Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson

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.

Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Imagined Communities

Benedict Anderson

Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Imagined communities

this book has continuously served its academic purpose to me on numerous counts and i’ve finally finished reading (and rereading) it all in one go so i can return this book to the library and release it from the captivity of the stack of unread books in my bedroom 😇 i have my favourite chapters that are more relevant to me than the others and am glad to have taken notes and collected a further reading list from this one.

aisha

Gavin

[a nation is a community because], regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail within each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.

reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Danu Poyner

Anderson wants to answer the question of how people can love nations and even be prepared to die for them, given that we will never meet or know the vast majority of people the nation comprises. In short, Anderson wants to know what it means to 'think' the nation at all. His groundbreaking book is a history of how nations came about, but not in the way these things are usually done. A big part of Anderson's argument concerns the very different concepts of time and self that characterise modern times, and so much of his book is spent discussing the happenings that made it possible to imagine national communities. In this regard, the book is as enlightening about earlier and ancient times as it is about our own.

Anderson provides a large number of case studies and makes deep and careful use of language analysis to draw out subtle shifts in thinking. He is deliberately un-Eurocentric, preferring to foreground examples in South America and South-East Asia in particular. This has the effect of bringing the effects of colonialism into sharper focus, and is thus not a study of particular nationalisms, but of the idea of nationalism itself. After a lengthy and delicate setup, the book really comes into its own in the final chapters, which discuss the creation of national myths and the state apparatus used to shape and monitor national imaginings.

It's powerful stuff. Nonetheless, a comfortable yet chewy read for the general (reasonably well-educated) reader. Required reading for anyone with a reason to learn about nationalism.

Sarah Sammis

César Steven Toribio

Aaron McCollough

Andy Sporring

Ahmed Bakr

Loretta Dredger

The defining, best-selling book on the history, origins and development of nationalism What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.

Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

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