Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Front Cover
What makes people love and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their name? While many studies have been written on nationalist political movements, the sense of nationality—the personal and cultural feeling of belonging to the nation—has not received proportionate attention. In this widely acclaimed work, Benedict Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the 'imagined communities' of nationality.

Anderson explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialisation of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of vernacular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time. He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was modularly adopted by popular movements in Europe, by the imperialist powers, and by the anti-imperialist resistances in Asia and Africa.

This revised edition includes two new chapters, one of which discusses the complex role of the colonialist state's mindset in the development of Third World nationalism, while the other analyses the processes by which all over the world, nations came to imagine themselves as old.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
Cultural Roots
9
The Origins of National Consciousness
37
Creole Pioneers
47
Old Languages New Models
67
Official Nationalism and Imperialism
83
The Last Wave
113
Patriotism and Racism
141
The Angel of History
155
Census Map Museum
163
Memory and Forgetting
187
Bibliography
207
Index
213
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About the author (1991)

Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson was born in Kunming, China on August 26, 1936. He received a degree in classics from Cambridge University in 1957 and a Ph.D. in government from Cornell University in 1967. He taught at Cornell University until his retirement, as an emeritus professor of international studies, in 2002. His best-known book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, was first published in 1983. He died of heart failure on December 12, 2015 at the age of 79.

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