Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Front Cover
Verso, Nov 17, 2006 - Political Science - 240 pages

The definitive, bestselling book on the origins of nationalism, and the processes that have shaped it.

Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson’s brilliant book on nationalism, forged a new field of study when it first appeared in 1983. Since then it has sold over a quarter of a million copies and is widely considered the most important book on the subject. In this greatly anticipated revised edition, Anderson updates and elaborates on the core question: what makes people live and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their name?

Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the ‘imagined communities’ of nationality, and explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialization of religious faiths, the decline of antique kinship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of secular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time and space. He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was adopted by popular movements in Europe, by imperialist powers, and by the movements of anti-imperialist resistance in Asia and Africa.

In a new afterword, Anderson examines the extraordinary influence of Imagined Communities, and the book's international publication and reception, from the end of the Cold War era to the present day.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
Cultural Roots
9
The Origins of National Consciousness
39
Creole Pioneers
49
Old Languages New Models
69
Official Nationalism and Imperialism
85
The Last Wave
115
Patriotism and Racism
145
The Angel of History
159
Census Map Museum
167
Memory and Forgetting
191
On the Geobiography of Imagined Communities
211
Bibliography
237
Index
241
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2006)

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.

Bibliographic information