149) he also talks about ‘solidarity among whites’ from different metropoles in a colonial context as being evidence for this thesis. To take more modern examples, in his chapter on racism Anderson makes a strong case that “the dreams of racism actually have their origins in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and the ‘blue’ or ‘white’ blood and breeding among aristocracies.” (p. 60), or that “before the age of print, Rome easily won every war against heresy in Western Europe because it always had better internal lines of communication than its challengers.” (p. 40), the non-existence of medieval slavery (p. 54) make a lot of sense but his assertions that “the universality of Latin in medieval Western Europe never corresponded to a universal political system.” (p. 15) and his argument that “in a pre-print age, the reality of the imagined religious community depended profoundly on countless, ceaseless, travels.” (p. For example, I think his characterisation of Latin speakers as “tiny literate reefs on great illiterate oceans” (p. As such, when he makes generalisations, they rest on a limited evidence base. His assessment of medieval history is seemingly based entirely on two books by Annales historians, Marc Bloch’s La société féodale (1939) and Lucien Febvre’s L’apparition du livre (1958).

These points are central to the book, and have been immensely influential yet throughout the book Anderson makes arguments which seem wrong, especially when he’s outside his own area of expertise in southeast Asia. He returns repeatedly to the idea of ‘Peruvianization’, which “shows that from the start the nation was conceived in language, not in blood” (p. Language is the main subject of his analysis, and it is language that binds these imagined communities together - in contrast, for example, with pre-bourgeois aristocracies bound together by kinship. The entire book is concerned with vernaculars, languages-of-state, print-language and forms of words. Third, Anderson is focused above all on language. The development of European nationalism was characterised by ‘official nationalisms’ - “an anticipatory strategy adopted by dominant groups which are threatened with marginalisation or exclusion from an emerging nationally-imagined community.” (p.101 in the 2016 Verso edition). Second, Anderson argues that the origin of nationalism is in Latin American creole resistance to the metropole between 17, not in Europe. First, Anderson defines a nation as a “sovereign limited imagined political community”.

I took three big ideas from Imagined Communities.

Imagined communities