CONTENTS: Preface to Second Edition [xi]; Introduction [1]; Cultural Roots [9]; The Origins of National Consciousness [37]; Creole Pioneers [47]; Old Languages, New Models [67]; Official Nationalism and Imperialism [83]; The Last Wave [113]; Patriotism and Racism [141]; The Angle of History [155]; Census, Map, Museum [163]; memory and Forgetting [187]; Bibliography [207]; Index [213]. [Epigraphs from Benjamin and Defoe’s The True-born Englishman.)

‘[…] having traced the nationalist explosions that destroyed the vast polyglot and polyethnic realms which were ruled from Vienna, London, Constantinople, Paris and Madrid, I could not see that the train was laid at least as far as Moscow.’ (xi.)

‘The origin of the second “;appendix” was the humiliating recognition that in 1983 I had quoted Renan without the slightest understanding of what he had actually said [see p.199 infra]: I had taken as something easily ironical what was in fact utterly bizarre. The humiliation also forced me to realize that I had offered no intelligible explanation of exactly how, and why, new-emerging nations imagined themselves antique. What appeared in most of the scholarly writings as Machiavellian hocus-pocus, or as bourgeois fantasy, or as disinterred historical truth, struck me now as deeper and more interesting. Supposing “;antiquity” were, at a certain historical juncture, the necessary consequence of “;novelty”? If nationalism was, as I supposed it, the expression of a radically changed form of consciousness, should not awareness of that break, and the necessary forgetting of the older consciousness, create its own narrative? Seen from this perspective, the atavistic fantasising characteristic of most nationalist thought after the 1820s appears an epiphenomenon; what is really important is the structural alignment of post-1820s nationalist “;memory” with the inner premises and conventions of modern biography and autobiography.’ (xiv.)

Begins by noticing the ‘fundamental transformation’ indicated by the recent wars of ‘one revolutionary Marxist regime against another’ in the cases of the states Vietnam, Cambodia and China. (1.)

‘[..] the fact that the Soviet Union shares with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland the rare distinction of refusing nationality in its naming suggest that it is as much a legatee of the prenational dynastic states of the nineteenth century as the precursor of a twenty-first century international order. [Ftn. Anyone who has doubts about the UK’s claims to such parity with the USSR should ask himself what nationality its name denotes: Great Brito-Irish?)’ (p.2.)

Concurs with Hobsbaum in the view that the Marxist movements had tended to become national and that this trend will continue. Notes difficulty of defining Nation, nationality nationalism and the paucity of ‘plausible theory’ about nationalism relative to the ‘immense influence’ it has exerted. (p.3.)

[N]ationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word’s multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind. To understand them we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound legitimacy.’ (p.3.)

objectivity modernity of nations v. subjective antiquity in their eyes (p.5.)

Quotes Tom Nairn: ‘“;Nationalism” is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as “;neurosis” in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilism for societies) and largely incurable.’ (The Break-up of Britain, New Left Books, 1977, p.359.)

It would, I think, make things easier if one treated it [nationalism] as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion’, rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism’. (p.5)

In an anthropological spirit, I propose, then, the following [5] definition of the nation: it is an imagined community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. / It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. […; 7] The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind.  […] It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith’s ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. / Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity which makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings. / These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism. (pp.6-7.)

Cenotaphs and tombs of unknown soldiers (p.9.) saturated with ghostly national imaginings (p.9.)

neither Marxism nor Liberalism are much concerned with death and immortality. If the nationalist imagining is so concerned, this suggests a strong affinity with religious imaginings. As this affinity is by no means fortuitous, it may be useful to begin a consideration of the cultural roots of nationalism with death as the last of a whole gamut of fatalities. (p.10.)

If nation-states are widely conceded to be “;new” and “;historical”, the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, [11] glide into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn change into destiny.’ (pp.11-12.)

religious community and dynastic realm (p.12.)

[Religious and dynastic realms] were imaginable largely through the medium of a sacred language and written script (p.13.)

ideas about admission to membership (p.13.) Bibl., John Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, 1808-1826.

Yet if the sacred silent languages were the media through which the great global communities of the past were imagined, the reality of such apparitions depended on an idea largely foreign to the contemporary Western mind: the non-arbitrariness of the sign. The ideogram of Chinese, Latin, or Arabic were emanations of reality, not randomly fabricated representations of it. (p.14.)

But even though the sacral languages made such communities as Christendom imaginable, the actual scope and plausibility of these communities can not be explained by sacred script alone: Their readers were, after all, tiny literate reefs on top of vast illiterate oceans.  […] The astonishing power of the papacy in its noonday is only comprehensible in terms of a trans-European Latin-writing clerisy, and a conception of the world, shared by virtually everyone, that the bilingual intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin, mediated [15] between heaven and earth. (pp.15-16.)

their unselfconscious coherence waned steadily after the late Middle Ages (p.16.)

[Reasons:] First was the effect of the exploration of the non-European world [quotes Auerbach’s Mimesis:] ‘abruptly widened cultural and geographical horizon and hence also men’s conception of possible forms of human life’ (Mimesis, p.282.)

[Compares Marco Polo’s Travels with Montesquieu’s Persian Letters:] The deliberate, sophisticated fabrications of the eighteenth-century Catholic mirror the naïve realism of his thirteenth-century predecessor, but by now the “;relativisation” and “;territorialisation” are utterly self-conscious and political in intent. (p.17.)

Second was the gradual demotion of language itself. […] Despite a temporary come-back during the Counter-Reformation, Latin’s hegemony was doomed. (p.18.)

the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralised, and territorialised. (p.19.)

In the modern conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and even operative over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory. But the older imagining, where states were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another. hence, paradoxically enough, the ease with which pre-modern empires and kingdoms were able to sustain their rule over immensely heterogeneous, and often not even contiguous, populations for long periods of time. (p.19.)

In fact, royal lineages often derived their prestige, aside from any aura of divinity, from, shall we say, miscegenation? (p.20.)

During the seventeenth century […] the automatic legitimacy of sacral monarchy began its slow decline in Western Europe. (p.22.)

As late as 1914, dynastic states made up the majority of the membership of the world political system […] (p.22.)

Beneath the decline of sacred communities, languages and lineages, a fundamental change was taking place in modes of apprehending the world, which, more than anything else, made it possible to “;think” the nation. (p.22.)

visual representations of the sacred communities (p.22.) The humble parish priest, whose forebears and frailties everyone who heard his celebrations knew, was still the direct intermediary between his parishioners and the divine. (p.23.)

the medieval Christian mind had no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and present. (p.23.)

Bibl., Bloch, Feudal Society.

[Quotes Auerbach on the non-temporal order of events in the religious outlook epitomised by allegorical readings of the sacrifice of Isaac ‘as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ”:] ‘the here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it is simultaneously something which has always been, and will be fulfilled in the future; and, strictly in the eyes of God, it is something eternal, something omni-temporal, something already consummated in the realm of the fragmentary earthly event.’ (Auerbach, Mimesis, p.64; here pp.23-24.)

what Benjamin calls Messianic time [as distinct from] ‘homogeneous, empty time’ (Illuminations, p.265, 263; here p.24.)

[…] two forms of imagining which first flowered in [24] Europe in the eighteenth century: the novel and the newspaper […] provided the technical means of “;re-presenting” the kind of imagined community that is the nation. (pp.24-25.)

Examines José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere [26], Francisco Balagtas’s Pinagdaanang Buhay … [&c.], Fernandez de Lizardi’s El Periquillo Sarniento. [29], and Mas Marco Kartodikromo’s Semarang Hitam [30]

if we turn to the newspaper as cultural product, we will be struck by its profound fictiveness. (p.33.)

imagined linkage derives from … calendrical coincidence and] the newspaper as a form of book and the market (p.33.)

the book was the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity (p.34.)

Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning-prayers […] performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. (p.35.)

the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbours, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in [35] everyday life. As with Noli Me Tangere, fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations. (p.36.)

[Summary:] The very possibility of imagining the nation only arose historically when, and where, three fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on men’s minds. The first of these was the idea that a particularly script-language offered privileged access to ontological truth, precisely because it was an inseparable part of that truth. […] Second was the belief that society was naturally organised around and under higher centres - monarchs who were persons apart from other human beings and who ruled by some form of cosmological (divine) dispensation. […] Third was a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origins of the world and men essentially identical. Combined, these ideas rooted human lives firmly in the very nature of things, giving certain meaning to the everyday fatalities of existence […]

The slow, uneven decline of these interlinked certainties […] drove a harsh wedge between cosmology and history. No surprise then that the search was on, so to speak, for a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together. (p.36.)

A strong case can be made for the primacy of capitalism (p.37.) mechanical reproduction (p.37.) book-publishing [38] felt all of capitalism’s restless search for markets. (pp.37-38.)

the revolutionary vernacularising thrust of capitalism (p.39.) Impact of the Reformation … Martin Luther … Biblical translations … for the first time truly mass readership (p.39) … Counter-Reformation defended the citadel of Latin (p.40.) Bibl., Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book.

The coalition between Protestantism and print-capitalism, exploiting cheap popular editions, quickly created large new reading publics - not least among merchants and women, who typically know little or no Latin - and simultaneously mobilised them for politico-religious purposes. Inevitably, it was not merely the Church that was first shaken to the core. The same earthquake produced Europe’s first important non-dynastic, non-city states in the Dutch Republic and the Commonwealth of the Puritans […] (p.40.)

the birth of administrative vernaculars predated both print and the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century, and must therefore be regarded (at least initially) as an independent factor in the erosion of the sacred imagined community. (p.41.)

the elevation of vernaculars to the status of languages-of-power […] made its own contribution to the decline of the imagined community of Christendom. (p.42.)

What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between [42] a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communication (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity. (p.43.)

the essential interplay between fatality, technology, and capitalism (p.43.) assembling process [of dialectics into print-languages] facilitated by arbitrariness of any system of sounds (p.43.)

These print-languages laid the bases for national consciousness … created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars … became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field … in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally-imagined community. (p.44.)

capitalism gave a new fixity to language (p.44.)  worlds of our seventeenth-century forebears are accessible to us in a way that to Villon his twelfth-century ancestors were not. (p.45.)

the fixing of print-languages and the differentiation of status between them … largely unselfconscious processes resulting from explosive interaction between capitalism, technology and human linguistic diversity. (p.45.)

convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation. (p.46.)

New American states of the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries (p.47.) fear of “;lower-class” political mobilisations, to wit, Indian or Negro-slave uprisings (p.48.)

[Creoles resisted  humane law of 1798 issued from Madrid and procured its suspension in 1794] (p.49.)

The Liberator Bolívar once opined that a Negro revolt was “;a thousand times worse than a Spanish invasion” [and] many leaders of the independence movement in the Thirteen Colonies were slave-owning agrarian magnates. (p.49.)

Why did the Spanish-American Empire, which had existed calmly for almost three centuries, quite suddenly fragment into eighteen separate states? / The two factors most commonly adduced in explanation are the tightening of Madrid’s control and the spread of the liberalising ideas of the Enlightenment in the latter half of the eighteenth century. (p.50.)

heavy immigration of peninsulares (p.50.) improving trans-Atlantic communications … rapid and easy transmission of new economic and political doctrines being produced in Western Europe (p.51.)

“;cultural revolution” … pervasive republicanism of the newly independent communities (p.51.)  [Exception of Brazil … immigration of Portuguese dynast in flight from Napoleon.]

[Cites Victor Tuner on the “;journey” as a meaning-creating experience; p.53.]

In a pre-print age, the reality of the imagined religious community depended profoundly on countless, ceaseless travels. (p.54.) religious pilgrimages (p.54.)

inner thrust of absolutism was to create a unified apparatus of power … human interchangeability … recruitment … homines novi … [feudal hereditary:] round-trip to the centre of investiture and back home again to ancestral demesne … new functionary … talent, not death, charts his course … The last thing the functionary wants is to return home, for he has no home with any intrinsic value (p.55.)

Documentary interchangeability, which reinforced human interchangeability, was fostered by the development of a standardised language-of-state. (p.56.)

In principle, the extra-European expansion of the great kingdoms of early modern Europe should have simply extended the above model in the development of grand, transcontinental bureaucracies. But, in fact, this did not happen. The instrumental rationality of the absolutist apparatus - above all its tendency to recruit and promote on the basis of talent rather than birth - operated only fitfully beyond the eastern shores of the Atlantic. (p.56.)

[…] nearly unheard of for a creole to rise to a position of official importance in Spain. […] Even if he was born within two weeks of his father’s [57] migration, the accident of birth in the Americas consigned him to subordination - even though in terms of language, religion, ancestry, or manners he was largely indistinguishable from the Spain-born Spaniard. There was nothing to be done about it: he was irremediably creole. Yet how irrational his exclusion must have seemed! Nonetheless, hidden inside the irrationality was this logic: born in the Americas, he could not be a true Spaniard: ergo, born in Spain, the peninsular could not be a true American. (p.58.)

[…] the writings of Rousseau and Herder, which argued that climate and “;ecology” had a constitutive impact on culture and character, exerted wide influence. It was only too easy from there to make the convenient, vulgar deduction that creoles, born in a savage hemisphere, were by nature different from, and inferior to, the metropolitans - and thus unfit for higher office. (p.60.)

The figure of Benjamin Franklin is indelibly associated with creole nationalism in the northern Americas. … printer-journalist (p.61.) first American newspapers … early gazettes … commercial news … commodities … One fertile trait of such newspapers was always their provinciality (p.62.)

[…] in fact, people [62] all over Spanish America thought of themselves as “;Americans”, since this term denoted precisely the shared fatality of extra-Spanish birth. (p.63.)

the “;failure” of the Spanish-American experience to generate a permanent Spanish-American nationalism reflects both the general level of development of capitalism and technology in the late eighteenth century and the “;local” backwardness of Spanish capitalism and technology in relation to the administrative stretch of the empire. (p.63.)

[Cf. the Thirteen Colonies:] Bunched geographically together, their market-centres in Boston, New York and Philadelphia were readily accessible to one another, and their populations were relatively tightly linked by print as well as commerce. (p.64.)

Herder: “;Denn jedes Volk is Volk; es hat  seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache”. (Quoted in Kemiläinen, Nationalism: Problems Concerning the Word, the Concept and the Classification, 1964, p.42; here p.68.)

The growth of what might be called “;comparative history” led in time to the hitherto unheard-of conception of a “;modernity” explicitly juxtaposed to “;antiquity”, and by no means necessarily to the latter’s advantage. The issue was fiercely joined in the “;Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns” which dominated French intellectual life in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. To quote Auerbach again, ‘Under Louis XIV the French had the courage to consider their own [68] culture a valid model on a par with that of the ancients, and they imposed this view on the rest of Europe.” /  In the course of the sixteenth century, Europe’s “;discovery” of grandiose civilisations hitherto only dimly rumoured - in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent - or completely unknown - Aztec, Mexico and Incan Peru - suggested an irremediable human pluralism. Most of these civilisations had developed quite separate from the known history of Europe, Christendom, Antiquity, indeed man: their genealogies lay outside of and were unassimilable to Eden. (Only homogeneous, empty  time would offer them accommodation. ) The impact of the “;discoveries” can be gauged by the peculiar geographies of the imaginary politics of the age. Europe’s “;More’s Utopia, which appeared in 1516, purported to be the account of a sailor, encountered by the author in Antwerp, who had participated in Amerigo Vespucci’s 1497-1498 expedition to the Americas. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) was perhaps new above all because it was situated in the Pacific Ocean. Swift’s magnificent Island of the Hoyhnhnms (1726) came with a bogus map of its South Atlantic location. (The meaning of these settings may be clearer if one considers how unimaginable it would be to place Plato’s Republic on any map, sham or ideal.) All these tongue-in-cheek utopias, “;modelled” on real discoveries, are depicted, not as lost Edens, but as contemporary societies. One could argue that they had to be, since they were composed of criticisms of contemporary societies, and the discoveries had ended the necessity for seeking models in a vanished antiquity. In the wake of the utopians came the luminaries of the Enlightenment, Vico, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, who increasingly exploited a “;real” non-Europe for a barrage of subversive writings [Persian Letters] directed against current European social and political institutions. In due course, discovery and conquest also caused a revolution in European ideas about language [...]’ (pp.68-70.)

[Linguistic pioneers:] William Jones (Sanskrit, 1786); Jean Champillion (Rosetta Stone, 1835);

[Quotes Said: ‘Language became less a continuity between an outside power and the human speaker than in internal field created and accomplished by language users among themselves.’ (Orientalism, p.136; here p.70.)]

The study of folklore and the rediscovery and piecing together of popular epic poetry went together with the publication of grammars and dictionaries (p.74.)

Afrikaner nationalism pioneered by Boer pastors and litterateurs, who in the 1870s ere successful in making the local Dutch patois into a literary language and naming it something no longer European. (p.75.)

all these lexicographers, philologists, grammarians, folklorists, publicists and composers did not carry on their revolutionary activities in a vacuum … linked, via that silent bazaar [print-market] to consuming publics … families of the reading-classes (p.75.)

reading classes meant people of some power … state bureaucracies … expansion of bureaucratic middle classes … to be understood in its relationship to vernacular print-capitalism. (p.76.)

[The emerging bourgeoisie] did come to visualise in a general way the existence of thousands and thousands like themselves through print-language. For an illiterate bourgeoisie is scarcely imaginable. Thus in world-historical terms bourgeoisies were the first classes to achieve solidarities on an essentially imagined basis. (p.77.)

general growth in literacy … powerful new impulses for vernacular linguistic unification (p.77.)

vernacular languages-of-state assumed ever greater power and status in a process which, at least at the start, was largely unplanned. Thus English elbowed Gaelic out of most of Ireland, French pushed Breton to the way, and Castilian reduced Catalan to marginality. (p.78.)

[Quotes Nairn: ‘The new middle-class intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history; and the invitation card had to be written in a language they understood’ (Break up of Britain, p.340; here p.80.)]

[B]y the second decade of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, a “;model” of “;the” independent national state was available for pirating. [Ftn.: It would be more precise, probably to say that the model was a complex composite of French and American elements. But the “;observable reality” of France after 1870 was restored monarchies and the ersatz dynamism of Napoleon’s great-nephew.]  (p.81.)

6: Official Nationalism and Imperialism

Philological-lexicographical revolution and the rise of intra-European nationalist movements … elephantiasis of the dynastic states (p.83)

The lexicographical revolution […] created, and gradually spread, the conviction that languages (in Europe at least) were, so to speak, the personal property of quite specific groups - their daily speakers and readers - and moreover that these group, imagined as communities, were entitled to their autonomous place in a fraternity of equals. (p.84.)

[Quotes Jászi (Dissolution): “;Hapsburg emperors … sometimes fostered a policy of Germanisation … not led by nationalistic point of view but their measures were dictated by the intent of unification and universalism of their empire” (Ibid., p.137; here p. 84.)]

Insofar as all dynasts by mid-century were using some vernacular as language-of-state, and also because of their rapidly rising prestige all over Europe of the national idea, there was a discernible tendency among the Euro-Mediterranean monarchies to sidle towards a beckoning national identification. (p.85.)

[Discusses ‘official nationalism’ of dynasties, which developed after the popular national movements that proliferated since the 1820s. (p.86.)]

[Discusses problem raised by Tom Nairn as to why there was no Scottish nationalist movement in the late eighteenth century in spite of a rising bourgeoisie and distinguished intelligentsia and remarks on Nairn’s ‘good nationalist tendency to treat his “;Scotland” as an unproblematic, primordial given.’  (p.88.)]

in the eighteenth century the English-speaking Lowlands collaborated with London in largely exterminating the Gaeltacht. […] they had effectively eliminated, “;before” the age of nationalism, any possibility of a European-style vernacular-specific nationalist movement. But why not one in the American style? (p.90.)

[Quotes Macaulay:] ‘No Hindu who has received an English education ever remains sincerely attached to his religion. It is my firm belief […] that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence.’ (Quoted in Donald Eugene Smith, India as a Secular State, Princeton UP 1963, p.339; here p.91.)

Like Russification, Anglicisation naturally also offered rosy [92] opportunities to armies of middle-class metropolitans (not least Scotsmen!) - functionaries, school-masters, merchants, and planters - who quickly fanned out over the vast, permanently sunlit realm [of India]. (p.92.)

[Quotes Bipin Chandra Pal’s Memories of My Life and Times on position of educated Indians (1973).]

JAPAN: Account of the overthrow of the Japanese dynasty when Commodore Perry battered down the ways of Japanese isolation in 1854; overthrow of Bakufu (Tokugawa Shogunate regime) by Sonno Joi (Revere the Sovereign, Expel the Barbarians), a middle-ranking samurai groupoing effectively armed with 7,300 scrap rifles from the US civil war; aka Meiji’s men; notes leading role of Omura Masujrio, who learned Dutch and translated military manuals; also the rise of nationalism and the writings of Kita Ikka, who fostered the Japanese imperialist policiy on the basis that the Asians were the proletariat of the world and deserved the ‘right of class struggle’ accorded to the working-class of Europe (pp.94-98.)

BURMA: Chulalongkorn of Thailand used diplomacy to sustain his monarchy; imported single male foreigners are workers (p.100f.)

HUNGARIAN NATIONALISM (p.101-09) Kossuth, 1848; life-long exile in Aug. 1849; revival of official Magyr nationalism; institution of Dual Monarchy, 1866; triumph of reactionary official nationalism; USGA (United States of greater Austria).

Imperial Russification (p.115)

It is generally recognised that the intelligentsia were central to the rise of nationalism in the colonial territories, not least because colonialism ensured that native agrarian magnates, big merchants, industrial entrepreneurs, and even a large professional class were relative rarities. Almost everywhere economic power was either monopolised by the colonialists themselves, or unevenly shared with a politically impotent class of pariah (non-native) businessmen - Lebanese, Indian and Arab in colonial Africa, Chinese, Indian, and Arab in colonial Asia. It is no less generally recognised that the intelligentsia’s vanguard role derived from their bilingual literacy, or rather literacy and bilingualism. Print-literacy already made possible the imagined community floating in homogeneous, empty time of which we have spoken earlier. Bilingualism meant access, through the European language-of-state, to modern Western culture in the broadest sense, and, in particular, to the models of nationalism, nation-ness, and nation state produced elsewhere in the course of the nineteenth century. (p.116.)

[On Young Men’s Buddhist Association in Rangoon, et al.:] It is perfectly true that in one sense Europe had been there before - if we think of Young Ireland, Young Italy, and the like. Both in Europe and in the colonies “;young” and “;youth” signified dynamism, progress, self-sacrificing idealism and revolutionary will. But in Europe “;young” had little in the way of definable sociological contours. One could be middle-aged and still part of Young Ireland; one could be illiterate and still part of Young Italy. The reason, of course, was that the language of these nationalisms was either a vernacular mother-tongue to which the members had spoken access from the cradle, or, as in the case of Ireland, a metropolitan language which had sunk such deep roots in sections of the population over the centuries of conquest that it too could manifest itself, creole-style, as a vernacular. There was thus no necessary connection between language, age, class, and status. / In the colonies things were very different. Youth meant, above all, the first generation in any significant numbers to have acquired a European education, marking them off linguistically and culturally from their parents generation, as well as from the vast bulk of their colonised age-mates. […] (p.119.)

the unique role played by [119] colonial school-systems in promoting colonial nationalisms (pp.119-20.)

See note on term inlander for all indigenes of Indonesia during Dutch rule, and hence by implication defining the Afrikaners themselves as ‘not-belonging-there’. (p.122.) Cf. vreemde ossterlingen [foreign Orientals] with ‘politico-legal status superior to that of the “;native natives”, and the special case of the Meiji Japanese whose economic development inspired the Dutch to give them higher status as ‘honorary Europeans’. ‘From all this, by a sort of sedimentation, inlander […] grew ever more specific in content; until, like a ripe larva, it was suddenly transmogrified into the spectacular butterfly “;Indonesian”. (p.123.)

[Gives account of education ‘pyramid’ in Indo-china. (p.125ff.)]

Nothing suggests that Ghanaian nationalism is any less real than Indonesian simply because its national language is English rather than Ashanti. it is always a mistake to treat languages in the way that certainly nationalist ideologies treat them - as emblems of nation-ness, like flags, costumes, folk-dances, and the rest. Much the most important thing about language is its capacity for generating imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities. After all, imperial languages are still vernaculars, [133]  and thus particular vernaculars among many. […] Language is not an instrument of exclusion: in principle anyone can learn any language. On the contrary, it is fundamentally inclusive, limited only by the fatality of Babel: no one lives long enough to learn all languages. Print-language is what invents nationalism, not a particular language per se. […] Thirty years ago, almost no Indonesian spoke Bahasa Indonesia as his or her mother-tongue; virtually everyone had their own “;ethnic” language and some, especially people in the nationalist movement, bahasa Indonesia/dienstmaleisch as well. Today there are perhaps millions of young Indonesians, from dozen of ethno-linguistic backgrounds, who speak Indonesian as their mother tongue. (p.134.)

[…] advances in communications technology, especially radio and television, give print allies unavailable a century ago. Multilingual broadcasting can conjure up the imagined community to illiterates and populations with different mother-tongues. (Here there are resemblances to the conjuring up of mediaeval Christendom  through visual representation and bilingual literati.) […] (p.135)

Twentieth century nationalisms have […] a profoundly modular character. They can, and do, draw on more than a century and a half of human experience and three earlier models of nationalism [official nationalism; popular nationalism; republican nationalism]. (p.135.)

In a world in which the national state is the overwhelming norm, all of this means that nations can now be imagined without linguistic communality - not in the naïve spirit of nostros los Americanos, but of a general awareness of what modern history has demonstrated to be possible. (p.135.)

Helvetic republic (Switzerland), 1798. (p.136.) 

The “;last wave” of nationalisms, most of them in the colonial territories of Asia and Africa, was in its origins a response to the new-style global imperialism made possible by the achievements of industrial capitalism. As Marx put it in his inimitable way, “;The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole face of the globe” (Communist Manifesto). But capitalism had also, not least by its dissemination of print, helped to create popular, vernacular-based nationalisms in Europe, which to different degrees undermined the age-old dynastic principle, and egged into self-naturalisation every dynasty positioned to do so. […] (p.140.)

[…] It is doubtful whether either social change or transformed consciousness, in themselves, do much to explain the attachment people feel for the inventions of their imaginations, or […] why people are ready to die for these inventions.

[…] it is common to insist on the near pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred on the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love (p.141.)

Even in the case of colonised peoples, who have every reason to feel hatred for their imperial rulers, it is astonishing how insignicant the element of hatred is in these expression[s] of nationa feeling. (p.142; quotes Rizal’s “;Ultima Adios”, written before execution by the Spanish in the Philippines.)

Dying for one’s country, which usually one does not choose, aassumes a moral grandeur which dying for the Labour Party, the American Medical Association, or perhaps even Amnesty International can not rival, for all those bodies one can join or leave at easy will. (p.144.)

[Notes] the primordialness of languages … Each looms out of a horizonless past … Languages thus appear rooted beyond anything else in contemporary societies. (p.145.)

poetry and song … how selfless this uni-sonance feels! If we are aware that others are singing these songs … Nothing connects us all but imagined sound. (p.145.)

[…] languages […] appear rooted beyond almost anything else in contemporary societies. At the same time, nothing connects us affectively to the dead more than language. […] there is a special kind of contemporaneous community which language alone suggests - above all in the form of poetry and songs. (p.145.)

unisonality […] the echoed physical realisation of the imagined community. (p.145.) from the start the nation was conceived in language, not in blood, and […] one could be “;invited into” the imagined community. Thus today, even the most insular nations acept the principle of naturalisation (wonderful word!), no matter how difficult in practice they make it. (p.145.)

‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’: ] Seen as both a historical fatality and as a community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed. This paradox is well illustrated in the shifting rhythms of these famous lines on the death of John Moore during the battle of Coruna [Quotes stanzas.] / The lines celebrate a heroic memory with a beauty inseparable from the English language - one untranslatable, audible only to its speakers and readers. Yet both Moore and his eulogist were Irishmen. And there is no reason why a descendant of Moore’s French or Spanish “;foes” cannot fully hear the poem’s resonance: English, like any other language, is always open to new speakers, listeners, and readers.’ (p.146.)

[Quotes Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia [sic]. (p.147.)]

If every language is acquirable, its acquisition requirea a real portion of a person’s life: each new question is meansured against shortening days. What limites one’s access to other languages is not their imperviousness but one’s one mortality. Hence a certain privacy to all languages. French and American imperialiss voverned, exploited and killed the Vietnamese over many years. But thwatever else they made off with, the Vietamese languge stayed put. Accordingly, onlytoo often, a rage at Vietnamese “;inscrutability”, and that obscure despair which engenders the venomous argots of dying colonialisms: “;gooks” “;ratons”, &c. (In the long run the only responses to the vast privacy of the language of the oppressed are retreat or further massacre.). Ftn. The logic here is, q. I will be dead before I have penetrated them. 2. My power is such that they have had to learn my language. 3. But this means that my privacy has been penetrated. Terming them “;gooks” is small revenge. (p.148.)

Nairn is basically mistaken in arguing tht racism and anti-semitism derive from nationalism - and thus that ‘seen in sufficient historical depth, fascism tells us more about nationalism than any other episode.’ (Nairn, Break-up of Britain , pp.337, 347; here p.148.)

The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations [slant-eyed, &c.], transmitted from the origins of time thorugh an eneless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history. … For the Nazi, a Jewish German is always an impostor. (p.149.)

The dreams of race actually have their origin in class rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers, to ‘blue’ or ‘white’ blood and ‘breeding’ among aristocracies. (p.149.)

colonial empire … sizeable numbers of bourgeois and petty bourgeois to play artistocract off centre court [uses term ‘tropical Gothic’ to describe their manner of living as sristocratcy ‘off-stage’ in the colonies, supported by large cast of houseboys, grooms, gardeners, cooks, amahs … &c. ] (p.150.)

[Quotes Nairn’s view of the singularity of Britain in achieving a slow organic growth not being the result of a deliberate invention, resulting from a theory and speaks of the use of modular theorising and prectical experiementation that produced the Bolsheviks in the wake of the French Revolution which was not, as Hobsbaum notes, the result of a systematic programme, (pp.155-56).]

[…] Hobsbaum was right to observe that “;the French Revolution was not made or led by a formed party or movement in the modern sense, nor by men attempting to carry out a systematic programme.” But, thanks to print-capitalism, the French experience was not merely ineradicable from human memory, it was also learnable-from. Out of almost a century of modular theorising and practical experimentation came the Bolsheviks, who made the first successful “;planned” revolution. (p.156.)

Contemporary nationalism is the heir to two centuries of historic change. For all the reasons that I have attempted to sketch out, the legacies are truly Janus-headed. […] As we have seen, “;official nationalism” was from the start a conscious, self-protective policy, intimately linked to the preservation of imperial-dynastic interests. But once “;out there for all to see”, it was as copyable as Prussia’s early nineteenth-century military reforms […/] thus the model of official nationalism assumes its relevance above all at the moment when revolutionaries successfully take control of the state, and are for the first time in a position to use the power of the state in pursuit of their visions. The relevance is all the greater insofar as even the most determinedly radical revolutionaries always, to some degree, inherit the state from the fallen regime. (p.159.)

Urges that we abandon fictions like ‘Marxist as such are not nationalists’, or ‘nationalism is the pathology of modern developmental history’. (p.161.)

Quotes Walter Benjamin on the Angel of History: ‘His face is turned to the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The nagel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whol what has been ssmashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.’ (Benjamin, Illuminations, Fontana 1973, p.259.)

The fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one - and only one - extremely clear place. No fractions. / This mode of imagining by the colonial state had origins much older than the censuses of the 1870s [...] (p.166.)

[Corrects earlier assumption that the official nationalist of the Asia and Africa was modelled on that of dynastic states of Europe, suggesting in stead that the ‘genealogy should be traced to the imaginings of the colonial state’ and explores the way in which the colonial state imagines its dominion through census, map and museum. (pp.163-64.)]

[On racial classifications of the Dutch East India Co. or Vereenigde Ooost-Indische Compagnie:] From what poops was it possible to imagine Chinees ? Surely only those ferociously merchantile poops which, under centralised command, roved ceaselessly formport to port between the Gulf og Merguie and the mouth of the Yangtze-kiang. Oblivious of the [167] heterogeneous population of the Middle Kingdom; of the mutual incomprehensibility of many of their spoken languages; and of the peculiar social and geographic origins of their diaspora across Southeast Asia, the Company imagined, with its trans-oceanic eye, an endless series of Chinezen , as the conquistadors had seen an endless series of hidalgos . And on the basis of this inventive census it began to insist that those under its control whom it categorises as Chinezen dress, reside, marry, be buried, and bequeathe property according to that census. (p.168.)

The real innovation of the census-takers of the 1870s was, therefore, not in the construction of ethnic-racial classifications, but rather in their systematic quantification. [168; …] the new census […] tried carefully to count the objects of its fevered imagining. […] The new demographic topography put down deep social and institutional roots as the colonial state multiplied its size and functions. Guided by its imagined map it organised the new education, juridical, public health, police, and immigration bureacracies it was building on the principle of ethno-racial hierarchies which were, however, always understood in terms of parallel series. The flow of subject populations through the mesh […] created “;traffic-habits” which in time gave real social life to the state’s earlier fantasies. (pp.168-69.)

[Discusses the ‘cosmographic’ and ‘profane (or terrestrial)’ maps of Rama IV - the Mongkut of The King and I - which did ‘mark borders’ and therefore did not constitute the nation; 171-72]

The Mercator map, brought in by the European colonisers, was beginning via print, to shape the imagination of Southeast Asians. (p.171.)

Siam was not colonised, though what, in the end, came to be its broders were colonially determined. (p.171.)

Quotes Winichakul Tongchai, ‘Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of Siam’, PhD Diss. (Sydney UP 1988): ‘In terms of most communication theories and common sense, a map is a scientific abstraction of reality. A map merely represents something which already exists objectively “;there”. In the history I have described, this relationship is reversed. A map anticipated spatial reality, not vice versa. In other words, a map was a model for, rather than a model of, what it purported to represent. […] It had become a [173] real instrument to concretise projections on the earth’s surface. A map was now necessary for the new administrative mechanisms and for the troops to back up their claims. […] The discourse of mapping was the paradigm which both administrative and military operations worked within and served.’ (Tongchai, op. cit., p.310; here pp.173-74.)

map-as-logo (p.175.) [Example of West New Guinea which was claimed by the Indonesian state on the basis of Dutch maps: 176]

[On museums:] colonial regimes began attaching themselves to antiquity as much as conquest, originally for quite straightforward Machievellian-legalistic reasons. As they passed, however, there was less and less openly brutal talk about right of conquest, and more and more effort to create alternative legitimacies. More and more Europeans were being born in South-East Asia, and being tempted to make it their home. Monumental archaeology, increasingly linked to tourism, allowed the state to appear as the guardian of a generalised, but also local, Tradition. The old sacred sites were to be incorporated into the map of the colony, and their ancient prestige (which, if this had [181] disappeared, as it often had, the state would attempt to revive) draped about the mappers. […] a characteristic feature of this profane state was infinite reproducibility, a reproducibility made technically possible by print and photography, but politico-culturally by the disbelief of the rulers themselves in the real sacredness of local sites. […] From there it is only a step into the market; Hotel Pagan, Borodubur Fried Chicken, and so on. (p.181-82.)

[Notes that Angor was reproduced in papier maché for display in sports stadium of Phnom Penh by Norodom Sihanouk on 15th anniversary of Cambodian independence. (p.183.)]

Interlinked with one another, then, the census, the map and the museum illuminate the late colonial state’s style of thinking about its domain. The “;warp” of this thinking was a totalising classificatory grid, which could be applied with endless flexibility to anything under the state’s real or contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products, monuments, and so forth. The effect of the grid was always to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it belonged here, not there. It was bounded, determinate, and therefore - in principle - countable. […] The “;weft” was what one could call serialisation: the assumption that the world was made up of replicable plurals. The particular always stood as a provisional representative of a series, and was to be handled in this light. This is why the colonial state imagined a Chinese series before any Chinese, and a nationalist series beofre the appearance of any nationalists. (p.184.)

Bentham’s Panopticon, of total surveyability (p.184.)

Map and census thus shaped the grammar which would in due course make possible “;Burma” and “;Burmese”, “;Indonesia” and “;Indonesians”. But the concretisation of these possibilities - concretisations which have a powerful life today, long after the colonial state has disappeared - owed much to the colonial state’s peculiar imagining of history and power. (p.185.)

[A] new synchronic novelty [i.e., parallelism or simultaneity] could arise historically only when substantial groups of people were in a position to think of themselves as living lives parallel to those of other substantial groups of people [...] it was necessary for the distance between the parallel groups to be large, and that the newer of them be substantial in size and permanently settled, as well as firmly subordinated to the other. (p.188.)

The doubleness of the Americas and the reason for it, sketched out above, help to explain why nationalism emerged first in the New World, not the Old. [...] none of the creole revolutionaries dreamed of keeping the empire intact but rearranging its internal distribution of power, reversing the previous relationship of subjection by transferrring the metropole from a Europe to an American site. in other words, the aim was not to have New London succeed, overthrow, or destroy Old London, but rather to safeguard their continuing parallelism. [...] although these wars caused a great deal of suffering and were marked by much barbarity, in an odd way the stakes were rather low [...; 192] The revolutionary wars, bitter as they were, were still reassuring in that they were wars between kinsmen [and] after a certaint period of acrimony had passed, close cultural, and sometimes political and economic, ties could be reknit bettween the former metropoles and the new nations. (pp.191-92.)

[In a footnote Anderson writes: ‘it is an astonishing sign of the depth of Eurocentrism that so many European scholars persist, in the face of all the evidence, in regarding nationalism as a European invention.’ (p.191.)]

In Europe, the new nationalisms almost immeditely began to imagine themselves as “awakening from sleep”, a trope wholly foreign to the Americas. [...] many different elements contributed to the popularity of this trope [..] It seemed to explain why nationalist movements had bizarrely cropped up in the civilised Old World so obviously later than in the barbarous New. [...; 195] In the second place, the trope provided a crucial metaphorical link between the new European nationalisms and language. [...] “uncivilised” vernaculars began to function politically in the same way as the Atlantic Ocean had earlier done, i.e., to “separate” subject national communities off from ancient dynastic realms. (pp.195-96.)

Quotes Renan as before : ‘Or, l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beacoup de choses en commun et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses [...] Tout citoyen français doit avoir oublié la Saint-Barthélemy, les massacres du Midi au XIIIe siècle. Il n’y a pas en France dix familles qui puissent fournir la preuve d’une origine franque ...’ (Oeuvre Complète, I, p.892; here 199, but see also p.6, ftn.10.)

English history textbooks offer the diverting spectacle of a great Founding Father whom every schoolchild is taught to call William the Conqueror [...] The same child is not informed that William spoke no English [...] nor is she told “Conqueror of what?” For the only intelligible modern answer would have to be “Conqueror of the English” [...] (p.201.)

[Reads Ishmael and Queequeg and Jim and Huck in Melville and Twain as examples of the nation establishing fraternity: 203]

All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives. [...] These narrative, like the novels and newspapers discussed in Chapter 2, are set in homogeneous empty time. (p.204.) [Compares this with the ahistorical geneaology of Christ in St. Matthew’s Gospel]

As with modern persons, so it is with nations. Awareness of being embedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of “forgetting” the experience of this continuity - product of the ruptures of the late eighteenth-century - engenders the need for a narrative of “identity”. Yet between narratives of person and nation there is a central difference of employment. In the secular story of the “person” there is a beginning and an end. [..] Nations, however, have no clearly identifiable births, and their deaths, if they ever happen, are never natural. [...] Yet the deaths that structure a nation’s biography are of a very special kind.

[Discusses Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen ... Philippe II, with its ‘remorselessly accumulating cemeteries’: 206] But, to serve the narrative purpose, these violent deaths must be remembered/forgotten as “our own”. [END; 206]