I argued that Rizal learnt much from European novelists, yet transformed what he found there to explosive new anticolonial effect. But Rizal was not only the first great novelist but also the founding father of the modern Philippine nation, and did not read merely fiction.
He also perused the newspapers and magazines of the various capitals in which he lived—Madrid, Paris, Berlin, London—not to mention non-fiction books. More than that, from very early on his political trajectory was profoundly affected by events in Europe, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, and their often violent local backwash thousands of miles away in his home country.
The aims of the present article are twofold. The second is to allow a new global landscape of the late nineteenth century to come into view, from the estranging vantage point of a brilliant young man who coined the wonderful expression el demonio de las comparaciones from one of its least-known peripheries.
By the time El Filibusterismo was published in , Rizal, now thirty, had been in Europe for almost ten years, and had learned the two master-languages of the subcontinent—German and French—as well as some English.
He had also lived for extended periods in Paris, Berlin and London. He subtitled his second major fiction novela filipina with good political reason. But it could almost as well be termed novela mundial. Bismarck had made Germany the dominant power in Europe, and pioneered a new global German imperialism alongside several others, of course in Africa, Asia and Oceania.
