PDF Summary:Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson explores the phenomenon of nationalism. His core insight is that the concept of “the nation” has no basis in empirical reality, but is instead a purely political innovation that constructs a shared identity binding strangers from different communities together—usually on the basis of a shared language, history, culture, religion, or ethnicity. Thus, although a nation may consist of tens of millions of people—nearly all of whom will never personally know or even meet one another—nationalism allows each individual to think of themselves as a member of a singular community with a shared identity.

In this guide, we’ve added alternative viewpoints on the basis of nationalism, including psychological and anthropological perspectives. We've also added more historical context for Anderson's theories.

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4. Language and the Rise of Nationalism

Anderson argues that one of the key factors in the rise of nationalism was the explosion of literacy in Europe beginning in the 14th and 15th centuries.

He writes that the new reading public that began to emerge in most European countries was able to absorb written ideas and communicate with one another in the languages they spoke every day. This, in turn, formed a crucial link that sparked national consciousness and forged key bonds of commonality between previously disunited political communities within European countries.

Literacy Initially Cemented a Ruling Class

Anderson argues that one of the primary bonds that had linked otherwise disparate political and religious elites together before the rise of the nation-state was their shared use of ancient sacred languages.

According to Anderson, liturgical languages like Latin, Classical Chinese, and Koranic Arabic helped to join the tiny educated elite (an infinitesimal fraction of the overall population, the overwhelming majority of which was completely illiterate) together across vast stretches of time and space. The fact that these were dead tongues—read and written, but not used in ordinary conversation—gave them a unique power.

Because they existed almost entirely in writing, these languages were relatively unchanged throughout the centuries or across countries. In Europe, this meant that those scribes, scholars, and monks from Ireland to the furthest reaches of the Holy Roman Empire who possessed a shared understanding of Latin could cement their solidarity as Europe’s educated elite—regardless of what country they were from.

Anderson also notes that these languages were used almost exclusively in the context of either sacred religious ceremonies, legal contracts, or royal proclamations. This gave them a weight and gravity that common languages didn’t possess and positioned the small community of princes and churchmen who had mastered them as intermediaries between the common masses and the realm of the sacred.

Challenging Latin Supremacy in the Middle Ages

The Latin Vulgate—a Latin translation of the Bible that dates back to Late Antiquity—was the Catholic Church's officially endorsed translation of Scripture in use during the Middle Ages. Although it has gone through subsequent editions and revisions, it is still in use in the Roman Catholic Church today.

But even during the long period of Latin’s ascendancy in Western European Christianity, there were a number of groups (whose leaders were often branded as “heretics'' in their time) that challenged the ecclesiastical elite’s stranglehold on the interpretation and dissemination of the Bible by pushing for the translation of Scripture into local languages. They believed that Christians should have a more direct relationship with the holy written word instead of having it intermediated by the Latin-educated elites of the Church—and that one of the best ways to achieve this was to have the Bible printed in languages that laypeople would be more likely to understand.

The Lollards, a proto-Protestant movement in England during the 14th and 15th centuries, led by the reformer John Wycliffe, were strong proponents of the printing, reading, and instruction of the Bible in English. Likewise, the 12th-century Waldensians—a group led by former wealthy merchant-turned-ascetic Peter Waldo, whose adherents demanded a return to Christ-like poverty and simplicity—commissioned scholars to translate the Bible into local languages then spoken in the Alpine regions of France and Italy.)

The Printing Press Democratized Literacy

But literacy rates would eventually come to soar in Europe, paving the way for vernacular languages to supplant Latin as the dominant language of written expression.

Anderson argues that the massive growth in literacy beginning in the 14th and 15th centuries was made possible by the printing press. For the first time, books and pamphlets could be mass-produced by machine rather than painstakingly hand-copied—making them much more inexpensive and widely available. Indeed, Anderson writes that 20,000 titles were published in Europe by the year 1500, an increase many orders of magnitude beyond what had been possible before.

This gave the European general public far greater access to the world of words than they’d ever had before. The emerging bookselling and publishing industry naturally sought the broadest possible market for its products. Since only a tiny educated minority of the population was literate in Latin, it took very little time to saturate this market. Simple economic logic therefore dictated that books be printed in the vernacular—the languages that people spoke and used every day.

This helped to boost literacy rates, because it was easier for people to learn to read and write in languages they already spoke. Within a few generations, according to Anderson, there was a genuine mass reading public in Europe.

In addition to its effect on nationalism, the printing press also had a momentous impact on global political, intellectual, scientific, economic, social, and religious developments. The new ability to print religious tracts questioning the practices and dogma of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, for example, made the success of the Protestant Reformation possible.

The Protestants—who advocated a more direct connection between congregants and Scripture, without the intermediaries of Latin-trained Catholic priests—found a powerful weapon in this new tool that allowed them to mass-print and widely disseminate copies of the Bible, translated into local languages for ordinary people to read. This encouraged the growth of local national cultures based on a shared language, with the emerging states often making their Protestantism a defining feature of their national identity. The Reformation also contributed to the breakdown of the medieval idea of transnational Christianity—with firmer national identities gradually taking its place.

The Rise of Vernacular Brought About New Linguistic Identities

According to Anderson, the explosion of books printed in the vernacular helped to dethrone Latin as the transnational language of literature and written expression. With Latin no longer acting as a barrier to the written word, the mass public in countries from England to Sweden began to cultivate a new language-based identity and heritage. Gradually, the growth of a class of literate professionals able to consume news and literature printed in their own languages created new bonds and fostered an idea of nationhood—a community of people bound to one another by their shared recognition that they spoke, wrote, and thought in the same language.

The demands of the new print market helped to forge these new linguistic identities. Beyond just printing in the vernacular, booksellers sought to appeal to their customers by printing works in standard or uniform versions of a vernacular language—rather than having to adapt each book to suit each local or regional dialect.

Over time, this process smoothed out the differences between regional dialects to create standard versions of languages like French, English, Spanish, and Italian. By transcending local speech, Anderson argues that these new print cultures fused and cemented the idea of a national linguistic community.

In The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson explores this process of language standardization in greater detail. His discussion of the standardization of English in particular illustrates this process in action.

He writes that the emerging printing industry in England naturally centered itself in the nation’s commercial, cultural, and political capital—London. As printed works produced by London printers began to spread across the country, London spelling conventions gradually began to supplant local variations. The sheer weight of London’s gravity proved decisive—by the dawn of the 18th century, English had become far more unified in its spelling than it had been just a generation before. Bryson further notes that this period also coincided with a major change in the morphology and pronunciation of spoken English known as the Great Vowel Shift.

5. Modern European Nationalism

Anderson writes that European nationalism in its modern form really came to the fore in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as Europeans rediscovered and promoted cultural artifacts from their own past—with a particular focus on history, literature, folklore, mythology, and music. Nineteenth-century Europeans at last began to see their own culture and history as being on par with—and even superior to—that of the Greeks and Romans.

In each country, the promoters of these emerging national identities—typically drawn from the ranks of the educated middle and professional classes—pored over ancient texts, folklore, and literature in an effort to reach back into history and find historical evidence of their “nationhood” in the distant past.

National Origin Myths in Germany

These national origin stories were important elements in the cultivation of a shared national identity—although they often had political effects far beyond what anyone at the time could have imagined. In the case of Germany, these nation-making myths proved to be an important element in the development of Nazi ideology in the 20th century.

Nineteenth-century promoters of German nationalism were beginning to rediscover what they saw as their national origins and celebrate a uniquely Germanic past entirely separate from Europe’s Roman/Latin past. This was the age in which famous figures like the composer Richard Wagner reached deep into the mythological past to incorporate elements of Germanic and Norse mythology into their artistic works.

These nationalists often pointed to the famous victory of the Germanic leader Arminius over three Roman legions at the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9 as the moment when the German nation came into being. Of course, the forces commanded by Arminius at this battle were drawn from a patchwork of over 50 tribes that had no shared “German” identity at all and quickly dissipated after their victory. Indeed, there would be no united German nation until Otto von Bismarck’s unification of the German states nearly two thousand years later in 1871 following the Franco-Prussian War.

But the myth of Arminius and the victory at the Teutoburg Forest proved valuable fodder to German nationalist propaganda. This was eventually taken up by the Nazis, who saw Arminius as the national race hero of the German people who had defended the homeland against foreign threats. Arminius’s associations with Nazi race ideology have made once-traditional German celebrations of the battle at Teutoburg Forest politically contentious today.

Discovering the Non-European Ancient Past

The Enlightenment and its spirit of scientific inquiry also kicked off a new era of European interest in the ancient civilizations of the non-European world.

Anderson notes that the new European thirst for knowledge about ancient Asian and African societies—usually closely connected to colonial and imperialist ambitions—helped to deliver the final blow to Latin’s status as the ancient bond that held European societies together.

When European intellectuals began discovering and studying the ancient languages of Assyria and Egypt, they found that these languages were much older than Latin. Before this, Europeans exalted Latin as the venerable language that linked them to their glorious ancient Roman past, as well as the lingua franca of the Church—a crucial bond that held together the imagined community of Christendom.

But with the explosion of knowledge about the languages and history of the non-European world, European intellectuals saw that Latin was merely one among many ancient languages. Other languages and civilizations had predated it, and in some respects, their cultural achievements dwarfed those of Classical Europe.

Anderson argues that this downgrading of the Latin tradition (which, as we’ve seen, was already underway since the beginning of vernacular book-printing in the 15th century) enabled Europeans to finally fully break free from the intellectual stranglehold of their ancient past and created space for them to begin to define their own national and linguistic identities.

Philology and Language as Destiny

In Orientalism, Edward Said points to the rising prominence of the field of philology in European intellectual circles at this time as another development that helped to define Europeans’ views of their own civilization vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Philology is the study of language, primarily using written, ancient textual sources, aiming to understand the evolution of languages from a scientific perspective.

For the philologists, language was the key to understanding Eastern (or “Oriental”) culture, history, and the “Oriental mind.” Philologist scholarship contributed heavily to the racial determinism that would become a hallmark of the social sciences during the 19th century. Orientalist philologists like France’s Ernest Renan (1823-1892) believed they could discover the reasons for what they saw as “shortcomings” in contemporary Eastern civilization and culture in the structure of their ancient languages.

Renan and his colleagues saw the supposedly ossified and static Semitic languages (like Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic) as responsible for the languid and desultory development of the Middle East. He contrasted it with the dynamic and organic Indo-European languages to which could be attributed the success of white European civilization—and its inevitable conquest of the East. For the philologists, language was destiny.

6. The Challenge to the Old Dynasties

This new celebration of unique cultural identities helped to instill more nationalist and separatist political identities. This process was particularly acute among ethnic and linguistic minorities within multilingual and multiethnic empires, like the Ukrainians within the Russian Empire or the Czechs and Romanians within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Anderson argues that this created new political challenges for the dynasties—like the Romanovs, Habsburgs, and Hohenzollerns of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires, respectively—that ruled these empires.

These sovereigns were from royal families whose lineages stretched far back into the Middle Ages—they had no real “national” identity of their own. Often, they didn’t even speak the language of the dominant linguistic group over which they ruled as their primary language. For example, the Romanov dynasty of the Russian Empire primarily spoke in French and German in private.

This rise of linguistic nationalism not only created tensions within empires, but between them as well. The 19th- and early 20th-century phenomenon of Pan-Germanism—the idea that all of Europe’s German-speaking peoples should be united in one nation-state ruled by the German kaiser—significantly called into question the existing relationship between the German and Austro-Hungarian empires.

Organizations like the Pan-German League argued that the 12 million-plus German speakers living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (mainly in what is now Austria, but also in parts of what is now Poland) should be annexed into the German Empire. Some members of the Reichsrat—the Austro-Hungarian parliament—even publicly proclaimed their loyalty to the German Hohenzollerns over their own Habsburg sovereign. Pan-Germanism was a major ideological influence upon Nazism in both Germany and Austria, which culminated in the 1938 Anschluss, or annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany.

The Fathers of the Nation

With the emergence of linguistic-based nationalism, Anderson argues that the rulers of multilingual, multiethnic empires made the decision to choose one language (usually the one spoken as a primary language by the largest number of people within the empire) to make the official language of state for administrative purposes. Thus, the Hohenzollerns became “officially” German, and the Romanovs became “officially” Russian.

These moves transformed the political arrangements in these empires and represented attempts by the old dynasties to make new claims to political legitimacy. The princes no longer justified their right to rule by virtue of their noble bloodline or their personal territorial sovereignty through conquest, inheritance, or marriage alliance.

Instead, they now positioned themselves as the fathers of the nation—the exemplars and defenders of the new, imagined community that shared a language, a history, and a ruler.

Ethnic vs. Civic Nationalism

This adoption of nationalist themes by formerly cosmopolitan nobles is closely related to the 19th century concept of ethnic nationalism—in which full membership in the national community is accorded to members based on a shared ancestral, linguistic, religious, or racial identity. Under this framework, which the hereditary princes sought to co-opt for their own political benefit, those who did not meet these criteria could never be truly considered members of the nation—regardless of their behavior, beliefs, or professed loyalties to it. Thus, Germany was the nation for ethnic Germans, Poland was the nation for ethnic Poles, Russia was the nation for ethnic Russians.

Political scientists often contrast ethnic nationalism with civic nationalism. Civic nationalism posits that membership in the national community is premised on a shared set of ideals such as democracy, civil liberties, and individual freedoms. Progressive American political figures like Barack Obama argue that, as a nation of immigrants, the United States has no core ethnic “American” identity, and that therefore, being an American is less about a person’s ethnicity or religion than about their belief in the nation’s historic civic values. Some have argued, however, that Donald Trump’s successful 2016 candidacy signaled a new rise in support for ethnic nationalist ideals, particularly among white Americans.

Suppression of Linguistic Minorities

Anderson writes that the European empires began to forcefully consolidate a coherent national identity by using the power of the state to suppress cultural, ethnic, and linguistic minorities and enforce and impose the dominant culture and language—often through the use of the educational system and the civil service.

This was an era of forced cultural assimilation. In the Russian Empire, for example, Anderson writes that the Russification policy made Russian the official language of state—all official languages had to be written in Russian; the civil service could only conduct official business only in Russian; and the official language of instruction in schools in territories such as modern-day Finland, Ukraine, and Latvia became Russian instead of the local language.

Some observers have noted that the spirit of the old Russification policy is alive and well under current Russian President Vladimir Putin. Although the Russian Empire and its successor state the Soviet Union no longer exist, modern-day Russia still contains within its borders a number of sovereign “ethnic republics”—territories with significant populations of non-ethnic Russians that, while not sovereign, are granted a greater degree of autonomy than other political divisions within the country.

In 2018, however, the State Duma passed a law making instruction in minority languages at schools within the ethnic republics a purely voluntary program, offered only at the request of parents. However, the law makes the study of Russian language and culture a mandatory part of the curriculum. Critics have argued that this policy is little more than neo-Russification, designed to suppress, subordinate, and weaken non-Russian ethnic identity.

7. Nationalism in the Colonies

Anderson writes that, beginning in the late 19th century, colonized peoples from Indonesia to India to Kenya began to repurpose European-style nationalism to advance their own political ambitions—chiefly, independence from the European empires and the establishment of nations of their own.

Maintaining the East-West Divide

In Orientalism, Edward Said notes that Western scholars and imperial propagandists defined themselves explicitly in opposition to the monolithic bloc of the East. Maintaining these distinctions was key to Europeans—if these lines were to become blurred, the West might find itself without an identity of its own.

Said argues that the growth of national independence movements and organizations like the League of Nationalist Action in Lebanon and the Arab Independence Party in Mandatory Palestine (which was administered by the British) threatened to knock down the barriers between East and West and possibly even put the East on equal footing with the West with their forceful demands for self-determination. This represented a grave affront to the West’s self-conception, as it envisaged itself as the natural ruler and guardian of the “Orient.”

Many Western scholars retreated into denial—as late as 1963, prominent Orientalists (Western scholars who positioned themselves as the authoritative “interpreters” of the East) were asserting that the politics of the Arab world could not possibly be motivated by modern political ideologies like communism, nationalism, or anti-colonialism. Those ideologies were products of the Western tradition; the “Oriental” was forever constrained by his status as an “Oriental.” Any deviation from this preordained role was a betrayal or perversion of his essential character, and complex movements toward self-determination were merely unorganized outbursts of short-lived and self-destructive enthusiasm.

Anderson writes that colonized peoples ironically discovered their own nationalism from the very Europeans who had colonized them. To understand how this happened, we have to understand how the European empires actually governed their colonial possessions.

When Europeans began to colonize large swaths of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, they faced a manpower shortage—there were simply never enough white Europeans who were willing or able to uproot themselves to directly govern the colonies.

To solve this administrative problem, the European empires gave “natives” the opportunity to perform mid-level administrative functions in the colonies. These “native” colonial officials were typically specially selected from the ranks of the children of the pre-colonial ruling elite. These young men had the opportunity to travel to Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands, where they studied and mastered European languages—the languages of administration—before returning to work back in their colonized homelands.

These new, European-educated colonial elites would go on to become the chief ideologues and proponents of their own nationalism in their own countries. They came to believe that adopting Western-style nationalism and modern state political structures was the only solution to what they saw as the problems of oppression, economic stagnation, and backwardness plaguing their countries.

(Shortform note: Although the Asian and African students and administrators brought European languages, culture, and political ideas back to their home countries, they also made a significant cultural contribution to life in the European countries they visited. It was during the 19th century Victorian Era that the British people began to form close cultural connections with the peoples of the Indian subcontinent that persist to this day. Indian sports like polo; foods like tea and curry, and a surprising number of loanwords like “shampoo,” “bungalow,” and “jungle” all became staples of British life. Queen Victoria herself was a well-known Indophile who promoted and celebrated Indian culture and the influence of the Empire’s crown jewel colony on the mother country.)

Forging the Idea of the Nation in the Colonies

Anderson observes that, ironically, the nationalist policies of the European empires planted the seeds of their own destruction.

In colonies ruled by the British, French, and Dutch empires, the imperial authorities sought to impose cultural uniformity by creating a standardized, Western-style local, regional, and national school system. Here, students were expected to learn the official language of state, be instructed in European history and culture, and prepare to become loyal subjects in the service of the empire. In a place like French Indochina (modern-day Vietnam), the goal was to break down old linguistic and cultural links and create a pliant and loyal class of French-speaking colonial administrators and functionaries.

Anderson argues, however, that these schools proved to be the crucible that forged nationalist ideas in the hearts and minds of the subjects. As students advanced through the school system, they journeyed from local schools, to regional academies, to national universities. In places like Madagascar or Indonesia, this served to bring people together from different parts of the country who would have never met or interacted before.

Anderson writes that having students from different regions—who, in many cases, spoke different local languages and imagined themselves to be from entirely separate political communities—suddenly studying and working all together galvanized the creation of a shared national identity.

The fact that the Europeans usually made little distinction between these groups—as, for example, between Gujarati-speakers and Hindi-speakers in India, whom they viewed as simply “Indians”—only helped to reinforce the idea among these students that they shared a political identity and community that encompassed millions of others.

Anderson notes that the important effect these schools had in the forging of national identity can be seen by looking at the 20th-century nationalist leaders who emerged from these educational systems—like Son Ngoc Thanh (1908-1977) of Cambodia, Sukarno (1901-1970) of Indonesia, Hồ Chí Minh (1890-1969) of Vietnam, and perhaps most famously, Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) of India.

The Legacy of Macauley

Macauleyism is the term given for the policy of an imperial power designing the educational system of a subject colony in order to shape and influence the thinking of its people. It is named for Thomas Babington Macauley (1800-1859), a high-ranking colonial official during the British Raj in India. In his Minute on Education, he asserted that instruction in English ought to be given priority in India over education in local languages. The tract is generally seen today as expressing highly paternalistic and ethnocentric views regarding the superiority of European civilization over Indian civilization, as well as for advancing the political interests of the British Empire.

Some Indian writers, however, argue that Macauley’s legacy in modern India is not entirely regrettable. They write that Macauley’s vision for the Indian education system made it more cosmopolitan in its content (i.e., less religious and more focused on the world outside India) and more egalitarian, helping to break down the barriers of caste and class that had barred all but the children of elites from access to education. This cosmopolitan and egalitarian education system, it is argued, has played a key role in India’s economic development since independence.)

Creating the Mental Map of Nationhood

Anderson further notes that the creation of maps by the colonial authorities helped to forge national identity among colonized peoples of Asia and Africa.

He argues that maps of the colonies weren’t just a way of physically ordering a geographical space. They also changed the mental framework of how people thought about themselves and the communities to which they belonged.

Detailed, colored maps lumped previously disparate and disconnected peoples into neat, tidy, and newly created national categories with defined borders, where none had existed before. By delineating previously fluid territories into compact and contiguous geographical units, maps redefined the precise limits of sovereignty—where the nation began and ended and where the ruler’s authority did and did not extend.

When viewed this way, Anderson writes that maps did not merely describe pre-existing political and spatial realities— they created entirely new realities.

Maps Reflect Political Ideology

Beyond solidifying the idea of a national community, world maps profoundly influence our political thinking in other ways. Scholars argue that world maps have never been “neutral”—rather, they have always reflected the worldview of the mapmaker.

These views can be seen in the land areas that they chose to include or not include, how large they choose to make certain areas, and where they place countries and continents relative to one another. The organization of physical space reflects political ideas. This applies even to today’s maps, which use the Mercator projection, in which straight lines on the map represent constant directions on the Earth’s surface.

However, the Mercator projection significantly distorts the size of landmasses, making Europe and North America appear larger than they truly are, while making equatorial nations appear smaller than they are. Some critics have argued that these visual distortions make it easier for the wealthier, more developed nations of North America and Europe to ignore developing nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America because they appear relatively insignificant on the map.

8. Nationalism vs. Racism

Anderson concludes by arguing that nationalism and racism—while often viewed as related and even complementary ideologies—are actually highly divergent phenomena.

Within the nationalist framework, conflict and competition are between nations. This is the basis for history’s most famous nationalist rivalries, conflicts between largely monolithic, unified political communities—India vs. Pakistan, France vs Germany, China vs. Japan.

But, Anderson argues, racism is primarily concerned with internal racial purity. Thus, the biggest threat to the racist is not foreign aggression on the part of another nation, but instead, contamination or impurity from the enemy within. Racism tends to act as a catalyst not for foreign military adventure, but for domestic repression, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and segregation.

Anderson notes that the incompatibility between racism and nationalism can be seen in how racial propagandists downgrade and discount national identity in favor of racial identity. He notes that racial slurs like “gook,” “slant,” or “slope” exist specifically to deny the very existence of nationhood among East Asian peoples. These terms instead compress Vietnamese, Cambodians, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans into an indistinguishable mass.

Some writers contest Anderson’s assertion that racism and nationalism are inherently different ideologies. In fact, some have argued that nationalism is inherently racist and by definition cannot be separated from racism. The experience of colonialism, according to this argument, shows the fundamentally racist character of nationalism.

For example, even the most high-born Indian subjects under the British Empire could learn the English language, convert to the Anglican religion, and loyally serve the Crown, but they would never be considered fully “British” by the imperial authorities and would never be able to have the same opportunities of career advancement in London—no matter their qualifications. According to this view, being non-white barred one from full membership in the national community and exposed nationalism as a pseudo-intellectual veil for racial tribalism.