Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Intro -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface to the Second Edition -- 1: Introduction -- 2: Cultural Roots -- 3: The Origins of National Consciousness -- 4: Creole Pioneers -- 5: Old Languages, New Models -- 6: Official Nationalism and Imperialism -- 7: The Last Wave -- 8: Patriotism and Racism -- 9: The Angel of History -- 10: Census, Map, Museum -- 11: Memory and Forgetting -- Travel and Traffic: On the Geo-biography of Imagined Communities -- Bibliography -- Index.

'Imagined Communities' examines the creation & function of the 'imagined communities' of nationality & the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism & printing & the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.

Verlagsinfo: 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.