese government, staffed and so on by these foreigners. It was a very fascinating and unusual organization. So I became deeply absorbed in learning about that. And in the course of that, in reading my father's confidential dispatches to headquarters, I learned an enormous amount about his character and person. He was, I think, an extraordinarily brave and straightforward, and at the same time, unorthodox human being. I formed an enormous retrospective admiration for him. It was very moving for me, actually, to discover my parent in the archives forty years after his death.
Did you read a lot as a young person?
Oh, very much so. In the pre-television era in Ireland, there was nothing to do during the vacations except read. So I and my brother, we just read eight hours a day.
Any books stand out from your youth that impressed you and put you on the intellectual path that you took?
I read history from very early on, actually, and was extremely fascinated by it. So if somebody would say, "What in your teens, for example, made the most impression?" I think I would say, maybe, Gibbons's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
How old were you when you read that book?
I suppose I was about fourteen or fifteen, something like that.
I think it could be said of you that in some ways, in your work, you're not at home in any particular place, but the world is your home. Were there any other influences from this early period that gave you this global perspective?
I wouldn't want to give too bland an account of what it's like growing up if you're not, as it were, fixed in one place. One thing that certainly made an impression on me was the following: When I was a kid here in boarding school in Los Gatos ...
Oh, in California?
In California, yes. I had an English accent, of course, as did my brother. And so we were picked at, not exactly targeted, but, the mixture of a kind of derision and, you know how it is with small children, "He's an outsider." We were treated as English. By the time I got back to England, immediately after the war, we had American accents, so we were treated as Americans. And American kids also were objects, to some extent, of fun, or of attack. Then going back to Ireland, we were treated as English. And the Irish don't like the English very much, so we had that. And then, finally, I came back to England again, by which time, we were treated as Irish. So that process unsettled what one might think of as an unreflective or automatic attachment to one's own country.
So a sense of living with estrangement?
A plurality of existence, at least plurality of different cultures, I would say.
Where were you educated? You went back to Ireland.
Yes, but then I was sent to boarding school in England. A very good school. I was very happy in London; the teaching was absolutely excellent. As happens very often, I think, the teachers you have in this period of life in some ways make more of an impression than the teachers one gets at universities. I think that's a very common experience; certainly, at any rate, in boarding schools.
Along the way, you acquired a facility with a lot of languages; or did that come later? You speak how many now?
Well, no, actually; you touched me on a sore spot. I come from a family in which my older brother, Benedict, is fluent in Thai, Javanese, Tagalog, Indonesian, not to speak of being a first class classicist, which he was originally. And my younger sister worked for Amnesty International, is fluent in Albanian, Greek, Serbo-Croat, and all this. But I'm lagging very much in the family. I can read a number of European languages, but my spoken ability is far below that of my siblings. But I can, obviously, make my way in the main European languages.
And where did you do your higher education?
At Oxford.
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