Imagined Communities Imagined. Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism BENEDICT ANDERSON Revised Edition VERSO London • New York First published by Verso 1983 This edition published by Verso 2006 © Benedict Anderson, 1983, 1991, 2006 new material © Benedict Anderson, 2006 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 3 5 7 9 10 8 642 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG USA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-086-4 ISBN-10: 1-84467-086-4 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed by Quebecor Wodd, Fairfield For Mamma an d Tanti ette in lo ve an d grati tu de Contents Pr eface to th e Se cond Edition Xl 1 Introduction 1 2 Cultural Roots 9 3 The Origin s of National Consciousness 37 4 Creole Pioneers 47 5 Old Languages, New Mo de ls 67 6 Official Nationali sm and Imperiali sm 83 7 The La st Wave 113 8 Patrioti sm and Ra cism 141 9 The Angel of History 155 10 Census, Map, Museum 163 11 Memo ry and Forge tting 187 Travel and Traffic: On the Geo-bio graphy of Imagined Communities 207 Bibliography 230 In dex 234 LAN PAGE , B K Acknowledgments As will be app ar ent to th e re ad er , my thinking ab out nationalism has been de eply affected by th e writings of Erich Auerb ach, Walter Benjamin an d Vi ctor Tu rner. In preparing th e book itself, I have bene fitte d enormously fr om th e criticism an d ad vice of my br other Perry Anderson, An thony Barnett, an d Ste ve Heder. J. A� Ball ard, Mohamed Chamb as, Peter Katzenstein, th e late Rex Mortimer, Francis Mulhern, Tom Nairn, Shiraishi Takashi, Jim Si egel, Laura Su mmers, an d Es ta Un gar al so gave me in valuable help in di fferent ways. Naturally, none of th ese fr iendly critics should be held in any way acc oun table for the te xt's deficiencies, which are wh olly my respon­ sibili ty. I should perhaps add th at I am by tr ai ning an d pro fession a sp ecialist on SoutheastAsi a. This admi ssion may help to explain some· of th e bo ok's biases an d choices of examples, as well as to de flate its would­ be-glob al pre tensions. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations Thus from a Mixture of �ll kinds began, That Het'rogeneous Thing, An Englishman: In eager Rapes, and furious Lust begot, Betwixt a Painted Britton and a Scot: Whose gend'ring Offspring quickly learnt to bow, And yoke their Heifers to the Roman Plough: From whence a Mongrel half-bred Race there came, With neither Name nor Nation, Speech or Fame. In whose hot Veins now Mixtures quickly ran, Infus'd betwixt a Saxon and a Dane. While their Rank Daughters, to their Parents just, Receiv'd all Nations with Promiscuous Lust. This Nauseous Brood directly did contain The well-extracted Blood of Englishmen . From Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman Preface to the Second Edition Wh o would have thought that the st orm blows harder the fart her it le ave s Paradise behind? The armed confli cts of 1978--79 in Indochina, which provided the imme diate occasion fo r the original text of Imagined Communities, se em al re ady, a mere twe lve ye ar s later, to belong to an other era. Th en I was haunted by the pro spect of fu rther fu ll-scale wars be tween the so ciali st st ates. Now half the se st ates have jo ined the debris at the An gel's fe et, an d the re st are fe arfu l of so on following them. Th e wars that the survi vo rs face ar e civil wars. Th e likelihood is stro ng th at by the op ening of the new millennium li ttle will remain of the Union of Soviet Soci ali st Rep ublics ex cept ... republics. Sho uld al l thi s have somehow been fo re seen? In 1983 I wrote th at the Soviet Union was 'as much the legatee of the pr enational dyn astic st ate s of the nineteenth century as the precursor of a twenty-first century intern ationali st order.' But, havi ng traced the nationali st explosions th at de stro yed the vast polyglot an d polyethnic re al ms which were ru led fr om Vi enna, London, Constantinople, Pari s an d Mad ri d, I could not se e that the tr ai n was laid at le ast as far as Moscow. It is me lancholy consolation to ob serve that hi st o ry se ems to be bearing out the 'logic' of Imagined Communities better than its au thor managed to do. It is not only the world that has changed it s fac e over the past xi IMAGINED COMMUNITIES twelve years. The study of nationalism too has been startlingly trans­ formed - in method, scale, sophistication, and sheer quantity. In the English language alone, J.A. Armstrong's Na tions Before Na tionalism (1982), John Breuilly's Na tionalism and the State (1982), Ernest Gellner's Na tions and Na tionalism (1983), Miroslav Hroch's Social Preconditions oj Na tional Revival in Europe (1985), Anthony Smith's The Ethnic Origins oj Na tions (1986), P. Chatterjee's Na tionalist Thought and the Colonial World (1986), and Eric Hobsbawm's Na tions and Na tionalism since 1788 (1990) - to name only a few of the key texts - have, by their historical reach and theoretical power, made largely obsolete the traditional literature on the subject. In part out of these works has developed an extraordinary proliferation of historical, literary, anthropological, sociological, fem­ inist, and other studies linking the objects of these fields of enquiry to nationalism and nation. 1 To adapt Imagined Communities to the demands of these vast changes in the world and in the text is a task beyond my present means. It seemed better, therefore, to leave it largely as an 'unrestored' period piece, with its own characteristic style, silhouette, and mood. Two things give me comfort. On the one hand, the full final outcome of developments in the old socialist world remain shrouded in the ob­ scurity ahead. On the other hand, the idiosyncratic method and preoccupations of Imagined Communities seem to me still on the margins of the newer scholarship on nationalism - in that sense, at least, not fully superseded. What I have tried to do, in the present edition, is simply to correct errors of fact, conception, and interpretation which I should have avoided in preparing the original version. These corrections - in the spirit of 1983, as it were - involve some alterations of the firstedition, as well as two new chapters, which basically have the character of discrete appendices. In the main text, I discovered two serious errors of translation, at least one unfulfilled promise, and one misleading emphasis. Unable to read Spanish in 1983, I thoughtlessly relied on Leon Ma. Guerrero's English translation of Jose Rizal's No li Me Tangere, although earlier 1. Hobsbawm has had the courage to conclude from this scholarly explosion that the age of nationalism is near its end: Minerva's owl flies at dusk. xii PREFACE translations were available. It was only in 1990 that I discovered how fascinatingly corrupt Guerrero's version was. For a· long, important quotation from Otto Bauer's Die Na tionalitatenfrage und die Sozial­ demokratie I lazily relied on Oscar Jaszi's translation. More recent consultation of the German original has shown me how far Jaszi's political predilections tinted his citations. In at least. two passages I had faithlessly promised to explain why Brazilian nationalism developed so late and so idiosyncratically by comparison with those of other Latin American countries. The present text attempts to fulfil· the broken pledge. It had been part of my original plan to stress the New World origi�s of nationalism. My feeling had been that an unselfconscious provincialism had long skewed .and distorted theorizing on ·the subject. European scholars, accustomed to the conceit that every­ thing important in the modern world originated in Europe, too easily took 'second generation' ethnolinguistic nationalisms (Hun­ garian, Czech, Greek, Polish, etc.) as the starting point in their modelling, no matter whether they were ·'for' or 'against' nation­ alism. I was startled to discover, in many of the notices of Imagined Communities, that this Eurocentric provincialism remained quite undisturbed, and that the crucial chapter on the originating Americas was largely ignored. Unfortunately, I have found no better 'instant' solution to this problem than to retitle Chapter 4 as 'Creole Pioneers.' The two 'appendices' try to correct serious theoretical flaws in the first edition.2 A number of friendly critics had suggested that Chapter 7 ('The Last Wave') oversimplified the process whereby early 'Third World' nationalisms were modelled. Furthermore· the chapter did not seriously . address the question of the role of the local colonial state, rather than the metropole, in styling these nationalisms.