Imagined Communities
v
Imagined Communities
Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism
— • — —
B E N E D I C T A N D E R S O N
Revised Edition
VERSO
London • New York
First published by Verso 1983
This edition published by Verso 2006
© Benedict Anderson, 1983, 1991, 2006
new material © Benedict Anderson, 2006
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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For Mamma and Tantiette
in love and gratitude
BLANKPAGE
Contents
Preface to the Second Edition xi
1 Introduction 1
2 Cultural Roots 9
3 The Origins of National Consciousness 37
4 Creole Pioneers 47
5 Old Languages, New Models 67
6 Official Nationalism and Imperialism 83
7 The Last Wave 113
8 Patriotism and Racism 141
9 The Angel of History 155
10 Census, Map, Museum 163
11 Memory and Forgetting 187
Travel and Traffic: On the Geo-biography of Imagined Communities 207
Bibliography 230
Index 234
Acknowledgments
As will be apparent to the reader, my thinking about nationalism has
been deeply affected by the writings of Erich Auerbach, Walter
Benjamin and Victor Turner. In preparing the book itself, I have
benefitted enormously from the criticism and advice of my brother
Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett, and Steve Heder. J. A. Ballard,
Mohamed Chambas, Peter Katzenstein, the late Rex Mortimer, Francis
Mulhern, Tom Nairn, Shiraishi Takashi, Jim Siegel, Laura Summers,
and Esta Ungar also gave me invaluable help in different ways.
Naturally, none of these friendly critics should be held in any way
accountable for the text's deficiencies, which are wholly my responsibility.
I should perhaps add that I am by training and profession a
specialist on Southeast Asia. This admission may help to explain some of
the book's biases and choices of examples, as well as to deflate its wouldbe-global
pretensions.
He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Thus from a Mixture of all kinds began,
That Het'rogeneous Thing, An Englishman:
In eager Rapes, and furious Lust begot,
Betwixt a Painted Britton and a Scot:
Whose gend'ring Offspring quickly learnt to bow,
And yoke their Heifers to the Roman Plough:
From whence a Mongrel half-bred Race there came,
With neither Name nor Nation, Speech or Fame.
In whose hot Veins now Mixtures quickly ran,
Infus'd betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their Rank Daughters, to their Parents just,
Receiv'd all Nations with Promiscuous Lust.
This Nauseous Brood directly did contain
The well-extracted Blood of Englishmen . . .
From Daniel Defoe, The True-Bom Englishman
Preface to the Second Edition
Who would have thought that the storm blows harder the farther it
leaves Paradise behind?
The armed conflicts of 1978-79 in Indochina, which provided the
immediate occasion for the original text of Imagined Communities,
seem already, a mere twelve years later, to belong to another era.
Then I was haunted by the prospect of further full-scale wars
between the socialist states. Now half these states have joined the
debris at the Angel's feet, and the rest are fearful of soon following
them. The wars that the survivors face are civil wars. The likelihood
is strong that by the opening of the new millennium little will
remain of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics except . . .
republics.
Should all this have somehow been foreseen? In 1983 I wrote that
the Soviet Union was 'as much the legatee of the prenational dynastic
states of the nineteenth century as the precursor of a twenty-first
century internationalist order.' But, 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.
It is melancholy consolation to observe that history seems to be bearing
out the logic' of Imagined Communities better than its author managed
to do.
It is not only the world that has changed its face over the past
xi
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
twelve years. The study of nationalism too has been startlingly transformed
- in method, scale, sophistication, and sheer quantity. In the
English language alone, J.A. Armstrong's Nations Before Nationalism
(1982), John Breuilly's Nationalism and the State (1982), Ernest Gellner's
Nations and Nationalism (1983), Miroslav Hroch's Social Preconditions of
National Revival in Europe (1985), Anthony Smith's The Ethnic Origins of
Nations (1986), P. Chatteijee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World
(1986), and Eric Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism since 1788 (1990)
— to name only a few of the key texts — have, by their historical reach
and theoretical power, made largely obsolete the traditional literature on
the subject. In part out of these works has developed an extraordinary
proliferation of historical, literary, anthropological, sociological, feminist,
and other studies linking the objects of these fields of enquiry to
nationalism and nation.
To adapt Imagined Communities to the demands of these vast changes
in the world and in the text is a task beyond my present means. It
seemed better, therefore, to leave it largely as an 'unrestored' period
piece, with its own characteristic style, silhouette, and mood. Two
things give me comfort. On the one hand, the full final outcome of
developments in the old socialist world remain shrouded in the obscurity
ahead. On the other hand, the idiosyncratic method and
preoccupations of Imagined Communities seem to me still on the margins
of the newer scholarship on nationalism — in that sense, at least, not fully
superseded.
What I have tried to do, in the present edition, is simply to correct
errors of fact, conception, and interpretation which I should have
avoided in preparing the original version. These corrections — in the
spirit of 1983, as it were - involve some alterations of the first edition, as
well as two new chapters, which basically have the character of discrete
appendices.
In the main text, I discovered two serious errors of translation, at
least one unfulfilled promise, and one misleading emphasis. Unable to
read Spanish in 1983, I thoughtlessly relied on Leon Ma. Guerrero's
English translation of Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, although earlier
1. Hobsbawm has had the courage to conclude from this scholarly explosion that
the age of nationalism is near its end: Minerva's owl flies at dusk.
xii
PREFACE
translations were available. It was only in 1990 that I discovered how
fascinatingly corrupt Guerrero's version was. For a long, important
quotation from Otto Bauer's Die Nationalitatenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie
I lazily relied on Oscar Jaszi's translation. More recent
consultation of the German original has shown me how far Jaszi's
political predilections tinted his citations. In at least two passages I had
faithlessly promised to explain why Brazilian nationalism developed so
late and so idiosyncratically by comparison with those of other Latin
American countries. The present text attempts to fulfil the broken
pledge.
It had been part of my original plan to stress the New World
origins of nationalism. My feeling had been that an unselfconscious
provincialism had long skewed and distorted theorizing on the
subject. European scholars, accustomed to the conceit that everything
important in the modern world originated in Europe, too
easily took 'second generation' ethnolinguistic nationalisms (Hungarian,
Czech, Greek, Polish, etc.) as the starting point in their
modelling, no matter whether they were Tor' or 'against' nationalism.
I was startled to discover, in many of the notices of Imagined
Communities, that this Eurocentric provincialism remained quite
undisturbed, and that the crucial chapter on the originating Americas
was largely ignored. Unfortunately, I have found no better 'instant'
solution to this problem than to re title Chapter 4 as 'Creole
Pioneers.'
The two 'appendices' try to correct serious theoretical flaws in the
first edition. A number of friendly critics had suggested that Chapter 7
('The Last Wave') oversimplified the process whereby early 'Third
World' nationalisms were modelled. Furthermore the chapter did
not seriously address the question of the role of the local colonial
state, rather than the metropole, in styling these nationalisms. At the
same time, I became uneasily aware that what I had believed to be a
significantly new contribution to thinking about nationalism -
2. The first appendix originated in a paper prepared for a conference held in
Karachi in January 1989, sponsored by the World Institute for Development
Economics Research of the United Nations University. A sketch for the second
appeared in The Times Literary Supplement of June 13, 1986, under the rubric
'Narrating the Nation.'
xiii
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
changing apprehensions of time — patently lacked its necessary
coordinate: changing apprehensions of space. A brilliant doctoral
thesis by Thongchai Winichakul, a young Thai historian, stimulated
me to think about mapping's contribution to the nationalist
imagination.
'Census, Map, Museum' therefore analyses the way in which, quite
unconsciously, the nineteenth-century colonial state (and policies that
its mindset encouraged) dialectically engendered the grammar of the
nationalisms that eventually arose to combat it. Indeed, one might go so
far as to say that the state imagined its local adversaries, as in an ominous
prophetic dream, well before they came into historical existence. To the
forming of this imagining, the census's abstract quantification/serialization
of persons, the map's eventual logoization of political space, and
the museum's 'ecumenical,' profane genealogizing made interlinked
contributions.
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: 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, newemerging
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 fantasizing 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 autobio-
graphy.
Aside from any theoretical merits or demerits the two 'appendices'
may prove to have, each has its own more everyday limitations. The
data for 'Census, Map, Museum' are drawn wholly from Southeast
Asia. In some ways this region offers splendid opportunities for
xiv
PREFACE
comparative theorizing since it comprises areas formerly colonized by
almost all the great imperial powers (England, France, Holland, Portugal,
Spain and the United States) as well as uncolonized Siam. Nonetheless,
it remains to be seen whether my analysis, even if plausible for
this region, can be convincingly applied around the globe. In the second
appendix, the sketchy empirical material relates almost exclusively to
Western Europe and the New World, regions on which my knowledge
is quite superficial. But the focus had to be there since it was in these
zones that the amnesias of nationalism were first voiced over.
Benedict Anderson
February 1991
xv
Introduction
Perhaps without being much noticed yet, a fundamental transformation
in the history of Marxism and Marxist movements is upon us. Its
most visible signs are the recent wars between Vietnam, Cambodia
and China. These wars are of world-historical importance because
they are the first to occur between regimes whose independence and
revolutionary credentials are undeniable, and because none of the
belligerents has made more than the most perfunctory attempts to
justify the bloodshed in terms of a recognizable Marxist theoretical
perspective. While it was still just possible to interpret the Sino-Soviet
border clashes of 1969, and the Soviet military interventions in
Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan
(1980) in terms of - according to taste - 'social imperialism,'
'defending socialism,' etc., no one, I imagine, seriously believes that
such vocabularies have much bearing on what has occurred in
Indochina.
If the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia in
December 1978 and January 1979 represented the first large-scale
conventional war waged by one revolutionary Marxist regime against
lanother, China's assault on Vietnam in February rapidly confirmed
1. This formulation is chosen simply to emphasize the scale and the style of the
fighting, not to assign blame. To avoid possible misunderstanding, it should be said that
the December 1978 invasion grew out of armed clashes between partisans of the
1
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
the precedent. Only the most trusting would dare wager that in the
declining years of this century any significant outbreak of inter-state
hostilities will necessarily find the USSR and the PRC — let alone the
smaller socialist states — supporting, or fighting on, the same side. Who
can be confident that Yugoslavia and Albania will not one day come
to blows? Those variegated groups who seek a withdrawal of the Red
Army from its encampments in Eastern Europe should remind
themselves of the degree to which its overwhelming presence has,
since 1945, ruled out armed conflict between the region's Marxist
regimes.
Such considerations serve to underline the fact that since World
War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms
- the People's Republic of China, the Socialist Republic of
Vietnam, and so forth - and, in so doing, has grounded itself
firmly in a territorial and social space inherited from the prerevolutionary
past. Conversely, 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 suggests that it is as
much the legatee of the prenational dynastic states of the nineteenth
century as the precursor of a twenty-first century internationalist
order.
Eric Hobsbawm is perfectly correct in stating that 'Marxist
movements and states have tended to become national not only
in form but in substance, i.e., nationalist. There is nothing to suggest
two revolutionary movements going back possibly as far as 1971. After April
1977, border raids, initiated by the Cambodians, but quickly followed by the
Vietnamese, grew in size and scope, culminating in the major Vietnamese
incursion of December 1977. None of these raids, however, aimed at overthrowing
enemy regimes or occupying large territories, nor were the numbers of
troops involved comparable to those deployed in December 1978. The controversy
over the causes of the war is most thoughtfully pursued in: Stephen P.
Heder, 'The Kampuchean-Vietnamese Conflict,' in David W. P. Elliott, ed.,
The Third Indochina Conflict, pp. 21-67; Anthony Barnett, 'Inter-Communist
Conflicts and Vietnam,' Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 11: 4 (OctoberDecember
1979), pp. 2-9; and Laura Summers, 'In Matters of War and
Socialism Anthony Barnett would Shame and Honour Kampuchea Too Much,'
ibid., pp. 10-18.
2. 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?
2
INTRODUCTION
that this trend will not continue.' Nor is the tendency confined to
the socialist world. Almost every year the United Nations admits
new members. And many 'old nations,' once thought fully consolidated,
find themselves challenged by 'sub'-nationalisms within
their borders - nationalisms which, naturally, dream of shedding this
sub-ness one happy day. The reality is quite plain: the 'end of the
era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight.
Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the
political life of our time.
But if the facts are clear, their explanation remains a matter of
long-standing dispute. Nation, nationality, nationalism — all have
proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone to analyse. In contrast
to the immense influence that nationalism has exerted on the modern
world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously meagre. Hugh
Seton-Watson, author of far the best and most comprehensive
English-language text on nationalism, and heir to a vast tradition
of liberal historiography and social science, sadly observes: 'Thus I am
driven to the conclusion that no "scientific definition" of the nation
can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists.'4
Tom
Nairn, author of the path-breaking The Break-up of Britain, and heir
to the scarcely less vast tradition of Marxist historiography and social
science, candidly remarks: 'The theory of nationalism represents
Marxism's great historical failure.'5
But even this confession is
somewhat misleading, insofar as it can be taken to imply the
regrettable outcome of a long, self-conscious search for theoretical
clarity. It would be more exact to say that nationalism has proved an
uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory and, precisely for that
reason, has been largely elided, rather than confronted. How else to
explain Marx's failure to explicate the crucial adjective in his
memorable formulation of 1848: 'The proletariat of each country
3. Eric Hobsbawm, 'Some Reflections on "The Break-up of Britain" New Left
Review, 105 (September-October 1977), p. 13.
4. See his-Nations and States, p. 5. Emphasis added.
5. See his 'The Modern Janus', New Left Review, 94 (November-December 1975),
p. 3. This essay is included unchanged in The Break-up of Britain as chapter 9 (pp. 329-
63).
3
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie'?6
How else to account for the use, for over a century, of the concept
'national bourgeoisie' without any serious attempt to justify theoretically
the relevance of the adjective? Why is this segmentation of the
bourgeoisie - a world-class insofar as it is defined in terms of the
relations of production — theoretically significant?
The aim of this book is to offer some tentative suggestions for a
more satisfactory interpretation of the 'anomaly' of nationalism. My
sense is that on this topic both Marxist and liberal theory have become
etiolated in a late Ptolemaic effort to 'save the phenomena'; and that a
reorientation of perspective in, as it were, a Copernican spirit is
urgently required. My point of departure is that nationality, 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 properly 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
emotional legitimacy. I will be trying to argue that the creation of these
artefacts towards the end of the eighteenth century7
was the spontaneous
distillation of a complex 'crossing' of discrete historical forces;
but that, once created, they became 'modular,' capable of being
transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great
variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly
wide variety of political and ideological constellations. I will also
attempt to show why these particular cultural artefacts have aroused
such deep attachments.
6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in the Selected Works,
I, p. 45. Emphasis added. In any theoretical exegesis, the words 'of course' should flash
red lights before the transported reader.
7. As Aira Kemilainen notes, the twin 'founding fathers' of academic scholarship
on nationalism, Hans Kohn and Carleton Hayes, argued persuasively for this dating.
Their conclusions have, I think, not been seriously disputed except by nationalist
ideologues in particular countries. Kemilainen also observes that the word 'nationalism'
did not come into wide general use until the end of the nineteenth century. It did not
occur, for example, in many standard nineteenth century lexicons. If Adam Smith
conjured with the wealth of'nations,' he meant by the term no more than 'societies' or
'states.' Aira Kemilainen, Nationalism, pp. 10, 33, and 48-49.
4
INTRODUCTION
C O N C E P T S AND D E F I N I T I O N S
Before addressing the questions raised above, it seems advisable to
consider briefly the concept of'nation' and offer a workable definition.
Theorists of nationalism have often been perplexed, not to say
irritated, by these three paradoxes: (1) The objective modernity of
nations to the historian's eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes
of nationalists. (2) The formal universality of nationality as a sociocultural
concept - in the modern world everyone can, should, will
'have' a nationality, as he or she 'has' a gender - vs. the irremediable
particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition,
'Greek' nationality is sui generis. (3) The 'political' power of
nationalisms vs. their philosophical poverty and even incoherence.
In other words, unlike most other isms, nationalism has never
produced its own grand thinkers: no Hobbeses, Tocquevilles,
Marxes, or Webers. This 'emptiness' easily gives rise, among cosmopolitan
and polylingual intellectuals, to a certain condescension.
Like Gertrude Stein in the face of Oakland, one can rather quickly
conclude that there is 'no there there'. It is characteristic that even so
sympathetic a student of nationalism as Tom Nairn can nonetheless
write that: ' "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)
8
and largely incurable.'
Part of the difficulty is that one tends unconsciously to hypostasize
the existence of Nationalism-with-a-big-N (rather as one
might Age-with-a-capital-A) and then to classify 'it' as an ideology.
(Note that if everyone has an age, Age is merely an analytical
expression.) It would, I think, make things easier if one treated it as
if it belonged with 'kinship' and 'religion', rather than with
'liberalism' or 'fascism'.
In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following
8. The Break-up of Britain, p. 359.
5
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
definition of the nation: it is an imagined political 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.9
Renan referred to this imagining in his suavely
back-handed way when he wrote that 4
Or 1'essence d'une nation
est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et
/ 10
aussi que tous aient oublie bien des choses.' With a certain ferocity
Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that 'Nationalism is
not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations
11
where they do not exist.' The drawback to this formulation,
however, is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism
masquerades under false pretences that he assimilates 'invention' to
'fabrication' and 'falsity', rather than to 'imagining' and 'creation'. In
this way he implies that 'true' communities exist which can be
advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger
than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even
these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by
their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.
Javanese villagers have always known that they are connected
to people they have never seen, but these ties were once imagined
particularistically - as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and
clientship. Until quite recently, the Javanese language had no word
meaning the abstraction 'society.' We may today think of the
French aristocracy of the ancien regime as a class; but surely it was
9. Cf. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. 5: 'All that I can find to say is that a
nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves
to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.' We may translate 'consider
themselves' as 'imagine themselves.'
10. Ernest Renan, 'Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?' in OEuvres Completes, 1, p. 892. He
adds: 'tout citoyen frangais doit avoir oublie la Saint-Barthelemy, les massacres du Midi
an XHIe siecle. II n'y a pas en France dix families qui puissent fournir la preuve d'line
origine franque . . .'
11. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change, p. 169. Emphasis added.
6
INTRODUCTION
12 i
imagined this way only very late. To the question 'Who is the
Comte de X?' the normal answer would have been, not 'a member
of the aristocracy,' but 'the lord of X,' 'the uncle of the Baronne de
Y,' or 'a client of the Due de Z.'
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. The most messianic nationalists do not
dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their
nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say,
Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.
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 that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so
many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly 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.
12. Hobsbawm, for example, 'fixes' it by saying that in 1789 it numbered about
400,000 in a population of23,000,000. (See his The Age of Revolution, p. 78). But would
this statistical picture of the noblesse have been imaginable under the ancien regime?
7
Cultural Roots
No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism
exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public
ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because
they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside
them, has no true precedents in earlier times. To feel the force of
this modernity one has only to imagine the general reaction to the
busy-body who 'discovered' the Unknown Soldier's name or insisted
on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange,
contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal
remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly
national imaginings. (This is why so many different nations have such
1. The ancient Greeks had cenotaphs, but for specific, known individuals whose
bodies, for one reason or another, could not be retrieved for regular burial. I owe this
information to my Byzantinist colleague Judith Herrin.
2. Consider, for example, these remarkable tropes: 1. 'The long grey line has never
failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and
grey, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, honour,
country.' 2. 'My estimate of [the American man-at-arms] was formed on the battlefield
many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him
now, as one of the world's noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military
characters, but also as one of the most stainless [sic]. . . . He belongs to history as
furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism [sic]. He belongs to
posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom.
9
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
tombs without feeling any need to specify the nationality of their
absent occupants. What else could they be but Germans, Americans,
Argentinians . . .?)
The cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer if
one tries to imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a
cenotaph for fallen Liberals. Is a sense of absurdity avoidable? The reason
is that neither Marxism nor Liberalism is 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.
If the manner of a man's dying usually seems arbitrary, his
mortality is inescapable. Human lives are full of such combinations
of necessity and chance. We are all aware of the contingency and
ineluctability of our particular genetic heritage, our gender, our lifeera,
our physical capabilities, our mother-tongue, and so forth. The
great merit of traditional religious world-views (which naturally must
be distinguished from their role in the legitimation of specific systems
of domination and exploitation) has been their concern with man-inthe-cosmos,
man as species being, and the contingency of life. The
extraordinary survival over thousands of years of Buddhism, Christianity
or Islam in dozens of different social formations attests to their
imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human suffering
— disease, mutilation, grief, age, and death. Why was I born
blind? Why is my best friend paralysed? Why is my daughter
retarded? The religions attempt to explain. The great weakness of
all evolutionary/progressive styles of thought, not excluding Marxism,
is that such questions are answered with impatient silence. At
He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and his achievements.' Douglas
Mac Arthur, 'Duty, Honour, Country,' Address to the U.S. Military Academy, West
Point, May 12, 1962, in his A Soldier Speaks, pp. 354 and 357.
3. Cf. Regis Debray, 'Marxism and the National Question,' New; Left Review, 105
(September-October 1977), p. 29. In the course of doing fieldwork in Indonesia in the
1960s I was struck by the calm refusal of many Muslims to accept the ideas of Darwin. At
first I interpreted this refusal as obscurantism. Subsequently I came to see it as an
honourable attempt to be consistent: the doctrine of evolution was simply not
compatible with the teachings of Islam. What are we to make of a scientific materialism
10
CULTURAL ROOTS
the same time, in different ways, religious thought also responds to
obscure intimations of immortality, generally by transforming fatality
into continuity (karma, original sin, etc.). In this way, it concerns
itself with the links between the dead and the yet unborn, the
mystery of re-generation. Who experiences their child's conception
and birth without dimly apprehending a combined connectedness,
fortuity, and fatality in a language of 'continuity'? (Again, the
disadvantage of evolutionary/progressive thought is an almost Heraclitean
hostility to any idea of continuity.)
I bring up these perhaps simpleminded observations primarily
because in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only
the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of
thought. The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism,
brought with it its own modern darkness. With the ebbing of
religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did
not disappear. Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more
arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of
continuity more necessary. What then was required was a secular
transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning.
As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end than an
idea of nation. 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,4
and, still more important, glide
which formally accepts the findings of physics about matter, yet makes so little effort to
link these findings with the class struggle, revolution, or whatever. Does not the abyss
between protons and the proletariat conceal an unacknowledged metaphysical conception
of man? But see the refreshing texts of Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism
and The Freudian Slip, and Raymond Williams' thoughtful response to them in
'Timpanaro's Materialist Challenge,' New Left Review, 109 (May-June 1978), pp. 3-17.
4. The late President Sukarno always spoke with complete sincerity of the 350
years of colonialism that his 'Indonesia' had endured, although the very concept
'Indonesia' is a twentieth-century invention, and most of today's Indonesia was only
conquered by the Dutch between 1850 and 1910. Preeminent among contemporary
Indonesia's national heroes is the early nineteenth-century Javanese Prince Diponegoro,
although the Prince's own memoirs show that he intended to 'conquer [not liberate!]
Java,' rather than expel 'the Dutch.' Indeed, he clearly had no concept of'the Dutch' as
a collectivity. See Harry J. Benda and John A. Larkin, eds., The World of Southeast Asia,
p. 158; and Ann Kumar, 'Diponegoro (1778?-1855),' Indonesia, 13 (April 1972), p. 103.
n
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance
into destiny. With Debray we might say, 'Yes, it is quite accidental
that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal.'
Needless to say, I am not claiming that the appearance of nationalism
towards the end of the eighteenth century was 'produced' by the
erosion of religious certainties, or that this erosion does not itself
require a complex explanation. Nor am I suggesting that somehow
nationalism historically 'supersedes' religion. What I am proposing is
that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with selfconsciously
held political ideologies, but with the large cultural
systems that preceded it, out of which — as well as against which
- it came into being.
For present purposes, the two relevant cultural systems are the religious
community and the dynastic realm. For both of these, in their heydays,
were taken-for-granted frames of reference, very much as nationality is
today. It is therefore essential to consider what gave these cultural
systems their self-evident plausibility, and at the same time to underline
certain key elements in their decomposition.
THE R E L I G I O U S C O M M U N I T Y
Few things are more impressive than the vast territorial stretch of the
Ummah Islam from Morocco to the Sulu Archipelago, of Christendom
from Paraguay to Japan, and of the Buddhist world from Sri
Lanka to the Korean peninsula. The great sacral cultures (and for our
purposes here it may be permissible to include 'Confucianism')
incorporated conceptions of immense communities. But Christendom,
the Islamic Ummah, and even the Middle Kingdom — which, though
we think of it today as Chinese, imagined itself not as Chinese, but as
Emphasis added. Similarly, Kemal Atatiirk named one of his state banks the Eti Banka
(Hittite Bank) and another the Sumerian Bank. (Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p.
259). These banks flourish today, and there is no reason to doubt that many Turks,
possibly not excluding Kemal himself, seriously saw, and see, in the Hittites and
Sumerians their Turkish forebears. Before laughing too hard, we should remaind
ourselves of Arthur and Boadicea, and ponder the commercial success of Tolkien's
mythographies.
12
CULTURAL ROOTS
central - were imaginable largely through the medium of a sacred
language and written script. Take only the example of Islam: if
Maguindanao met Berbers in Mecca, knowing nothing of each other's
languages, incapable of communicating orally, they nonetheless understood
each other's ideographs, because the sacred texts they shared
existed only in classical Arabic. In this sense, written Arabic functioned
like Chinese characters to create a community out of signs, not sounds.
(So today mathematical language continues an old tradition. Of what
the Thai call + Rumanians have no idea, and vice versa, but both
comprehend the symbol.) All the great classical communities conceived
of themselves as cosmically central, through the medium of a
sacred language linked to a superterrestrial order of power. Accordingly,
the stretch of written Latin, Pali, Arabic, or Chinese was, in
theory, unlimited. (In fact, the deader the written language - the
farther it was from speech - the better: in principle everyone has access
to a pure world of signs.)
Yet such classical communities linked by sacred languages had a
character distinct from the imagined communities of modern nations.
One crucial difference was the older communities' confidence in the
unique sacredness of their languages, and thus their ideas about
admission to membership. Chinese mandarins looked with approval
on barbarians who painfully learned to paint Middle Kingdom
ideograms. These barbarians were already halfway to full absorption.5
Half-civilized was vastly better than barbarian. Such an attitude was
certainly not peculiar to the Chinese, nor confined to antiquity.
Consider, for example, the following 'policy on barbarians' formulated
by the early-nineteenth-century Colombian liberal Pedro Fermm de
Vargas:
To expand our agriculture it would be necessary to hispanicize our
Indians. Their idleness, stupidity, and indifference towards normal
endeavours causes one to think that they come from a degenerate race
which deteriorates in proportion to the distance from its origin . . . it
would be very desirable that the Indians be extinguished, by miscegenation with
5. Hence the equanimity with which Sinicized Mongols and Manchus were
accepted as Sons of Heaven.
13
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
the whites, declaring them free of tribute and other charges, and giving them
private property in land.6
How striking it is that this liberal still proposes to 'extinguish' his
Indians in part by 'declaring them free of tribute' and 'giving them
private property in land', rather than exterminating them by gun and
microbe as his heirs in Brazil, Argentina, and the United States began to
do soon afterwards. Note also, alongside the condescending cruelty, a
cosmic optimism: the Indian is ultimately redeemable — by impregnation
with white, 'civilized' semen, and the acquisition of private
property, like everyone else. (How different Fermin's attitude is from the
later European imperialist's preference for 'genuine' Malays, Gurkhas,
and Hausas over 'half-breeds,' 'semi-educated natives,' 'wogs', and the
like.)
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
ideograms of Chinese, Latin, or Arabic were emanations of reality,
not randomly fabricated representations of it. We are familiar with
the long dispute over the appropriate language (Latin or vernacular)
for the mass. In the Islamic tradition, until quite recently, the Qur'an
was literally untranslatable (and therefore untranslated), because
Allah's truth was accessible only through the unsubstitutable true
signs of written Arabic. There is no idea here of a world so separated
from language that all languages are equidistant (and thus interchangeable)
signs for it. In effect, ontological reality is apprehensible
only through a single, privileged system of re-presentation: the truthlanguage
of Church Latin, Qur'anic Arabic, or Examination Chinese.
And, as truth-languages, imbued with an impulse largely foreign to
6. John Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, 1808-1826, p. 260. Emphasis
added.
7. Church Greek seems not to have achieved the status of a truth-language. The
reasons for this 'failure' are various, but one key factor was certainly the fact that Greek
remained a living demotic speech (unlike Latin) in much of the Eastern Empire. This
insight I owe to Judith Herrin.
14
CULTURAL ROOTS
nationalism, the impulse towards conversion. By conversion, I mean
not so much the acceptance of particular religious tenets, but alchemic
absorption. The barbarian becomes 'Middle Kingdom', the Rif
Muslim, the Ilongo Christian. The whole nature of man's being is
sacrally malleable. (Contrast thus the prestige of these old worldlanguages,
towering high over all vernaculars, with Esperanto or
Volapiik, which lie ignored between them.) It was, after all, this
possibility of conversion through the sacred language that made it
possible for an 'Englishman' to become Pope and a 'Manchu' Son of
Heaven.
But even though the sacred 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.9
A fuller
explanation requires a glance at the relationship between the literati and
their societies. It would be a mistake to view the former as a kind of
theological technocracy. The languages they sustained, if abstruse, had
none of the self-arranged abstruseness of lawyers' or economists'
jargons, on the margin of society's idea of reality. Rather, the literati
were adepts, strategic strata in a cosmological hierarchy of which the
apex was divine.10
The fundamental conceptions about 'social groups'
were centripetal and hierarchical, rather than boundary-oriented and
horizontal. 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
8. Nicholas Brakespear held the office of pontiff between 1154 and 1159 under
the name Adrian IV.
9. Marc Bloch reminds us that 'the majority of lords and many great barons [in
mediaeval times] were administrators incapable of studying personally a report or an
account.' Feudal Society, I, p. 81.
10. This is not to say that the illiterate did not read. What they read, however, was
not words but the visible world. 'In the eyes of all who were capable of reflection the
material world was scarcely more than a sort of mask, behind which took place all the
really important things; it seemed to them also a language, intended to express by signs a
more profound reality.' Ibid. p. 83.
15
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
between earth and heaven. (The awesomeness of excommunication
reflects this cosmology.)
Yet for all the grandeur and power of the great religiously imagined
communities, their unselfconscious coherence waned steadily after the late
Middle Ages. Among the reasons for this decline, I wish here to
emphasize only the two which are directly related to these communities'
unique sacredness.
First was the effect of the explorations of the non-European world,
which mainly but by no means exclusively in Europe 'abruptly widened
the cultural and geographic horizon and hence also men's conception of
11 • •possible forms of human life.' The process is already apparent in the
greatest of all European travel-books. Consider the following awed
description of Kublai Khan by the good Venetian Christian Marco Polo
12
at the end of the thirteenth century:
The grand khan, having obtained this signal victory, returned with
great pomp and triumph to the capital city of Kanbalu. This took
place in the month of November, and he continued to reside there
during the months of February and March, in which latter was our
festival of Easter. Being aware that this was one of our principal
solemnities, he commanded all the Christians to attend him, and to
bring with them their Book, which contains the four Gospels of the
Evangelists. After causing it to be repeatedly perfumed with incense,
in a ceremonious manner, he devoutly kissed it, and directed that the
same should be done by all his nobles who were present. This was his
usual practice upon each of the principal Christian festivals, such as
Easter and Christmas; and he observed the same at the festivals of the
Saracens, Jews, and idolaters. Upon being asked his motive for this
conduct, he said: 'There are four great Prophets who are reverenced
and worshipped by the different classes of mankind. The Christians
regard Jesus Christ as their divinity; the Saracens, Mahomet; the Jews,
Moses; and the idolaters, Sogomombar-kan, the most eminent
among their idols. I do honour and show respect to all the four,
11. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 282.
12. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, pp. 158-59. Emphases added. Notice
that, though kissed, the Evangel is not read.
16
CULTURAL ROOTS
and invoke to my aid whichever amongst them is in truth supreme in
heaven.' But from the manner in which his majesty acted towards
them, it is evident that he regarded the faith of the Christians as the
truest and the best . . .
What is so remarkable about this passage is not so much the great
Mongol dynast's calm religious relativism (it is still a religious relativism),
as Marco Polo's attitude and language. It never occurs to him, even
though he is writing for fellow-European Christians, to term Kublai a
hypocrite or an idolater. (No doubt in part because 'in respect to
number of subjects, extent of territory, and amount of revenue, he
surpasses every sovereign that has heretofore been or that now is in the
13
world.') And in the unselfconscious use of 'our' (which becomes
'their'), and the description of the faith of the Christians as 'truest,'
rather than 'true,' we can detect the seeds of a territorialization of faiths
which foreshadows the language of many nationalists ('our' nation is
'the best'- in a competitive, comparative field).
What a revealing contrast is provided by the opening of the letter
written by the Persian traveller 'Rica' to his friend 'Ibben' from Paris in
'1712':14
The Pope is the chief of the Christians; he is an ancient idol,
worshipped now from habit. Once he was formidable even to
princes, for he would depose them as easily as our magnificent
sultans depose the kings of Iremetia or Georgia. But nobody fears him
any longer. He claims to be the successor of one of the earliest
Christians, called Saint Peter, and it is certainly a rich succession, for
his treasure is immense and he has a great country under his control.
The deliberate, sophisticated fabrications of the eighteenth century
Catholic mirror the naive realism of his thirteenth-century predecessor,
but by now the 'relativization' and 'territorialization' are utterly selfconscious,
and political in intent. Is it unreasonable to see a paradoxical
13. The Travels of Marco Polo, p. 152.
14. Henri de Montesquieu, Persian Letters, p, 81. The Lettres Persanes first appeared
in 1721.
17
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
elaboration of this evolving tradition in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's
identification of The Great Satan, not as a heresy, nor even as a
demonic personage (dim little Carter scarcely fitted the bill), but as a nation?
Second was a gradual demotion of the sacred language itself. Writing of
mediaeval Western Europe, Bloch noted that 'Latin was not only the
\ s
language in which teaching was done, it was the only language taught.'
(This second 'only' shows quite clearly the sacredness of Latin - no other
language was thought worth the teaching.) But by the sixteenth century
all this was changing fast. The reasons for the change need not detain us
here: the central importance of print-capitalism will be discussed below. It
is sufficient to remind ourselves of its scale and pace. Febvre and Martin
estimate that 77% of the books printed before 1500 were still in Latin
(meaning nonetheless that 23% were already in vernaculars).16
If of the 88
editions printed in Paris in 1501 all but 8 were in Latin, after 1575 a17
majority were always in French. Despite a temporary come-back
during the Counter-Reformation, Latin's hegemony was doomed.
Nor are we speaking simply of a general popularity. Somewhat later,
but at no less dizzying speed, Latin ceased to be the language of a panEuropean
high intelligentsia. In the seventeenth century Hobbes (1588-
1678) was a figure of continental renown because he wrote in the truthlanguage.
Shakespeare (1564—1616), on the other hand, composing in the
vernacular, was virtually unknown across the Channel. And had
English not become, two hundred years later, the pre-eminent worldimperial
language, might he not largely have retained his original insular
obscurity? Meanwhile, these men's cross-Channel near-contemporaries,
Descartes (1596-1650) and Pascal (1623-1662), conducted most
of their correspondence in Latin; but virtually all of Voltaire's (1694-
1778) was in the vernacular.19
'After 1640, with fewer and fewer
books coming out in Latin, and more and more in the vernacular
languages, publishing was ceasing to be an international [sic]
15. Bloch, Feudal Society, I, p. 77. Emphasis added.
16. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp. 248—49.
17. Ibid., p. 321.
18. Ibid., p. 330.
19. Ibid., pp. 331-32.
18
CULTURAL ROOTS
20
enterprise.' In a word, the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in
which the sacred communities integrated by old sacred languages were
gradually fragmented, pluralized, and territorialized.
THE DYNASTIC REALM
These days it is perhaps difficult to put oneself empathetically into a
world in which the dynastic realm appeared for most men as the only
imaginable 'political' system. For in fundamental ways 'serious' monarchy
lies transverse to all modern conceptions of political life.
Kingship organizes everything around a high centre. Its legitimacy
derives from divinity, not from populations, who, after all, are
subjects, not citizens. In the modern conception, state sovereignty
is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a
legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining, where states
were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and
21
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 of22
time.
One must also remember that these antique monarchical states
20. Ibid., pp. 232-33. The original French is more modest and historically exact:
'Tandis que l'on edite de moins en moins d'ouvrages en latin, et une proportion
toujours plus grande de textes en langue nationale, le commerce du livre se morcelle en
Europe.' L'Apparition du Livre, p. 356.
21. Notice the displacement in rulers' nomenclature that corresponds to this
transformation. Schoolchildren remember monarchs by their first names (what was
William the Conqueror's surname?), presidents by their last (what was Ebert's
Christian name?). In a world of citizens, all of whom are theoretically eligible for
the presidency, the limited pool of 'Christian' names makes them inadequate as
specifying designators. In monarchies, however, where rule is reserved for a single
surname, it is necessarily 'Christian' names, with numbers, or sobriquets, that supply
the requisite distinctions.
22. We may here note in passing that Nairn is certainly correct in describing the
1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland as a 'patrician bargain,' in the sense
that the union's architects were aristocratic politicians. (See his lucid discussion in The
Break-up of Britain, pp. 136fi). Still, it is difficult to imagine such a bargain being
19
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
expanded not only by warfare but by sexual politics - of a kind very
different from that practised today. Through the general principle of
verticality, dynastic marriages brought together diverse populations
under new apices. Paradigmatic in this respect was the House of
Habsburg. As the tag went, Bella gerant alii, tufelix Austria nube! Here,
23in somewhat abbreviated form, is the later dynasts' titulature.
Emperor of Austria; King of Hungary, of Bohemia, of Dalmatia,
Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria, and Illyria; King of Jerusalem,
etc; Archduke of Austria [sic]; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow;
Duke of Loth[a]ringia, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and
Bukovina; Grand Duke of Transylvania, Margrave of Moravia; Duke
of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza, and
Guastella, of Ausschwitz and Sator, of Teschen, Friaul, Ragusa,
and Zara; Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gorz,
and Gradiska; Duke of Trient and Brizen; Margrave of Upper and
Lower Lausitz and in Istria; Count of Hohenembs, Feldkirch,
Bregenz, Sonnenberg, etc.; Lord of Trieste, of Cattaro, and above
the Windisch Mark; Great Voyvod of the Voyvodina, Servia . . . .
etc.
This, Jaszi justly observes, was, 'not without a certain comic aspect . . .
the record of the innumerable marriages, hucksterings and captures of
the Habsburgs.'
In realms where polygyny was religiously sanctioned, complex
systems of tiered concubinage were essential to the integration of
the realm. In fact, royal lineages often derived their prestige, aside
from any aura of divinity, from, shall we say, miscegenation?24
For such
struck between the aristocracies of two republics. The conception of a United Kingdom
was surely the crucial mediating element that made the deal possible.
23. Oscar Jaszi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, p. 34.
24. Most notably in pre-modern Asia. But the same principle was at work in
monogamous Christian Europe. In 1910, one Otto Forst put out his Ahnentafel Seiner
Kaiserlichen und Koniglichen Hoheit des durchlauchtigsten Hern Erzherzogs Franz Ferdinand,
listing 2,047 of the soon-to-be-assassinated Archduke's ancestors. They included
1,486 Germans, 124 French, 196 Italians, 89 Spaniards, 52 Poles, 47 Danes, 20
Englishmen/women, as well as four other nationalities. This 'curious document' is
cited in ibid., p. 136, no. 1. I can not resist quoting here Franz Joseph's wonderful
20
CULTURAL ROOTS
mixtures were signs of a superordinate status. It is characteristic that
there has not been an 'English' dynasty ruling in London since the
eleventh century (if then); and what 'nationality' are we to assign to the
or
Bourbons?
During the seventeenth century, however - for reasons that need
not detain us here - the automatic legitimacy of sacral monarchy
began its slow decline in Western Europe. In 1649, Charles Stuart was
beheaded in the first of the modern world's revolutions, and during
the 1650s one of the more important European states was ruled by a
plebeian Protector rather than a king. Yet even in the age of Pope and
Addison, Anne Stuart was still healing the sick by the laying on of
royal hands, cures committed also by the Bourbons, Louis XV and
/ 2 6
XVI, in Enlightened France till the end of the ancien regime. But after
1789 the principle of Legitimacy had to be loudly and self-consciously
defended, and, in the process, 'monarchy' became a semi-standardized
model. Tenno and Son of Heaven became 'Emperors.' In far-off Siam
Rama V (Chulalongkorn) sent his sons and nephews to the courts of
St. Petersburg, London and Berlin to learn the intricacies of the worldmodel.
In 1887, he instituted the requisite principle of succession-bylegal-primogeniture,
thus bringing Siam 'into line with the "civilized"j27 i >
monarchies of Europe.' The new system brought to the throne in
1910 an erratic homosexual who would certainly have been passed
over in an earlier age. However, inter-monarchic approval of his
ascension as Rama VI was sealed by the attendance at his coronation of
princelings from Britain, Russia, Greece, Sweden, Denmark - and
Japan!28
reaction to the news of his erratic heir-apparent's murder: 'In this manner a superior
power has restored that order which I unfortunately was unable to maintain' (ibid., p.
125).
25. Gellner stresses the typical foreignness of dynasties, but interprets the phenomenon
too narrowly: local aristocrats prefer an alien monarch because he will not
take sides in their internal rivalries. Thought and Change, p. 136.
26. Marc Bloch, Les Rois Thaumaturges, pp. 390 and 398-99.
27. Noel A. Battye, 'The Military, Government and Society in Siam, 1868-1910,'
PhD thesis, Cornell 1974, p. 270.
28. Stephen Greene, 'Thai Government and Administration in the Reign of
Rama VI (1910-1925),' PhD thesis, University of London 1971, p. 92.
21
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
As late as 1914, dynastic states made up the majority of the
membership of the world political system, but, as we shall be noting
in detail below, many dynasts had for some time been reaching for a
'national' cachet as the old principle of Legitimacy withered silently
away. While the armies of Frederick the Great (r. 1740-1786) were
heavily staffed by 'foreigners', those of his great-nephew Friedrich
Wilhelm III (r. 1797-1840) were, as a result of Scharnhorst's, Gneisenau's
and Clausewitz's spectacular reforms, exclusively 'national-
Prussian.'29
A P P R E H E N S I O N S OF TIME
It would be short-sighted, however, to think of the imagined communities
of nations as simply growing out of and replacing religious
communities and dynastic realms. 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.
To get a feeling for this change, one can profitably turn to the
visual representations of the sacred communities, such as the reliefs
and stained-glass windows of mediaeval churches, or the paintings of
early Italian and Flemish masters. A characteristic feature of such
representations is something misleadingly analogous to 'modern
dress'. The shepherds who have followed the star to the manger
where Christ is born bear the features of Burgundian peasants. The
Virgin Mary is figured as a Tuscan merchant's daughter. In many
paintings the commissioning patron, in full burgher or noble costume,
appears kneeling in adoration alongside the shepherds. What
seems incongruous today obviously appeared wholly natural to the
eyes of mediaeval worshippers. We are faced with a world in which
29. More than 1,000 of the 7,000-8,000 men on the Prussian Army's officer list in
1806 were foreigners. 'Middle-class Prussians were outnumbered by foreigners in their
own army; this lent colour to the saying that Prussia was not a country that had an army,
but an army that had a country.' In 1798, Prussian reformers had demanded a 'reduction
by one half of the number of foreigners, who still amounted to about 50% of the
privates. . . .' Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism, pp. 64 and 85.
22
CULTURAL ROOTS
the figuring of imagined reality was overwhelmingly visual and aural.
Christendom assumed its universal form through a myriad of specificities
and particularities: this relief, that window, this sermon, that
tale, this morality play, that relic. While the trans-European Latinreading
clerisy was one essential element in the structuring of the
Christian imagination, the mediation of its conceptions to the
illiterate masses, by visual and aural creations, always personal and
particular, was no less vital. 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. This
juxtaposition of the cosmic-universal and the mundane-particular
meant that however vast Christendom might be, and was sensed to
be, it manifested itself variously to particular Swabian or Andalusian
communities as replications of themselves. Figuring the Virgin Mary
with 'Semitic' features or 4
first-century' costumes in the restoring
spirit of the modern museum was unimaginable because the mediaeval
Christian mind had no conception of history as an endless chain
of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and
30
present. Bloch observes that people thought they must be near
the end of time, in the sense that Christ's second coming could occur
at any moment: St. Paul had said that 'the day of the Lord cometh
like a thief in the night.' It was thus natural for the great twelfthcentury
chronicler Bishop Otto of Freising to refer repeatedly to we
who have been placed at the end of time.' Bloch concludes that as
soon as mediaeval men 'gave themselves up to meditation, nothing
was farther from their thoughts than the prospect of a long future for31a young and vigorous human race.'
Auerbach gives an unforgettable sketch of this form of conscious-
32ness:
30. For us, the idea of'modern dress,' a metaphorical equivalencing of past with
present, is a backhanded recognition of their fatal separation.
31. Bloch, Feudal Society, I, pp. 84-86.
32. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 64. Emphasis added. Compare St. Augustine's description
of the Old Testament as 'the shadow of [i.e. cast backwards by] the future.' Cited in
Bloch, Feudal Society, I, p. 90.
23
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
If an occurrence like the sacrifice of Isaac is interpreted as prefiguring
the sacrifice of Christ, so that in the former the latter is as it were
announced and promised and the latter 'fulfills' . . . the former, then a
connection is established between two events which are linked neither
temporally nor causally - a connection which it is impossible to
establish by reason in the horizontal dimension... It can be established
only if both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence,
which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to
its understanding . . . 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 omnitemporal, something already
consummated in the realm of fragmentary earthly event.
He rightly stresses that such an idea of simultaneity is wholly alien to our
own. It views time as something close to what Benjamin calls Messianic
33
time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present. In
such a view of things, the word 'meanwhile' cannot be of real
significance.
Our own conception of simultaneity has been a long time in the
making, and its emergence is certainly connected, in ways that have yet
to be well studied, with the development of the secular sciences. But it is
a conception of such fundamental importance that, without taking it
fully into account, we will find it difficult to probe the obscure genesis
of nationalism. What has come to take the place of the mediaeval
conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin,
an idea of'homogeneous, empty time,' in which simultaneity is,
as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and
fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and
calendar.34
Why this transformation should be so important for the birth of the
imagined community of the nation can best be seen if we consider the
basic structure of two forms of imagining which first flowered in
33. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 265.
34. Ibid., p. 263. So deep-lying is this new idea that one could argue that every
essential modern conception is based on a conception of 'meanwhile'.
24
CULTURAL ROOTS
Europe in the eighteenth century: the novel and the newspaper. For
these forms provided the technical means for 're-presenting5
the kind of
imagined community that is the nation.
Consider first the structure of the old-fashioned novel, a structure
typical not only of the masterpieces of Balzac but also of any contemporary
dollar-dreadful. It is clearly a device for the presentation of
simultaneity in 'homogeneous, empty time,' or a complex gloss upon
the word 'meanwhile'. Take, for illustrative purposes, a segment of a
simple novel-plot, in which a man (A) has a wife (B) and a mistress (C),
who in turn has a lover (D). We might imagine a sort of time-chart for
this segment as follows:
Time: I II III
Events: A quarrels with B A telephones C D gets drunk in a bar
C and D make love B shops A dines at home with B
D plays pool C has an ominous dream
Notice that during this sequence A and D never meet, indeed may not
even be aware of each other's existence if C has played her cards
OX*•
right. What then actually links A to D? Two complementary
conceptions: First, that they are embedded in 'societies' (Wessex,
Liibeck, Los Angeles). These societies are sociological entities of such
firm and stable reality that their members (A and D) can even be
described as passing each other on the street, without ever becoming37acquainted, and still be connected. Second, that A and D are
35. While the Princesse de Cleves had already appeared in 1678, the era of
Richardson, Defoe and Fielding is the early eighteenth century. The origins of the
modern newspaper lie in the Dutch gazettes of the late seventeenth century; but the
newspaper only became a general category of printed matter after 1700. Febvre and
Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 197.
36. Indeed, the plot's grip may depend at Times I, II, and III on A, B, C and D not
knowing what the others are up to.
37. This polyphony decisively marks off the modem novel even from so brilliant a
forerunner as Petronius's Satyricon. Its narrative proceeds single file. If Encolpius bewails
his young lover's faithlessness, we are not simultaneously shown Gito in bed with
Ascyltus.
2 5
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
embedded in the minds of the omniscient readers. Only they, like God,
watch A telephoning C, B shopping, and D playing pool all at once.
That all these acts are performed at the same clocked, calendrical time,
but by actors who may be largely unaware of one another, shows the
novelty of this imagined world conjured up by the author in his
readers' minds.38
The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through
homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the
nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily
39
down (or up) history. An American will never meet, or even know
the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000-odd fellowAmericans.
He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But
he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous
activity.
The perspective I am suggesting will perhaps seem less abstract if we
turn to inspect briefly four fictions from different cultures and different
epochs, all but one of which, nonetheless, are inextricably bound to
nationalist movements. In 1887, the 'Father of Filipino Nationalism',
Jose Rizal, wrote the novel Noli Me Tangere, which today is regarded as
the greatest achievement of modern Filipino literature. It was also
almost the first novel written by an 'Indio.'40
Here is how it marvellously
begins:41
Towards the end of October, Don Santiago de los Santos, popularly
known as Capitan Tiago, was giving a dinner party. Although,
38. In this context it is rewarding to compare any historical novel with documents
or narratives from the period fictionalized.
39. Nothing better shows the immersion of the novel in homogeneous, empty
time than the absence of those prefatory genealogies, often ascending to the origin of
man, which are so characteristic a feature of ancient chronicles, legends, and holy
books.
40. Rizal wrote this novel in the colonial language (Spanish), which was then the
lingua franca of the ethnically diverse Eurasian and native elites. Alongside the novel
appeared also for the first time a 'nationalist' press, not only in Spanish but in such
'ethnic' languages as Tagalog and Ilocano. See Leopoldo Y. Yabes, 'The Modern
Literature of the Philippines,' pp. 287-302, in Pierre-Bernard Lafont and Denys
Lombard (eds), Litteratures Contemporaines de I'Asie du Sud-Est.
41. Jose Rizal, Noli Me Tangere (Manila: Instituto Nacional de Historia, 1978), p.
1. My translation. At the time of the original publication of Imagined Communities, I
26
CULTURAL ROOTS
contrary to his usual practice, he had announced it only that afternoon,
it was already the subject of every conversation in Binondo, in
other quarters of the city, and even in [the walled inner city of]
Intramuros. In those days Capitan Tiago had the reputation of a lavish
host. It was known that his house, like his country, closed its doors to
nothing, except to commerce and to any new or daring idea.
So the news coursed like an electric shock through the community
of parasites, spongers, and gatecrashers whom God, in His infinite
goodness, created, and so tenderly multiplies in Manila. Some hunted
polish for their boots, others looked for collar-buttons and cravats.
But one and all were preoccupied with the problem of how to greet
their host with the familiarity required to create the appearance of
longstanding friendship, or, if need be, to excuse themselves for not
having arrived earlier.
The dinner was being given at a house on Anloague Street. Since
we do not recall the street number, we shall describe it in such a way
that it may still be recognized - that is, if earthquakes have not yet
destroyed it. We do not believe that its owner will have had it torn
down, since such work is usually left to God or to Nature, which,
besides, holds many contracts with our Government.
Extensive comment is surely unnecessary. It should suffice to note that
right from the start the image (wholly new to Filipino writing) of a dinnerparty
being discussed by hundreds of unnamed people, who do not know
each other, in quite different parts of Manila, in a particular month of a
particular decade, immediately conjures up the imagined community. And
in the phrase 'a house on Anloague Street' which 'we shall describe in such a
way that it may still be recognized,' the would-be recognizers are weFilipino-readers.
The casual progression of this house from the 'interior'
time of the novel to the 'exterior' time of the [Manila] reader's everyday life
gives a hypnotic confirmation of the solidity of a single community,
embracing characters, author and readers, moving onward through
caiendrical time.42
Notice too the tone. While Rizal has not the faintest
had no command of Spanish, and was thus unwittingly led to rely on the instructively
corrupt translation of Leon Maria Guerrero.
42. Notice, for example, Rizal's subtle shift, in the same sentence, from the past
tense of'created' (crio) to the all-of-us-together present tense of'multiplies' (multiplied).
27
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
idea of his readers' individual identities, he writes to them with an ironical
intimacy, as though their relationships with each other are not in the
smallest degree problematic.43
Nothing gives one a more Foucauldian sense of abrupt discontinuities
of consciousness than to compare Noli with the most celebrated
previous literary work by an 'Indio', Francisco Balagtas
(Baltazar)'s Pinagdaanang Buhay ni Florante at ni Laura sa Cahariang
Albania [The Story of Florante and Laura in the Kingdom of Albania],
the first printed edition of which dates from 1861, though it may have
been composed as early as 1838.44
For although Balagtas was still alive
when Rizal was born, the world of his masterpiece is in every basic
respect foreign to that of Noli. Its setting - a fabulous mediaeval
Albania — is utterly removed in time and space from the Binondo of
the 1880s. Its heroes - Florante, a Christian Albanian nobleman, and
his bosom-friend Aladin, a Muslim ('Moro') Persian aristocrat remind
us of the Philippines only by the Christian-Moro linkage.
Where Rizal deliberately sprinkles his Spanish prose with Tagalog
words for 'realistic', satirical, or nationalist effect, Balagtas unselfconsciously
mixes Spanish phrases into his Tagalog quatrains simply to
heighten the grandeur and sonority of his diction. Noli was meant to
be read, while Florante at Laura was to be sung aloud. Most striking of
all is Balagtas's handling of time. As Lumbera notes, 'the unravelling
of the plot does not follow a chronological order. The story begins in
medias res, so that the complete story comes to us through a series of
speeches that serve as flashbacks.'45
Almost half of the 399 quatrains
are accounts of Florante's childhood, student years in Athens, and
subsequent military exploits, given by the hero in conversation with
43. The obverse side of the readers' anonymous obscurity was/is the author's
immediate celebrity. As we shall see, this obscurity/celebrity has everything to do with
the spread of print-capitalism. As early as 1593 energetic Dominicans had published in
Manila the Doctrina Christiana. But for centuries thereafter print remained under tight
ecclesiastical control. Liberalization only began in the 1860s. See Bienvenido L.
Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry 1570—1898, Tradition and Influences in its Development, pp.
35, 93.
44. Ibid., p. 115.
45. Ibid., p. 120.
28
CULTURAL ROOTS
Aladin.46
The 'spoken flashback' was for Balagtas the only alternative
to a straightforward single-file narrative. If we learn of Florante's and
Aladin's 'simultaneous' pasts, they are connected by their conversing
voices, not by the structure of the epic. How distant this technique is
from that of the novel: 'In that same spring, while Florante was still
studying in Athens, Aladin was expelled from his sovereign's court
. . .' In effect, it never occurs to Balagtas to 'situate' his protagonists in
'society,' or to discuss them with his audience. Nor, aside from the
mellifluous flow of Tagalog polysyllables, is there much 'Filipino'
about his text.47
In 1816, seventy years before the writing of Noli, Jose Joaquin
Fernandez de Lizardi wrote a novel called El Periquillo Sarniento [The
Itching Parrot], evidently the first Latin American work in this genre. In
the words of one critic, this text is 'a ferocious indictment of Spanish
administration in Mexico: ignorance, superstition and corruption are
seen to be its most notable characteristics.'48
The essential form of this
'nationalist' novel is indicated by the following description of its
49content:
From the first, [the hero, the Itching Parrot] is exposed to bad
influences — ignorant maids inculcate superstitions, his mother indulges
his whims, his teachers either have no vocation or no ability to
46. The technique is similar to that of Homer, so ably discussed by Auerbach,
Mimesis, ch. 1 ('Odysseus' Scar').
47. 'Paalam Albaniang pinamamayanan
ng casama, t, lupit, bangis caliluhan,
acong tangulan mo, i, cusa mang pinatay
sa iyo, i, malaqui ang panghihinayang.'
'Farewell, Albania, kingdom now
of evil, cruelty, brutishness and deceit!
I, your defender, whom you now murder
Nevertheless lament the fate that has befallen you.'
This famous stanza has sometimes been interpreted as a veiled statement of Filipino
patriotism, but Lumbera convincingly shows such an interpretation to be an
anachronistic gloss. Tagalog Poetry, p. 125. The translation is Lumbera's. I have
slightly altered his Tagalog text to conform to a 1973 edition of the poem based on
the 1861 imprint.
48. Jean Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, p. 34.
49. Ibid., pp. 35-36. Emphasis added.
29
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
discipline him. And though his father is an intelligent man who wants
his son to practise a useful trade rather than swell the ranks of lawyers
and parasites, it is Periquillo's over-fond mother who wins the day,
sends her son to university and thus ensures that he will learn only
superstitious nonsense . . . Periquillo remains incorrigibly ignorant
despite many encounters with good and wise people. He is unwilling
to work or take anything seriously and becomes successively a priest,
a gambler, a thief, apprentice to an apothecary, a doctor, clerk in a
provincial town . . . These episodes permit the author to describe
hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries, while at the same time
driving home one major point - that Spanish government and the
education system encourage parasitism and laziness . . . Periquillo's
adventures several times take him among Indians and Negroes . . .
Here again we see the 'national imagination' at work in the movement of a
solitary hero through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world
inside the novel with the world outside. This picaresque tour dy
horizon —
hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries, Indians, Negroes - is
nonetheless not a tour du monde. The horizon is clearly bounded: it is
that of colonial Mexico. Nothing assures us of this sociological solidity
more than the succession ofplurals. For they conjure up a social space full of
comparable prisons, none in itself of any unique importance, but all
representative (in their simultaneous, separate existence) of the oppressiveness
of this colony.50
(Contrast prisons in the Bible. They are never
imagined as typical of this or that society. Each, like the one where Salome
was bewitched by John the Baptist, is magically alone.)
Finally, to remove the possibility that, since Rizal and Lizardi both
wrote in Spanish, the frameworks we have been studying are somehow
'European', here is the opening of Semarang Hitam [Black Semarang], a
tale by the ill-fated young Indonesian communist-nationalist Mas
51 52
Marco Kartodikromo, published serially in 1924:
50. This movement of a solitary hero through an adamantine social landscape is
typical of many early (anti-)colonial novels.
51. After a brief, meteoric career as a radical journalist, Marco was interned by the
Dutch colonial authorities in Boven Digul, one of the world's earliest concentration
camps, deep in the interior swamps of western New Guinea, There he died in 1932,
after six years confinement. Henri Chambert-Loir, 'Mas Marco Kartodikromo (c.
30
CULTURAL ROOTS
It was 7 o'clock, Saturday evening; young people in Semarang never
stayed at home on Saturday night. On this night however nobody
was about. Because the heavy day-long rain had made the roads wet
and very slippery, all had stayed at home.
For the workers in shops and offices Saturday morning was a time
of anticipation - anticipating their leisure and the fun of walking
around the city in the evening, but on this night they were to be
disappointed - because of lethargy caused by the bad weather and the
sticky roads in the kampungs. The main roads usually crammed with
all sorts of traffic, the footpaths usually teeming with people, all were
deserted. Now and then the crack of a horse-cab's whip could be
heard spurring a horse on its way - or the clip-clop of horses' hooves
pulling carriages along.
Semarang was deserted. The light from the rows of gas lamps
shone straight down on the shining asphalt road. Occasionally the
clear light from the gas lamps was dimmed as the wind blew from the
east. . . .
A young man was seated on a long rattan lounge reading a
newspaper. He was totally engrossed. His occasional anger and at
other times smiles were a sure sign of his deep interest in the story. He
turned the pages of the newspaper, thinking that perhaps he could
find something that would stop him feeling so miserable. All of a
sudden he came upon an article entitled:
PROSPERITY
A destitute vagrant became ill
and died on the side of the road from exposure.
The young man was moved by this brief report. He could just
imagine the suffering of the poor soul as he lay dying on the side of
the road . . . One moment he felt an explosive anger well up inside.
Another moment he felt pity. Yet another moment his anger was
1890-1932) ou L'Education Politique,' p. 208, in Litteratures contemporaines de VAsie du
Sud-Est. A brilliant recent full-length account of Marco's career can be found in Takashi
Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912-1926, chapters 2-5 and 8.
52. As translated by Paul Tickell in his Three Early Indonesian Short Stories by Mas
Marco Kartodikromo (c. 1890-1932), p. 7. Emphasis added.
31
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
directed at the social system which gave rise to such poverty, while
making a small group of people wealthy.
Here, as in El Periquillo Sarniento, we are in a world of plurals: shops,
offices, carriages, kampungs, and gas lamps. As in the case of Noli, wethe-Indonesian-readers
are plunged immediately into calendrical time
and a familiar landscape; some of us may well have walked those 'sticky'
Semarang roads. Once again, a solitary hero is juxtaposed to a socioscape
described in careful, general detail. But there is also something new: a
hero who is never named, but who is frequently referred to as 4
our
young man'. Precisely the clumsiness and literary naivety of the text
confirm the unselfconscious 'sincerity' of this pronominal adjective.
Neither Marco nor his readers have any doubts about the reference. If in
the jocular-sophisticated fiction of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Europe the trope 'our hero' merely underlines an authorial play with
a(ny) reader, Marco's 'our young man,' not least in its novelty, means a
young man who belongs to the collective body of readers of Indonesian,
and thus, implicitly, an embryonic Indonesian 'imagined community.'
Notice that Marco feels no need to specify this community by name: it
is already there. (Even if polylingual Dutch colonial censors could join
his readership, they are excluded from this 'ourness,' as can be seen from
the fact that the young man's anger is directed at 'the,' not 'our,' social
system.)
Finally, the imagined community is confirmed by the doubleness of
our reading about our young man reading. He does not find the corpse
of the destitute vagrant by the side of a sticky Semarang road, but
e
imagines it from the print in a newspaper. Nor does he care the
slightest who the dead vagrant individually was: he thinks of the
representative body, not the personal life.
It is fitting that in Semarang Hitam a newspaper appears embedded in
53. In 1924, a close friend and political ally of Marco published a novel titled Rasa
Merdika [Feeling Free/The Feel of Freedom]. Of the hero of this novel (which he
wrongly attributes to Marco) Chambert-Loir writes that 'he has no idea of the meaning
of the word "socialism": nonetheless he feels a profound malaise in the face of the social
organization that surrounds him and he feels the need to enlarge his horizons by two
methods: travel and reading.' ('Mas Marco', p. 208. Emphasis added.) The Itching Parrot
has moved to Java and the twentieth century.
32
CULTURAL ROOTS
fiction, for, if we now turn to the newspaper as cultural product, we will
be struck by its profound fictiveness. What is the essential literary
convention of the newspaper? If we were to look at a sample front page
of, say, The New York Times, we might find there stories about Soviet
dissidents, famine in Mali, a gruesome murder, a coup in Iraq, the
discovery of a rare fossil in Zimbabwe, and a speech by Mitterrand.
Why are these events so juxtaposed? What connects them to each
other? Not sheer caprice. Yet obviously most of them happen independently,
without the actors being aware of each other or of what the
others are up to. The arbitrariness of their inclusion and juxtaposition (a
later edition will substitute a baseball triumph for Mitterrand) shows that
the linkage between them is imagined.
This imagined linkage derives from two obliquely related sources.
The first is simply calendrical coincidence. The date at the top of the
newspaper, the single most important emblem on it, provides the
essential connection — the steady onward clocking of homogeneous,
empty time.54
Within that time, 'the world' ambles sturdily ahead. The
sign for this: if Mali disappears from the pages of The New York Times
after two days of famine reportage, for months on end, readers do not
for a moment imagine that Mali has disappeared or that famine has
wiped out all its citizens. The novelistic format of the newspaper assures
them that somewhere out there the 'character' Mali moves along
quietly, awaiting its next reappearance in the plot.
The second source of imagined linkage lies in the relationship
between the newspaper, as a form of book, and the market. It has
been estimated that in the 40-odd years between the publication of the
Gutenberg Bible and the close of the fifteenth century, more than
20,000,000 printed volumes were produced in Europe.55
Between
1500 and 1600, the number manufactured had reached between
54. Reading a newspaper is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any
thought of a coherent plot.
55. Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 186. This amounted to no less
than 35,000 editions produced in no fewer than 236 towns. As early as 1480, presses
existed in more than 110 towns, of which 50 were in today's Italy, 30 in Germany, 9 in
France, 8 each in Holland and Spain, 5 each in Belgium and Switzerland, 4 in England,
2 in Bohemia, and 1 in Poland. 'From that date it may be said of Europe that the printed
book was in universal use.' (p. 182).
33
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
150,000,000 and 200,000,000.56
'From early o n . . . the printing shops
looked more like modern workshops than the monastic workrooms of
the Middle Ages. In 1455, Fust and Schoeffer were already running a
business geared to standardised production, and twenty years later large
,57
printing concerns were operating everywhere in all [sic] Europe.' In a
rather special sense, the book was the first modern-style mass-produced
industrial commodity.58
The sense I have in mind can be shown if we
compare the book to other early industrial products, such as textiles,
bricks, or sugar. For these commodities are measured in mathematical
amounts (pounds or loads or pieces). A pound of sugar is simply a
quantity, a convenient load, not an object in itself. The book, however
— and here it prefigures the durables of our time — is a distinct, selfcontained
object, exactly reproduced on a large scale.59
One pound of
sugar flows into the next; each book has its own eremitic selfsufficiency.
(Small wonder that libraries, personal collections of massproduced
commodities, were already a familiar sight, in urban centres
like Paris, by the sixteenth century.)60
In this perspective, the newspaper is merely an 'extreme form' of the
book, a book sold on a colossal scale, but of ephemeral popularity.
56. Ibid., p. 262. The authors comment that by the sixteenth century books were
readily available to anyone who could read.
57. The great Antwerp publishing house of Plantin controlled, early in the
sixteenth century, 24 presses with more than 100 workers in each shop. Ibid.,
p. 125.
58. This is one point solidly made amidst the vagaries of Marshall McLuhan's
Gutenberg Galaxy (p. 125). One might add that if the book market was dwarfed by the
markets in other commodities, its strategic role in the dissemination of ideas nonetheless
made it of central importance to the development of modern Europe.
59. The principle here is more important than the scale. Until the nineteenth
century, editions were still relatively small. Even Luther's Bible, an extraordinary bestseller,
had only a 4,000-copy first edition. The unusually large first edition of
Diderot's Encyclopedic - numbered no more than 4,250. The average eighteenthcentury
run was less than 2,000. Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp.
218—20. At the same time, the book was always distinguishable from other durables by
its inherently limited market. Anyone with money can buy Czech cars; only Czechreaders
will buy Czech-language books. The importance of this distinction will be
considered below.
60. Furthermore, as early as the late fifteenth century the Venetian publisher Aldus
had pioneered the portable 'pocket edition.'
34
CULTURAL ROOTS
Might we say: one-day best-sellers? The obsolescence of the
newspaper on the morrow of its printing - curious that one of
the earlier mass-produced commodities should so prefigure the
inbuilt obsolescence of modern durables - nonetheless, for just this
reason, creates this extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely
simultaneous consumption ('imagining') of the newspaper-as-fiction.
We know that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly
be consumed between this hour and that, only on this
day, not that. (Contrast sugar, the use of which proceeds in an
unclocked, continuous flow; it may go bad, but it does not go out of
date.) The significance of this mass ceremony - Hegel observed that
newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers is
paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the
skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he
performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions)
of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose
identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony
is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the
calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked,
63
imagined community can be envisioned? At the same time, 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
61. As the case of Semarang Hitam shows, the two kinds of best-sellers used to be
more closely linked than they are today. Dickens too serialized his popular novels in
popular newspapers.
62. 'Printed materials encouraged silent adherence to causes whose advocates
could not be located in any one parish and who addressed an invisible public from afar.'
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, 'Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western
Society and Thought,' Journal of Modern History, 40: 1 (March 1968), p. 42.
63. Writing of the relationship between the material anarchy of middle-class
society and an abstract political state-order, Nairn observes that 'the representative
mechanism converted real class inequality into the abstract egalitarianism of citizens,
individual egotisms into an impersonal collective will, what would otherwise be chaos
into a new state legitimacy.' The Break-up of Britain, p. 24. No doubt. But the
representative mechanism (elections?) is a rare and moveable feast. The generation
of the impersonal will is, I think, better sought in the diurnal regularities of the
imagining life.
35
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
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.
Before proceeding to a discussion of the specific origins of nationalism,
it may be useful to recapitulate the main propositions put forward thus
far. Essentially, I have been arguing that 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 particular scriptlanguage
offered privileged access to ontological truth, precisely because
it was an inseparable part of that truth. It was this idea that called into
being the great transcontinental sodalities of Christendom, the Islamic
Ummah, and the rest. Second was the belief that society was naturally
organized around and under high centres — monarchs who were persons
apart from other human beings and who ruled by some form of
cosmological (divine) dispensation. Human loyalties were necessarily
hierarchical and centripetal because the ruler, like the sacred script, was a
node of access to being and inherent in it. Third was a conception of
temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the
origins of the world and of 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 (above all death,
loss, and servitude) and offering, in various ways, redemption from
them.
The slow, uneven decline of these interlinked certainties, first in
Western Europe, later elsewhere, under the impact of economic
change, 'discoveries' (social and scientific), and the development of
increasingly rapid communications, 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. Nothing perhaps more precipitated this search, nor
made it more fruitful, than print-capitalism, which made it possible for
rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to
relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways.
36
The Origins of
National Consciousness
If the development of print-as-commodity is the key to the
generation of wholly new ideas of simultaneity, still, we are simply
at the point where communities of the type 'horizontal-secular,
transverse-time' become possible. Why, within that type, did the
nation become so popular? The factors involved are obviously
complex and various. But a strong case can be made for the
primacy of capitalism.
As already noted, at least 20,000,000 books had already been printed
by 1500, signalling the onset of Benjamin's 'age of mechanical
reproduction.' If manuscript knowledge was scarce and arcane lore,
print knowledge lived by reproducibility and dissemination. If, as
Febvre and Martin believe, possibly as many as 200,000,000 volumes
had been manufactured by 1600, it is no wonder that Francis Bacon
believed that print had changed 'the appearance and state of the
world.'3
One of the earlier forms of capitalist enterprise, book-publishing
1. The population of that Europe where print was then known was about
100,000,000. Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp. 248-49.
2. Emblematic is Marco Polo's Travels, which remained largely unknown till its
first printing in 1559. Polo, Travels, p. xiii.
3. Quoted in Eisenstein, 'Some Conjectures,' p. 56.
37
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
felt all of capitalism's restless search for markets. The early printers
established branches all over Europe: 'in this way a veritable
"international" of publishing houses, which ignored national [sic]
frontiers, was created.'4
And since the years 1500-1550 were a
period of exceptional European prosperity, publishing shared in
the general boom. 'More than at any other time' it was 'a great
industry under the control of wealthy capitalists.'5
Naturally, 'booksellers
were primarily concerned to make a profit and to sell their
products, and consequently they sought out first and foremost those
works which were of interest to the largest possible number of their
contemporaries.'6
The initial market was literate Europe, a wide but thin stratum
of Latin-readers. Saturation of this market took about a hundred
and fifty years. The determinative fact about Latin — aside from its
sacrality - was that it was a language of bilinguals. Relatively few
were born to speak it and even fewer, one imagines, dreamed in it.
In the sixteenth century the proportion of bilinguals within the
total population of Europe was quite small; very likely no larger
than the proportion in the world's population today, and proletarian
internationalism notwithstanding - in the centuries to
come. Then and now the bulk of mankind is monoglot. The logic
of capitalism thus meant that once the elite Latin market was
saturated, the potentially huge markets represented by the monoglot
masses would beckon. To be sure, the Counter-Reformation
encouraged a temporary resurgence of Latin-publishing, but by the
mid-seventeenth century the movement was in decay, and fervently
Catholic libraries replete. Meantime, a Europe-wide shortage of
money made printers think more and more of peddling cheap
editions in the vernaculars.
4. Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p. 122. (The original text, however,
speaks simply of'par-dessus les frontieres.' L}
Apparition, p. 184.)
5. Ibid., p. 187. The original text speaks of 'puissants' (powerful) rather than
'wealthy' capitalists. LApparition, p. 281.
6. 'Hence the introduction of printing was in this respect a stage on the road to our
present society of mass consumption and standardisation.' Ibid., pp. 259-60. (The
original text has 'une civilisation de masse et de standardisation,' which may be better
rendered 'standardised, mass civilization.' LApparition, p. 394).
7. Ibid., p. 195.
38
THE ORIGINS OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
The revolutionary vernacularizing thrust of capitalism was given
further impetus by three extraneous factors, two of which contributed
directly to the rise of national consciousness. The first, and ultimately
the least important, was a change in the character of Latin itself. Thanks
to the labours of the Humanists in reviving the broad literature of preChristian
antiquity and spreading it through the print-market, a new
appreciation of the sophisticated stylistic achievements of the ancients
was apparent among the trans-European intelligentsia. The Latin they
now aspired to write became more and more Ciceronian, and, by the
same token, increasingly removed from ecclesiastical and everyday life.
In this way it acquired an esoteric quality quite different from that of
Church Latin in mediaeval times. For the older Latin was not arcane
because of its subject matter or style, but simply because it was written at
all, i.e. because of its status as text. Now it became arcane because of
what was written, because of the language-in-itself.
Second was the impact of the Reformation, which, at the same
time, owed much of its success to print-capitalism. 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. But when in 1517 Martin Luther nailed his theses to the
chapel-door in Wittenberg, they were printed up in German
translation, and 'within 15 days [had been] seen in every part of
the country.' In the two decades 1520—1540 three times as many
books were published in German as in the period 1500—1520, an
astonishing transformation to which Luther was absolutely central.
His works represented no less than one third of all German-language
books sold between 1518 and 1525. Between 1522 and 1546, a total
of 430 editions (whole or partial) of his Biblical translations appeared.
'We have here for the first time a truly mass readership and a
popular literature within everybody's reach.'9
In effect, Luther
became the first best-selling author so known. Or, to put it another
way, the first writer who could 'sell' his new books on the basis of
i • 1 0
his name.
8. Ibid., pp. 289-90.
9. Ibid., pp. 291-95.
10. From this point it was only a step to the situation in seventeenth-century
39
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Where Luther led, others quickly followed, opening the colossal
religious propaganda war that raged across Europe for the next century.
In this titanic 'battle for men's minds', Protestantism was always
fundamentally on the offensive, precisely because it knew how to
make use of the expanding vernacular print-market being created by
capitalism, while the Counter-Reformation defended the citadel of
Latin. The emblem for this is the Vatican's Index Librorum Prohibitorum to
which there was no Protestant counterpart - a novel catalogue made
necessary by the sheer volume of printed subversion. Nothing gives a
better sense of this siege mentality than Francois I's panicked 1535 ban
on the printing of any books in his realm — on pain of death by hanging!
The reason for both the ban and its unenforceability was that by then his
realm's eastern borders were ringed with Protestant states and cities
producing a massive stream of smugglable print. To take Calvin's
Geneva alone: between 1533 and 1540 only 42 editions were published
there, but the numbers swelled to 527 between 1550 and 1564, by
which latter date no less than 40 separate printing-presses were working
overtime.11
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 knew little or no
Latin - and simultaneously mobilized them for politico-religious
purposes. Inevitably, it was not merely the Church that was shaken
to its core. The same earthquake produced Europe's first important
non-dynastic, non-city states in the Dutch Republic and the Commonwealth
of the Puritans. (Francois I's panic was as much political as
religious.)
Third was the slow, geographically uneven, spread of particular
vernaculars as instruments of administrative centralization by certain
well-positioned would-be absolutist monarchs. Here it is useful to
remember that the universality of Latin in mediaeval Western
Europe never corresponded to a universal political system. The
France where Corneille, Moliere, and La Fontaine could sell their manuscript tragedies
and comedies directly to publishers, who bought them as excellent investments in view
of their authors' market reputations. Ibid., p. 161.
11. Ibid., pp. 310-15.
40
THE ORIGINS OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
contrast with Imperial China, where the reach of the mandarinal
bureaucracy and of painted characters largely coincided, is instructive.
In effect, the political fragmentation of Western Europe after
the collapse of the Western Empire meant that no sovereign could
monopolize Latin and make it his-and-only-his language-of-state,
and thus Latin's religious authority never had a true political
analogue.
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. At the same time, nothing suggests
that any deep-seated ideological, let alone proto-national, impulses
underlay this vernacularization where it occurred. The case of 'England'
- on the northwestern periphery of Latin Europe — is here
especially enlightening. Prior to the Norman Conquest, the language
of the court, literary and administrative, was Anglo-Saxon. For the
next century and a half virtually all royal documents were composed in
Latin. Between about 1200 and 1350 this state-Latin was superseded
by Norman French. In the meantime, a slow fusion between this
language of a foreign ruling class and the Anglo-Saxon of the subject
population produced Early English. The fusion made it possible for the
new language to take its turn, after 1362, as the language of the courts
- and for the opening of Parliament. Wycliffe's vernacular manuscript
Bible followed in
1382. It is essential to bear in mind that this
sequence was a series of'state,' not 'national,' languages; and that the
state concerned covered at various times not only today's England and
Wales, but also portions of Ireland, Scotland and France. Obviously,
huge elements of the subject populations knew little or nothing of13
Latin, Norman French, or Early English. Not till almost a century
after Early English's political enthronement was London's power swept
out of'France'.
On the Seine, a similar movement took place, if at a slower pace.
12. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, pp. 28-29; Bloch, Feudal Society, I, p. 75.
13. We should not assume that administrative vernacular unification was immediately
or fully achieved. It is unlikely that the Guyenne ruled from London was ever
primarily administered in Early English.
41
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
As Bloch wryly puts it, 'French, that is to say a language which,
since it was regarded as merely a corrupt form of Latin, took several
centuries to raise itself to literary dignity',14
only became the official
language of the courts of justice in 1539, when Francois I issued the
A 15
Edict of Villers-Cotterets. In other dynastic realms Latin survived
much longer — under the Habsburgs well into the nineteenth
century. In still others, 'foreign' vernaculars took over: in the
eighteenth century the languages of the Romanov court were
French and German.
In every instance, the 'choice' of language appears as a gradual,
unselfconscious, pragmatic, not to say haphazard development. As
such, it was utterly different from the selfconscious language
policies pursued by nineteenth-century dynasts confronted with
the rise of hostile popular linguistic-nationalisms. (See below,
Chapter 6). One clear sign of the difference is that the old
administrative languages were just that: languages used by and
for officialdoms for their own inner convenience. There was no
idea of systematically imposing the language on the dynasts' various17
subject populations. Nonetheless, the elevation of these vernaculars
to the status of languages-of-power, where, in one sense,
they were competitors with Latin (French in Paris, [Early] English
in London), made its own contribution to the decline of the
imagined community of Christendom.
At bottom, it is likely that the esotericization of Latin, the
Reformation, and the haphazard development of administrative
vernaculars are significant, in the present context, primarily in a
negative sense — in their contributions to the dethronement of Latin.
It is quite possible to conceive of the emergence of the new imagined
national communities without any one, perhaps all, of them being
present. What, in a positive sense, made the new communities
imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between
14. Bloch, Feudal Society, I, p. 98.
15. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. 48.
16. Ibid., p. 83.
17. An agreeable confirmation of this point is provided by Francois I, who, as we
have seen, banned all printing of books in 1535 and made French the language of his
courts four years later!
42
THE ORIGINS OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a
technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human
18
linguistic diversity.
The element of fatality is essential. For whatever superhuman feats
capitalism was capable of, it found in death and languages two tenacious
adversaries.19
Particular languages can die or be wiped out, but there
was and is no possibility of humankind's general linguistic unification.
Yet this mutual incomprehensibility was historically of only slight
importance until capitalism and print created monoglot mass reading
publics.
While it is essential to keep in mind an idea of fatality, in the sense of a
general condition of irremediable linguistic diversity, it would be a
mistake to equate this fatality with that common element in nationalist
ideologies which stresses the primordial fatality of particular languages
and their association with particular territorial units. The essential thing is
the interplay between fatality, technology, and capitalism. In pre-print
Europe, and, of course, elsewhere in the world, the diversity of spoken
languages, those languages that for their speakers were (and are) the
warp and woof of their lives, was immense; so immense, indeed, that
had print-capitalism sought to exploit each potential oral vernacular
market, it would have remained a capitalism of petty proportions. But
these varied idiolects were capable of being assembled, within definite
limits, into print-languages far fewer in number. The very arbitrariness20
of any system of signs for sounds facilitated the assembling process. (At
the same time, the more ideographic the signs, the vaster the potential
18. It was not the first 'accident' of its kind. Febvre and Martin note that while a
visible bourgeoisie already existed in Europe by the late thirteenth century, paper did
not come into general use until the end of the fourteenth. Only paper's smooth plane
surface made the mass reproduction of texts and pictures possible - and this did not
occur for still another seventy-five years. But paper was not a European invention. It
floated in from another history - China's - through the Islamic world. The Coming of the
Book, pp. 22, 30, and 45.
19. We still have no giant multinationals in the world of publishing.
20. For a useful discussion of this point, see S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of
Printing, chapter 5. That the sign ough is pronounced differently in the words although,
bough, lough, rough, cough, and hiccough, shows both the idiolectic variety out of
which the now-standard spelling of English emerged, and the ideographic quality of the
final product.
43
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
assembling zone. One can detect a sort of descending hierarchy here
from algebra through Chinese and English, to the regular syllabaries of
French or Indonesian.) Nothing served to 'assemble' related vernaculars
more than capitalism, which, within the limits imposed by grammars
and syntaxes, created mechanically reproduced print-languages capable
21
of dissemination through the market.
These print-languages laid the bases for national consciousnesses in
three distinct ways. First and foremost, they created unified fields of
exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken
vernaculars. Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or
Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand
one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one
another via print and paper. In the process, they gradually became
aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their
particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds
of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom
they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular,
visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined
community.
Second, print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, which in
the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the
subjective idea of the nation. As Febvre and Martin remind us, the
printed book kept a permanent form, capable of virtually infinite
reproduction, temporally and spatially. It was no longer subject to
the individualizing and 'unconsciously modernizing' habits of
monastic scribes. Thus, while twelfth-century French differed
markedly from that written by Villon in the fifteenth, the rate of
change slowed decisively in the sixteenth. 'By the 17th century22
languages in Europe had generally assumed their modern forms.'
21. I say 'nothing served . . . more than capitalism' advisedly. Both Steinberg and
Eisenstein come close to theomorphizing 'print' qua print as the genius of modern
history. Febvre and Martin never forget that behind print stand printers and publishing
firms. It is worth remembering in this context that although printing was invented first
in China, possibly 500 years before its appearance in Europe, it had no major, let alone
revolutionary impact - precisely because of the absence of capitalism there.
22. The Coming of the Book, p. 319. Cf. L'Apparition, p. 477: 'Au XVIIe siecle, les
langues nationales apparaissent un peu partout cristallisees.'
44
THE ORIGINS OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
To put it another way, for three centuries now these stabilized
print-languages have been gathering a darkening varnish; the words
of our seventeenth-century forebears are accessible to us in a way
that to Villon his twelfth-century ancestors were not.
Third, print-capitalism created languages-of-power of a kind different
from the older administrative vernaculars. Certain dialects
inevitably were 'closer' to each print-language and dominated their
final forms. Their disadvantaged cousins, still assimilable to the
emerging print-language, lost caste, above all because they were
unsuccessful (or only relatively successful) in insisting on their own
print-form. 'Northwestern German' became Piatt Deutsch, a largely
spoken, thus sub-standard, German, because it was assimilable to printGerman
in a way that Bohemian spoken-Czech was not. High
German, the King's English, and, later, Central Thai, were correspondingly
elevated to a new politico-cultural eminence. (Hence the
struggles in late-twentieth-century Europe by certain 'sub-' nationalities
to change their subordinate status by breaking firmly into print and
radio.)
It remains only to emphasize that in their origins, the fixing
of print-languages and the differentiation of status between them
were largely unselfconscious processes resulting from the explosive
interaction between capitalism, technology and human
linguistic diversity. But as with so much else in the history
of nationalism, once 'there,' they could become formal models
to be imitated, and, where expedient, consciously exploited in a
Machiavellian spirit. Today, the Thai government actively discourages
attempts by foreign missionaries to provide its hill-tribe
minorities with their own transcription-systems and to develop
publications in their own languages: the same government is
largely indifferent to what these minorities speak. The fate of the
Turkic-speaking peoples in the zones incorporated into today's
Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and the USSR is especially exemplary. A
family of spoken languages, once everywhere assemblable, thus
comprehensible, within an Arabic orthography, has lost that
unity as a result of conscious manipulations. To heighten
Turkish-Turkey's national consciousness at the expense of any
wider Islamic identification, Atatiirk imposed compulsory
45
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
23
romanization. The Soviet authorities followed suit, first with
an anti-Islamic, anti-Persian compulsory romanization, then, in
, • . . . . 24
Stalin's 1930s, with a Russifying compulsory Cyrillicization.
We can summarize the conclusions to be drawn from the argument thus
far by saying that the 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. The potential stretch of these communities
was inherently limited, and, at the same time, bore none but the most
fortuitous relationship to existing political boundaries (which were, on
the whole, the highwater marks of dynastic expansionisms).
Yet it is obvious that while today almost all modern self-conceived
nations - and also nation-states - have 'national print-languages', many
of them have these languages in common, and in others only a tiny
fraction of the population 'uses' the national language in conversation or
on paper. The nation-states of Spanish America or those of the 'AngloSaxon
family' are conspicuous examples of the first outcome; many excolonial
states, particularly in Africa, of the second. In other words, the
concrete formation of contemporary nation-states is by no means
isomorphic with the determinate reach of particular print-languages.
To account for the discontinuity-in-connectedness between printlanguages,
national consciousness, and nation-states, it is necessary to
turn to the large cluster of new political entities that sprang up in the
Western hemisphere between 1776 and 1838, all of which selfconsciously
defined themselves as nations, and, with the interesting
exception of Brazil, as (non-dynastic) republics. For not only were they
historically the first such states to emerge on the world stage, and
therefore inevitably provided the first real models of what such states
should 'look like,' but their numbers and contemporary births offer
fruitful ground for comparative enquiry.
23. Hans Kohn, The Age of Nationalism, p. 108. It is probably only fair to add that
Kemal also hoped thereby to align Turkish nationalism with the modern, romanized
civilization of Western Europe.
24. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. 317.
46
Creole Pioneers
The new American states of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries are of unusual interest because it seems almost impossible to
explain them in terms of two factors which, probably because they are
readily derivable from the mid-century nationalisms of Europe, have
dominated much provincial European thinking about the rise of
nationalism.
In the first place, whether we think of Brazil, the USA, or the former
colonies of Spain, language was not an element that differentiated them
from their respective imperial metropoles. All, including the USA, were
creole states, formed and led by people who shared a common language
and common descent with those against whom they fought. Indeed, it
is fair to say that language was never even an issue in these early struggles
for national liberation.
In the second place, there are serious reasons to doubt the applicability
in much of the Western hemisphere of Nairn's otherwise
persuasive thesis that:
The arrival of nationalism in a distinctively modern sense was tied to
the political baptism of the lower classes . . . Although sometimes
1. Creole (Criollo) - person of (at least theoretically) pure European descent but
born in the Americas (and, by later extension, anywhere outside Europe).
47
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
hostile to democracy, nationalist movements have been invariably
populist in outlook and sought to induct lower classes into political
life. In its most typical version, this assumed the shape of a restless
middle-class and intellectual leadership trying to sit up and channel
popular class energies into support for the new states.2
At least in South and Central America, European-style 'middle
classes' were still insignificant at the end of the eighteenth century.
Nor was there much in the way of an intelligentsia. For 'in those quiet
colonial days little reading interrupted the stately and snobbish rhythm
of men's lives.' As we have seen, the first Spanish-American novel was
published only in 1816, well after the wars for independence had
broken out. The evidence clearly suggests that leadership was held by
substantial landowners, allied with a somewhat smaller number of
merchants, and various types of professional (lawyers, military men,
local and provincial functionaries).
Far from seeking to 'induct the lower classes into political life,' one
key factor initially spurring the drive for independence from Madrid,
in such important cases as Venezuela, Mexico and Peru, was .the fear of
'lower-class' political mobilizations: to wit, Indian or Negro-slave
uprisings.5
(This fear only increased when Hegel's 'secretary of the
World-Spirit' conquered Spain in 1808, thereby depriving the Creoles
of peninsular military backup in case of emergency.) In Peru,
memories of the great jacquerie led by Tupac Amaru (1740—1781)
were still fresh. In 1791, Toussaint L'Ouverture led an insurrection of
black slaves that produced in 1804 the second independent republic in
the Western hemisphere — and terrified the great slave-owning
2. The Break-up of Britain, p. 41.
3. Gerhard Masur, Simon Bolivar, p. 17.
4. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, pp. 14-17 and passim. These proportions
arose from the fact that the more important commercial and administrative
functions were largely monopolized by Spain-born Spaniards, while land-owning was
fully open to Creoles.
5. In this respect there are clear analogies with Boer nationalism a century later.
6. It is perhaps notable that Tupac Amaru did not entirely repudiate allegiance to
the Spanish king. He and his followers (largely Indians, but also some whites and
mestizos) rose in fury against the regime in Lima. Masur, Bolivar, p. 24.
48
CREOLE PIONEERS
planters of Venezuela.7
When, in 1789, Madrid issued a new, more
humane, slave law specifying in detail the rights and duties of masters
and slaves, 'the Creoles rejected state intervention on the grounds that
slaves were prone to vice and independence [!], and were essential to
the economy. In Venezuela - indeed all over the Spanish Caribbean -
8 i
planters resisted the law and procured its suspension in 1794.' The
Liberator Bolivar himself once opined that a Negro revolt was 'a
thousand times worse than a Spanish invasion.' Nor should we forget
that many leaders of the independence movement in the Thirteen
Colonies were slave-owning agrarian magnates. Thomas Jefferson
himself was among the Virginian planters who in the 1770s were
enraged by the loyalist governor's proclamation freeing those slaves
who broke with their seditious masters.10
It is instructive that one
reason why Madrid made a successful come-back in Venezuela from
1814-1816 and held remote Quito until 1820 was that she won the
support of slaves in the former, and of Indians in the latter, in the11
struggle against insurgent Creoles. Moreover, the long duration of
the continental struggle against Spain, by then a second-rate European
power and one itself recently conquered, suggests a certain 'social
thinness' to these Latin American independence movements.
Yet they were national independence movements. Bolivar came to
1 2 * • *
change his mind about slaves, and his fellow-liberator San Martin
decreed in 1821 that 'in the future the aborigines shall not be called
7. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. 201.
8. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, p. 192.
9. Ibid., p. 224.
10. Edward S. Morgan, 'The Heart of Jefferson,' The New York Review of Books,
August 17, 1978, p. 2.
11. Masur, Bolivar, p. 207; Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, p. 237.
12. Not without some twists and turns. He freed his own slaves shortly after
Venezuela's declaration of independence in 1810. When he fled to Haiti in 1816, he
obtained military assistance from President Alexandre Petion in return for a promise to
end slavery in all territories liberated. The promise was redeemed in Caracas in 1818 but
it should be remembered that Madrid's successes in Venezuela between 1814 and
1816 were in part due to her emancipation of loyal slaves. When Bolivar became
president of Gran Colombia (Venezuela, New Granada and Ecuador) in 1821, he asked
for and obtained from Congress a law freeing the sons of slaves. He 'had not asked
Congress to wipe out slavery because he did not want to incur the resentment of the big
landowners.' Masur, Bolivar, pp. 125, 206-207, 329, and 388.
49
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Indians or natives; they are children and citizens of Peru and they shall be
13
known as Peruvians.' (We might add: in spite of the fact that as yet
print-capitalism had not reached these illiterates.)
Here then is the riddle: why was it precisely Creole communities that
developed so early conceptions of their nation-ness — well before most of
Europe? Why did such colonial provinces, usually containing large,
oppressed, non-Spanish-speaking populations, produce Creoles who
consciously redefined these populations as fellow-nationals? And
Spain,14
to whom they were, in so many ways, attached, as an enemy
alien? 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 liberalizing ideas
of the Enlightenment in the latter half of the eighteenth century. It is
undoubtedly true that the policies pursued by the capable 'enlightened
despot' Carlos III (r. 1759—1788) increasingly frustrated, angered,
and alarmed the upper Creole classes. In what has sometimes
sardonically been called the second conquest of the Americas, Madrid
imposed new taxes, made their collection more efficient, enforced
metropolitan commercial monopolies, restricted intra-hemispheric
trade to its own advantage, centralized administrative hierarchies,15
and promoted a heavy immigration of peninsulares. Mexico, for
example, in the early eighteenth century provided the Crown with
an annual revenue of about 3,000,000 pesos. By the century's end,
however, the sum had almost quintupled to 14,000,000, of which
only 4,000,000 were used to defray the costs of local administration.
Parallel to this, the level of peninsular migration by the decade
13. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, p. 276. Emphasis added.
14. An anachronism. In the eighteenth century the usual term was still Las Espanas
[the Spains], not Espaiia [Spain]. Seton Watson, Nations and States, p. 53.
15. This new metropolitan aggressiveness was partly the product of Enlightenment
doctrines, partly of chronic fiscal problems, and partly, after 1779, of war with England.
Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, pp. 4-17.
16. Ibid., p. 301. Four millions went to subsidize administration of other parts of
Spanish America, while six millions were pure profit.
50
CREOLE PIONEERS
1780-1790 was five times as high as it had been between 1710-
1730.17
There is also no doubt that improving trans-Atlantic communications,
and the fact that the various Americas shared languages and
cultures with their respective metropoles, meant a relatively rapid and
easy transmission of the new economic and political doctrines being
produced in Western Europe. The success of the Thirteen Colonies'
revolt at the end of the 1770s, and the onset of the French Revolution
at the end of the 1780s, did not fail to exert a powerful influence.
Nothing confirms this 'cultural revolution' more than the pervasive
republicanism of the newly independent communities. Nowhere was
any serious attempt made to recreate the dynastic principle in the
Americas, except in Brazil; even there, it would probably not have
been possible without the immigration in 1808 of the Portuguese
dynast himself, in flight from Napoleon. (He stayed there for 13 years,
and, on returning home, had his son crowned locally as Pedro I of
Brazil.)19
Yet the aggressiveness of Madrid and the spirit of liberalism, while
central to any understanding of the impulse of resistance in the Spanish
Americas, do not in themselves explain why entities like Chile,
Venezuela, and Mexico turned out to be emotionally plausible and
17. Ibid., p. 17.
18. The Constitution of the First Venezuelan Republic (1811) was in many places
borrowed verbatim from that of the United States. Masur, Bolivar, p. 131.
19. A superb, intricate analysis of the structural reasons for Brazilian exceptionalism
can be found in Jose Murilo de Carvalho, 'Political Elites and State Building:
The Case of Nineteenth-Century Brazil', Comparative Studies in Society and History,
24:3 (1982), pp. 378-99. Two of the more important factors were: (1) Educational
differences. While 'twenty-three universities were scattered in what eventually would
become thirteen different countries' in the Spanish Americas, 'Portugal refused
systematically to allow the organization of any institution of higher learning in her
colonies, not considering as such the theological seminaries.' Higher education was
only to be had in Coimbra University, and thither, in the motherland, went the Creole
elite's children, the great majority studying in the faculty of law. (2) Different career
possibilities for Creoles. De Carvalho notes 'the much greater exclusion of Americanborn
Spaniards from the higher posts in the Spanish side [sic].' See also Stuart B,
Schwartz, 'The Formation of a Colonial Identity in Brazil,' chapter 2 in Nicholas
Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800,
who notes in passing (p. 38) that 'no printing press operated in Brazil during the first
three centuries of the colonial era.'
51
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
2 0 *
politically viable, nor why San Martin should decree that certain
aborigines be identified by the neological 'Peruvians.' Nor, ultimately,
do they account for the real sacrifices made. For while it is certain that
the upper Creole classes, conceived as historical social formations, did nicely
out of independence over the long haul, many actual members of those
classes living between 1808 and 1828 were financially ruined. (To take
only one example: during Madrid's counter-offensive of 1814—16
'more than two-thirds of Venezuela's landowning families suffered
21
heavy confiscations.' ) And just as many willingly gave up their lives
for the cause. This willingness to sacrifice on the part of comfortable
classes is food for thought.
What then? The beginnings of an answer lie in the striking fact that
'each of the new South American republics had been an adminis-22
trative unit from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.' In this
respect they foreshadowed the new states of Africa and parts of Asia in
the mid twentieth century, and form a sharp contrast to the new
European states of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The original shaping of the American administrative units was to
some extent arbitrary and fortuitous, marking the spatial limits of
particular military conquests. But, over time, they developed a firmer
reality under the influence of geographic, political and economic
factors. The very vastness of the Spanish American empire, the
enormous variety of its soils and climates, and, above all, the immense
difficulty of communications in a pre-industrial age, tended to give
these units a self-contained character. (In the colonial era the sea
journey from Buenos Aires to Acapulco took four months, and the
return trip even longer; the overland trek from Buenos Aires to23
Santiago normally lasted two months, and that to Cartagena nine. )
In addition, Madrid's commercial policies had the effect of turning
administrative units into separate economic zones. 'All competition
20. Much the same could be said of London's stance vis-a-vis the Thirteen
Colonies, and of the ideology of the 1776 Revolution.
21. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, p. 208; cf. Masur, Bolivar, pp. 98-99
and 231.
22. Masur, Bolivar, p. 678.
23. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, pp. 25-26.
52
CREOLE PIONEERS
with the mother country was forbidden the Americans, and even the
individual parts of the continent could not trade with each other.
American goods en route from one side of America to the other had
to travel circuitously through Spanish ports, and Spanish navigation
24
had a monopoly on trade with the colonies.' These experiences help
to explain why 'one of the basic principles of the American revolution'
was that of 'uti possidetis by which each nation was to preserve
the territorial status quo of 1810, the year when the movement25
for independence had been inaugurated.' Their influence also
doubtless contributed to the break-up of Bolivar's short-lived Gran
Colombia and of the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata into
their older constituents (which today are known as VenezuelaColombia-Ecuador
and Argentina-Uruguay-Paraguay-Bolivia). Nonetheless,
in themselves, market-zones, 'natural'-geographic or politicoadministrative,
do not create attachments. Who will willingly die for
Comecon or the EEC?
To see how administrative units could, over time, come to be conceived
as fatherlands, not merely in the Americas but in other parts of
the world, one has to look at the ways in which administrative
organizations create meaning. The anthropologist Victor Turner has
written illuminatingly about the journey', between times, statuses and
26
places, as a meaning-creating experience. All such journeys require
interpretation (for example, the journey from birth to death has given
rise to various religious conceptions.) For our purposes here, the modal
journey is the pilgrimage. It is not simply that in the minds of Christians,
Muslims or Hindus the cities of Rome, Mecca, or Benares were the
centres of sacred geographies, but that their centrality was experienced
24. Masur, Bolivar, p. 19. Naturally these measures were only partially enforceable,
and a good deal of smuggling always went on.
25. Ibid., p. 546.
26. See his The Forest of Symbols, Aspects of Ndemhu Ritual, especially the chapter
'Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.' For a later, more
complex elaboration, see his Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, Symbolic Action in Human
Society, chapter 5 ('Pilgrimages as Social Processes') and 6 ('Passages, Margins, and
Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas').
53
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
and 'realized' (in the stagecraft sense) by the constant flow of
pilgrims moving towards them from remote and otherwise unrelated
localities. Indeed, in some sense the outer limits of the old religious
communities of the imagination were determined by which pil-
27
grimages people made. As noted earlier, the strange physical
juxtaposition of Malays, Persians, Indians, Berbers and Turks in
Mecca is something incomprehensible without an idea of their
community in some form. The Berber encountering the Malay
before the Kaaba must, as it were, ask himself: 'Why is this man
doing what I am doing, uttering the same words that I am uttering,
even though we can not talk to one another?' There is only one
answer, once one has learnt it: 'Because we . . . are Muslims.' There
was, to be sure, always a double aspect to the choreography of the
great religious pilgrimages: a vast horde of illiterate vernacularspeakers
provided the dense, physical reality of the ceremonial
passage; while a small segment of literate bilingual adepts drawn
from each vernacular community performed the unifying rites,
interpreting to their respective followings the meaning of their28
collective motion. In a pre-print age, the reality of the imagined
religious community depended profoundly on countless, ceaseless
travels. Nothing more impresses one about Western Christendom in
its heyday than the uncoerced flow of faithful seekers from all over
Europe, through the celebrated 'regional centres' of monastic
learning, to Rome. These great Latin-speaking institutions drew
together what today we would perhaps regard as Irishmen, Danes,
Portuguese, Germans, and so forth, in communities whose sacred
meaning was every day deciphered from their members' otherwise
inexplicable juxtaposition in the refectory.
Though the religious pilgrimages are probably the most touching and
27. See Bloch, Feudal Society, I, p. 64.
28. There are obvious analogies here with the respective roles of bilingual
intelligentsias and largely illiterate workers and peasants in the genesis of certain
nationalist movements - prior to the coming of radio. Invented only in 1895,
radio made it possible to bypass print and summon into being an aural
representation of the imagined community where the printed page scarcely
penetrated. Its role in the Vietnamese and Indonesian revolutions, and generally
in mid-twentieth-century nationalisms, has been much underestimated and under-
studied.
54
CREOLE PIONEERS
grandiose journeys of the imagination, they had, and have, more modest
29
and limited secular counterparts. For our present purposes, the most
important were the differing passages created by the rise of absolutizing
monarchies, and, eventually, Europe-centred world-imperial states.
The inner thrust of absolutism was to create a unified apparatus of
power, controlled directly by, and loyal to, the ruler over against a
decentralized, particularistic feudal nobility. Unification meant internal
interchangeability of men and documents. Human interchangeability
was fostered by the recruitment — naturally to varying extents — of
homines novi, who, just for that reason, had no independent power of• 30
their own, and so could serve as emanations of their masters' wills.
Absolutist functionaries thus undertook journeys which were basically
different from those of feudal nobles.31
The difference can be represented
schematically as follows: In the modal feudal journey, the heir of
Noble A, on his father's death, moves up one step to take that father's
place. This ascension requires a round-trip, to the centre for investiture,
and then back home to the ancestral demesne. For the new functionary,
however, things are more complex. Talent, not death, charts his course.
He sees before him a summit rather than a centre. He travels up its
corniches in a series of looping arcs which, he hopes, will become
smaller and tighter as he nears the top. Sent out to township A at rank V,
he may return to the capital at rank W; proceed to province B at rank X;
continue to vice-royalty C at rank Y; and end his pilgrimage in the
capital at rank Z. On this journey there is no assured resting-place; every
pause is provisional. The last thing the functionary wants is to return
home; for he has no home with any intrinsic value. And this: on his
upward-spiralling road he encounters as eager fellow-pilgrims his
functionary colleagues, from places and families he has scarcely heard
29. The 'secular pilgrimage' should not be taken merely as a fanciful trope. Conrad
was being ironical, but also precise, when he described as 'pilgrims' the spectral agents of
Leopold II in the heart of darkness.
30. Especially where: (a) monogamy was religiously and legally enforced; (b)
primogeniture was the rule; (c) non-dynastic titles were both inheritable and conceptually
and legally distinct from office-rank: i.e. where provincial aristocracies had
significant independent power - England, as opposed to Siam.
31. See Bloch, Feudal Society, II, pp. 422ff.
5 5
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
of and surely hopes never to have to see. But in experiencing them as
travelling-companions, a consciousness of connectedness ('Why are we
. . . here . . . together?) emerges, above all when all share a single
language-of-state. Then, if official A from province B administers
province C, while official D from province C administers province
B — a situation that absolutism begins to make likely - that experience of
interchangeability requires its own explanation: the ideology of absolutism,
which the new men themselves, as much as the sovereign,
elaborate.
Documentary interchangeability, which reinforced human interchangeability,
was fostered by the development of a standardized
language-of-state. As the stately succession of Anglo-Saxon, Latin,
Norman, and Early English in London from the eleventh through
the fourteenth centuries demonstrates, any written language could, in
principle, serve this function - provided it was given monopoly rights.
(One could, however, argue that where vernaculars, rather than Latin,
happened to hold the monopoly, a further centralizing function was
achieved, by restricting the drift of one sovereign's officials to his rivals'
machines: so to speak ensuring that Madrid's pilgrim-functionaries were
not interchangeable with those of Paris.)
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 of birth - operated only fitfully beyond the eastern
32
shores of the Atlantic.
The pattern is plain in the Americas. For example, of the 170
viceroys in Spanish America prior to 1813, only 4 were Creoles. These
figures are all the more startling if we note that in 1800 less than 5% of
the 3,200,000 Creole 'whites' in the Western Empire (imposed on
about 13,700,000 indigenes) were Spain-born Spaniards. On the eve of
32. Obviously this rationality should not be exaggerated. The case of the United
Kingdom, where Catholics were barred from office until 1829, is not unique. Can
one doubt that this long exclusion played an important role in fostering Irish
nationalism?
56
CREOLE PIONEERS
the revolution in Mexico, there was only one creole bishop, although
33
Creoles in the viceroyalty outnumbered peninsulares by 70 to 1. And,
needless to say, it was nearly unheard-of for a creole to rise to a position
of official importance in Spain.34
Moreover, the pilgrimages of creole
functionaries were not merely vertically barred. If peninsular officials
could travel the road from Zaragoza to Cartagena, Madrid, Lima, and
again Madrid, the 'Mexican' or 'Chilean' creole typically served only in
the territories of colonial Mexico or Chile: his lateral movement was as
cramped as his vertical ascent. In this way, the apex of his looping
climb, the highest administrative centre to which he could be assigned,
was the capital of the imperial administrative unit in which he found35
himself. Yet on this cramped pilgrimage he found travellingcompanions,
who came to sense that their fellowship was based not
only on that pilgrimage's particular stretch, but on the shared fatality of
trans-Atlantic birth. Even if he was born within one week of his father's
33. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, pp. 18-19, 298. Of the roughly
15,000 peninsulares, half were soldiers.
34. In the first decade of the nineteenth century there seem to have been
about 400 South Americans resident in Spain at any one time. These included the
'Argentinian' San Martin, who was taken to Spain as a small boy, and spent the
next 27 years there, entering the Royal Academy for noble youth, and playing a
distinguished part in the armed struggle against Napoleon before returning to his
homeland on hearing of its declaration of independence; and Bolivar, who for a
time boarded in Madrid with Manuel Mello, 'American' lover of Queen Marie
Louise. Masur describes him as belonging (c. 1805) to 'a group of young South
Americans' who, like him, 'were rich, idle and in disfavour with the Court. The
hatred and sense of inferiority felt by many Creoles for the mother country was in
them developing into revolutionary impulses.' Bolivar, pp. 41-47, and 469-70 (San
Martin).
35. Over time, military pilgrimages became as important as civilian. 'Spain had
neither the money nor the manpower to maintain large garrisons of regular troops in
America, and she relied chiefly on colonial militias, which from the mid-eighteenth
century were expanded and reorganized.' (Ibid., p. 10). These militias were quite
local, not interchangeable parts of a continental security apparatus. They played an
increasingly critical role from the 1760s on, as British incursions multiplied. Bolivar's
father had been a prominent militia commander, defending Venezuelan ports against
the intruders. Bolivar himself served in his father's old unit as a teenager. (Masur,
Bolivar, pp. 30 and 38). In this respect he was typical of many of the first-generation
nationalist leaders of Argentina, Venezuela, and Chile. See Robert L. Gilmore,
Caudillism and Militarism in Venezuela, 1810-1910, chapter 6 ['The Militia'] and 7
['The Military'].
57
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
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
a 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
36
peninsular could not be a true American.
What made the exclusion appear rational in the metropole?
Doubtless the confluence of a time-honoured Machiavellism with
the growth of conceptions of biological and ecological contamination
that accompanied the planetary spread of Europeans and European
power from the sixteenth century onwards. From the sovereign's angle
of vision, the American Creoles, with their ever-growing numbers and
increasing local rootedness with each succeeding generation, presented
a historically unique political problem. For the first time the metropoles
had to deal with - for that era — vast numbers of 'fellow-Europeans'
(over three million in the Spanish Americas by 1800) far outside
Europe. If the indigenes were conquerable by arms and disease, and
controllable by the mysteries of Christianity and a completely alien
culture (as well as, for those days, an advanced political organization),
the same was not true of the Creoles, who had virtually the same
relationship to arms, disease, Christianity and European culture as the
metropolitans. In other words, in principle, they had readily at hand the
political, cultural and military means for successfully asserting themselves.
They constituted simultaneously a colonial community and an
upper class. They were to be economically subjected and exploited, but
they were also essential to the stability of the empire. One can see, in
this light, a certain parallelism between the position of the Creole
36. Notice the transformations that independence brought the Americans: firstgeneration
immigrants now became 'lowest' rather than 'highest', i.e. the ones most
contaminated by a fatal place of birth. Similar inversions occur in response to racism.
'Black blood' — taint of the tar-brush — came, under imperialism, to be seen as hopelessly
contaminating for any 'white.' Today, in the United States at least, the 'mulatto' has
entered the museum. The tiniest trace of 'black blood' makes one beautifully Black.
Contrast Fermm's optimistic programme for miscegenation, and his absence of concern
for the colour of the expected progeny.
58
CREOLE PIONEERS
magnates and of feudal barons, crucial to the sovereign's power, but
also a menace to it. Thus the peninsulares dispatched as viceroys and
bishops served the same functions as did the homines novi of the pro to-
37 •
absolutist bureaucracies. Even if the viceroy was a grandee in his
Andalusian home, here, 5,000 miles away, juxtaposed to the Creoles, he
was effectively a homo novus fully dependent on his metropolitan master.
The tense balance between peninsular official and Creole magnate was
in this way an expression of the old policy of divide et impera in a new
setting.
In addition, the growth of creole communities, mainly in the
Americas, but also in parts of Asia and Africa, led inevitably to the
appearance of Eurasians, Eurafricans, as well as Euramericans, not as
occasional curiosities but as visible social groups. Their emergence
permitted a style of thinking to flourish which foreshadows modern
racism. Portugal, earliest of Europe's planetary conquerors, provides
an apt illustration of this point. In the last decade of the fifteenth
century Dom Manuel I could still 'solve' his 'Jewish question' by
mass, forcible conversion - possibly the last European ruler to find this38
solution both satisfactory and 'natural'. Less than a century later,
however, one finds Alexandre Valignano, the great reorganizer of the
Jesuit mission in Asia between 1574 and 1606, vehemently opposing
the admission of Indians and Eurindians to the priesthood in these39terms:
All these dusky races are very stupid and vicious, and of the basest
spirits... As for the mestizos and casti§os, we should receive either very
few or none at all; especially with regard to the mestizos, since the
more native blood they have, the more they resemble the Indians and
the less they are esteemed by the Portuguese.
(Yet Valignano actively encouraged the admission of Japanese, Koreans,
Chinese, and 'Indochinese' to the priestly function - perhaps
37. Given Madrid's deep concern that the management of the colonies be in
trustworthy hands, 'it was axiomatic that the high posts be filled exclusively with nativeborn
Spaniards'. Masur, Bolivar, p. 10.
38. Charles R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415—1825, p. 266.
39. Ibid., p. 252.
59
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
because in those zones mestizos had yet to appear in any numbers?)
Similarly, the Portuguese Franciscans in Goa violently opposed admission
of Creoles to the order, alleging that 'even if born of pure
white parents [they] have been suckled by Indian ayahs in their infancy
and thus had their blood contaminated for life.'40
Boxer shows that
'racial' bars and exclusions increased markedly during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries by comparison with earlier practice. To this
malignant tendency the revival of large-scale slavery (for the first time
in Europe since antiquity), which was pioneered by Portugal after
1510, made its own massive contribution. Already in the 1550s, 10%
of Lisbon's population were slaves; by 1800 there were close to a
million slaves among the 2,500,000 or so inhabitants of Portugal's
Brazil.41
Indirectly, the Enlightenment also influenced the crystallization of a
fatal distinction between metropolitans and Creoles. In the course of his
twenty-two years in power (1755-1777), the enlightened autocrat
Pombal not only expelled the Jesuits from Portuguese domains, but
made it a criminal offence to call 'coloured' subjects by offensive names,
such as 'nigger' or 'mestizo' [sic]. But he justified this decree by citing
ancient Roman conceptions of imperial citizenship, not the doctrines of
the philosophes.42
More typically, the writings of Rousseau and Herder,
which argued that climate and 'ecology' had a constitutive impact on
culture and character, exerted wide influence.43
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.
40. Ibid., p. 253.
41. Rona Fields, The Portuguese Revolution and the Armed Forces Movement, p. 15.
42. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, pp. 257-58.
43. Kemilainen, Nationalism, pp. 72—73.
44. I have emphasized here the racialist distinctions drawn between peninsulares
and Creoles because the main topic under review is the rise of Creole nationalism. This
should not be understood as minimizing the parallel growth of Creole racism towards
mestizos, Negroes, and Indians; nor the willingness of an unthreatened metropole to
protect (up to a certain point) these unfortunates.
60
CREOLE PIONEERS
Our attention thus far has been focussed on the worlds of functionaries
in the Americas - strategically important, but still small worlds. Moreover,
they were worlds which, with their conflicts between peninsulares
and Creoles, predated the appearance of American national consciousnesses
at the end of the eighteenth century. Cramped viceregal
pilgrimages had no decisive consequences until their territorial stretch
could be imagined as nations, in other words until the arrival of print-
capitalism.
Print itself spread early to New Spain, but for two centuries it
remained under the tight control of crown and church. Till the end
of the seventeenth century, presses existed only in Mexico City and
Lima, and their output was almost exclusively ecclesiastical. In
Protestant North America printing scarcely existed at all in that
century. In the course of the eighteenth, however, a virtual
revolution took place. Between 1691 and 1820, no less than
2,120 'newspapers' were published, of which 461 lasted more than
' 45
ten years.
The figure of Benjamin Franklin is indelibly associated with
Creole nationalism in the northern Americas. But the importance
of his trade may be less apparent. Once again, Febvre and Martin
are enlightening. They remind us that 'printing did not really
develop in [North] America during the eighteenth century until
printers discovered a new source of income — the newspaper.'46
Printers starting new presses always included a newspaper in their
productions, to which they were usually the main, even the sole,
contributor. Thus the printer-journalist was initially an essentially
North American phenomenon. Since the main problem facing the
printer-journalist was reaching readers, there developed an alliance
with the post-master so intimate that often each became the other.
Hence, the printer's office emerged as the key to North American
communications and community intellectual life. In Spanish
America, albeit more slowly and intermittently, similar processes
45. Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, pp. 208-11.
46. Ibid., p. 211.
61
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
produced, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the first
local presses.47
What were the characteristics of the first American newspapers,
North or South? They began essentially as appendages of the market.
Early gazettes contained — aside from news about the metropole —
commercial news (when ships would arrive and depart, what prices
were current for what commodities in what ports), as well as colonial
political appointments, marriages of the wealthy, and so forth. In other
words, what brought together, on the same page, this marriage with
that ship, this price with that bishop, was the very structure of the
colonial administration and market-system itself. In this way, the
newspaper of Caracas quite naturally, and even apolitically, created
an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellowreaders,
to whom these ships, brides, bishops and prices belonged.
In time, of course, it was only to be expected that political elements
would enter in.
One fertile trait of such newspapers was always their provinciality. A
colonial Creole might read a Madrid newspaper if he got the chance (but
it would say nothing about his world), but many a peninsular official,
living down the same street, would, if he could help it, not read the
Caracas production. An asymmetry infinitely replicable in other colonial
situations. Another such trait was plurality. The Spanish-American
journals that developed towards the end of the eighteenth century were
written in full awareness of provincials in worlds parallel to their own.
The newspaper-readers of Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Bogota,
even if they did not read each other's newspapers, were nonetheless
quite conscious of their existence. Hence a well-known doubleness in
early Spanish-American nationalism, its alternating grand stretch and
particularistic localism. The fact that early Mexican nationalists wrote of
themselves as nosotros los Americanos and of their country as nuestra
America, has been interpreted as revealing the vanity of the local Creoles
who, because Mexico was far the most valuable of Spain's American
48
possessions, saw themselves as the centre of the New World. But, in
47. Franco, An Introduction, p. 28.
48. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, p. 33.
62
CREOLE PIONEERS
fact, people all over Spanish America thought of themselves as 'Americans,'
since this term denoted precisely the shared fatality of extraSpanish
birth.
At the same time, we have seen that the very conception of the
newspaper implies the refraction of even 'world events' into a
specific imagined world of vernacular readers; and also how important
to that imagined community is an idea of steady, solid
simultaneity through time. Such a simultaneity the immense stretch
of the Spanish American Empire, and the isolation of its component
parts, made difficult to imagine.50
Mexican Creoles might learn
months later of developments in Buenos Aires, but it would be
through Mexican newspapers, not those of the Rio de la Plata; and
the events would appear as 'similar to' rather than 'part of events in
Mexico.
In this sense, the 'failure' of the Spanish-American experience to
generate a permanent Spanish-America-wide 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. (The world-historical era in which each nationalism is
born probably has a significant impact on its scope. Is Indian nationalism
not inseparable from colonial administrative-market unification,
after the Mutiny, by the most formidable and advanced of the imperial
powers?)
The Protestant, English-speaking Creoles to the north were much
more favourably situated for realizing the idea of 'America' and
indeed eventually succeeded in appropriating the everyday title of
'Americans'. The original Thirteen Colonies comprised an area
49. 'A peon came to complain that the Spanish overseer of his estancia had beaten
him. San Martin was indignant, but it was a nationalist rather than socialist indignation.
"What do you think? After three years of revolution, a maturrango [vulg., Peninsular
Spaniard] dares to raise his hand against an American!"' Ibid., p. 87.
50. A spell-binding evocation of the remoteness and isolation of the SpanishAmerican
populations is Marquez's picture of the fabulous Macondo in One Hundred
Years of Solitude.
63
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
smaller than Venezuela, and one third the size of Argentina.51
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. The 'United States' could gradually multiply in numbers
over the next 183 years, as old and new populations moved westwards
out of the old east coast core. Yet even in the case of the USA there
are elements of comparative 'failure' or shrinkage - non-absorption of
English-speaking Canada, Texas's decade of independent sovereignty
(1835—46). Had a sizeable English-speaking community existed in
California in the eighteenth century, is it not likely that an independent
state would have arisen there to play Argentina to the
Thirteen Colonies' Peru? Even in the USA, the affective bonds of
nationalism were elastic enough, combined with the rapid expansion
of the western frontier and the contradictions generated between the
economies of North and South, to precipitate a war of secession
almost a century after the Declaration of Independence; and this war today
sharply reminds us of those that tore Venezuela and Ecuador off from
Gran Colombia, and Uruguay and Paraguay from the United Pro-
CO
vinces of the Rio de la Plata.
By way of provisional conclusion, it may be appropriate to reemphasize
the limited and specific thrust of the argument so far. It is
intended less to explain the socio-economic bases of antimetropolitan
resistance in the Western hemisphere between say,
1760 and 1830, than why the resistance was conceived in plural,
'national' forms — rather than in others. The economic interests at
stake are well-known and obviously of fundamental importance.
51. The total area of the Thirteen Colonies was 322,497 square miles. That of
Venezuela was 352,143; of Argentina, 1,072,067; and of Spanish South America,
3,417,625 square miles.
52. Paraguay forms a case of exceptional interest. Thanks to the relatively
benevolent dictatorship established there by the Jesuits early in the seventeenth century,
the indigenes were better treated than elsewhere in Spanish America, and Guarani
achieved the status of print-language. The Crown's expulsion of the Jesuits from
Spanish America in 1767 brought the territory into the Rio de la Plata, but very late in
the day, and for little more than a generation. See Seton-Watson, Nations and States, pp.
200-201.
64
CREOLE PIONEERS
Liberalism ancl the Enlightenment clearly had a powerful impact,
above all in providing an arsenal of ideological criticisms of imperial
and anciens regimes. What I am proposing is that neither economic
interest, Liberalism, nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in
themselves the kind, or shape, of imagined community to be defended
from these regimes' depredations; to put it another way, none
provided the framework of a new consciousness — the scarcely-seen
periphery of its vision - as opposed to centre-field objects of its
admiration or disgust.53
In accomplishing this specific task, pilgrim
Creole functionaries and provincial Creole printmen played the
decisive historic role.
53. It is instructive that the Declaration of Independence in 1776 speaks only of
'the people', while the word 'nation' makes its debut only in the Constitution of 1789,
Kemilainen, Nationalism, p. 105.
65
Old Languages, New Models
The close of the era of successful national liberation movements in the
Americas coincided rather closely with the onset of the age of
nationalism in Europe. If we consider the character of these newer
nationalisms which, between 1820 and 1920, changed the face of the
Old World, two striking features mark them off from their ancestors.
First, in almost all of them 'national print-languages' were of central
ideological and political importance, whereas Spanish and English
were never issues in the revolutionary Americas. Second, all were able
to work from visible models provided by their distant, and after the
convulsions of the French Revolution, not so distant, predecessors.
The 'nation' thus became something capable of being consciously
aspired to from early on, rather than a slowly sharpening frame of
vision. Indeed, as we shall see, the 'nation' proved an invention on
which it was impossible to secure a patent. It became available for
pirating by widely different, and sometimes unexpected, hands. In this
chapter, therefore, the analytical focus will be on print-language and
piracy.
In blithe disregard of some obvious extra-European facts, the great
Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) had declared, towards the
end of the eighteenth century, that: 'Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat
67
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache.' This splendidly engEuropean
conception of nation-ness as linked to a private-property
language had wide influence in nineteenth-century Europe and, more
narrowly, on subsequent theorizing about the nature of nationalism.
What were the origins of this dream? Most probably, they lay in the
profound shrinkage of the European world in time and space that began
already in the fourteenth century, and was caused initially by the
Humanists' excavations and later, paradoxically enough, by Europe's
planetary expansion.
As Auerbach so well expresses it:
With the first dawn of humanism, there began to be a sense that the
events of classical history and legend and also those of the Bible were
not separated from the present simply by an extent of time but also by
completely different conditions of life. Humanism with its program of
renewal of antique forms of life and expression creates a historical
perspective in depth such as no previous epoch known to us
possessed: the humanists see antiquity in historical depth, and, against
that background, the dark epochs of the intervening Middle Ages.
. . . [This made impossible] re-establishing the autarchic life natural
to antique culture or the historical naivete of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries.
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 Ancients
and 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
1. Kemilainen, Nationalism, p. 42. Emphases added.
2. Mimesis, p. 282. Emphasis added.
3. The batde opened in 1689 when the 59-year old Charles Perrault published his
poem Siecle de Louis le Grand, which argued that the arts and sciences had come to their
full flowering in his own time and place.
68
OLD LANGUAGES, N E W MODELS
culture a valid model on a par with that of the ancients, and they
imposed this view upon the rest of Europe.'
In the course of the sixteenth century, Europe's 'discovery' of
grandiose civilizations 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 civilizations 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 polities of the age. 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 Houyhnhnms (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 real.) 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 as 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 directed against current European social and political institutions.
In effect, it became possible to think of Europe as only one
4. Mimesis, p. 343. Notice that Auerbach says 'culture', not 'language'. We should
also be chary of attributing 'nation-ness' to 'their own.'
5. Similarly, there is a nice contrast between the two famous Mongols of English
drama. Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great (1587-1588) describes a famous dynast dead
since 1407. Dryden's Aurangzeb (1676) depicts a contemporary reigning Emperor
(1658-1707).
69
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
among many civilizations, and not necessarily the Chosen or the
best.6
In due course, discovery and conquest also caused a revolution in
European ideas about language. From the earliest days, Portuguese,
Dutch, and Spanish seamen, missionaries, merchants and soldiers had,
for practical reasons — navigation, conversion, commerce and war —
gathered word-lists of non-European languages to be assembled in
simple lexicons. But it was only in the later eighteenth century that the
scientific comparative study of languages really got under way. Out of
the English conquest of Bengal came William Jones's pioneering
investigations of Sanskrit (1786), which led to a growing realization
that Indie civilization was far older than that of Greece or Judaea. Out of
Napoleon's Egyptian expedition came Jean Champollion's decipherment
of hieroglyphics (1835), which pluralized that extra-European
antiquity.7
Advances in Semitics undermined the idea that Hebrew was
either uniquely ancient or of divine provenance. Once again, genealogies
were being conceived which could only be accommodated by
homogeneous, empty time. 'Language became less of a continuity
between an outside power and the human speaker than an internal field
created and accomplished by language users among themselves.'8
Out of
these discoveries came philology, with its studies of comparative
grammar, classification of languages into families, and reconstructions
by scientific reasoning of 'proto-languages' out of oblivion. As Hobsbawm
rightly observes, here was 'the first science which regarded
evolution as its very core.'9
From this point on the old sacred languages - Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew - were forced to mingle on equal ontological footing with a
motley plebeian crowd of vernacular rivals, in a movement which
complemented their earlier demotion in the market-place by printcapitalism.
If all languages now shared a common (intra-)mundane
6. So, as European imperialism smashed its insouciant way around the globe, other
civilizations found themselves traumatically confronted by pluralisms which annihilated
their sacred genealogies. The Middle Kingdom's marginalization to the Far East is
emblematic of this process.
7. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, p. 337.
8. Edward Said, Orientalism, p. 136.
9. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, p. 337.
70
OLD LANGUAGES, NEW MODELS
status, then all were in principle equally worthy of study and admiration.
But by who? Logically, since now none belonged to God, by their new
owners: each language's native speakers — and readers.
As Seton-Watson most usefully shows, the nineteenth century
was, in Europe and its immediate peripheries, a golden age of
vernacularizing lexicographers, grammarians, philologists, and litterateurs.
The energetic activities of these professional intellectuals
were central to the shaping of nineteenth-century European nationalisms
in complete contrast to the situation in the Americas
between 1770 and 1830. Monolingual dictionaries were vast compendia
of each language's print-treasury, portable (if sometimes
barely so) from shop to school, office to residence. Bilingual
dictionaries made visible an approaching egalitarianism among languages
— whatever the political realities outside, within the covers of
the Czech-German/German-Czech dictionary the paired languages
had a common status. The visionary drudges who devoted years to
their compilation were of necessity drawn to or nurtured by the
great libraries of Europe, above all those of the universities. And
much of their immediate clientele was no less inevitably university
and pre-university students. Hobsbawm's dictum that 'the progress
of schools and universities measures that of nationalism, just as
schools and especially universities became its most conscious champions,'
is certainly correct for nineteenth-century Europe, if not for
11other times and places.
10. 'Just because the history of language is usually in our time kept so rigidly
apart from conventional political, economic and social history, it has seemed to me
desirable to bring it together with these, even at the cost of less expertise.' Nations and
States, p. 11. In fact, one of the most valuable aspects of Seton-Watson's text is
precisely his attention to language history - though one can disagree with the way he
employs it.
11. The Age of Revolution, p. 166. Academic institutions were insignificant to the
American nationalisms. Hobsbawm himself notes that though there were 6,000 students
in Paris at the time, they played virtually no role in the French Revolution (p. 167). He
also usefully reminds us that although education spread rapidly in the first half of the
nineteenth century, the number of adolescents in schools was still minuscule by modern
standards: a mere 19,000 lycee students in France in 1842; 20,000 high school pupils
among the 68,000,000 population of Imperial Russia in 1850; a likely total of 48,000
university students in all Europe in 1848. Yet in the revolutions of that year, this tiny,
but strategic, group played a pivotal role. (pp. 166-67).
71
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
One can thus trace this lexicographic revolution as one might the
ascending roar in an arsenal alight, as each small explosion ignites others,
till the final blaze turns night into day.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the prodigious labours of
German, French and English scholars had not only made available in
handy printed form virtually the entire extant corpus of the Greek
classics, along with the necessary philological and lexicographic adjuncts,
but in dozens of books were recreating a glittering, and firmly
pagan, ancient Hellenic civilization. In the last quarter of the century,
this 'past' became increasingly accessible to a small number of young
Greek-speaking Christian intellectuals, most of whom had studied or
12
travelled outside the confines of the Ottoman Empire. Exalted by the
philhellenism at the centres of Western European civilization, they
undertook the 'debarbarizing' of the modern Greeks, i.e., their trans-\ 3
formation into beings worthy of Pericles and Socrates. Emblematic of
this change in consciousness are the following words of one of these
young men, Adamantios Koraes (who later became an ardent lexicographer!),
in an address to a French audience in Paris in 1803:14
For the first time the nation surveys the hideous spectacle of its
ignorance and trembles in measuring with the eye the distance
separating it from its ancestors' glory. This painful discovery, however,
does not precipitate the Greeks into despair: We are the descendants
of Greeks, they implicitly told themselves, we must either try to
become again worthy of this name, or we must not bear it.
Similarly in the late eighteenth century, grammars, dictionaries
and histories of Rumanian appeared, accompanied by a drive,
successful at first in the Habsburg realms, later in the Ottoman,
for the replacement of Cyrillic by the Roman alphabet (marking
12. The first Greek newspapers appeared in 1784 in Vienna. Philike Hetairia, the
secret society largely responsible for the 1821 anti-Ottoman uprising, was founded in
the 'great new Russian grain port of Odessa' in 1814.
13. See Elie Kedourie's introduction to Nationalism in Asia and Africa, p. 40.
14. Ibid., pp. 43-44. Emphasis added. The full text of Koraes's 'The Present State
of Civilization in Greece' is given in pp. 157-82. It contains a stunningly modern
analysis of the sociological bases for Greek nationalism.
72
OLD LANGUAGES, N E W MODELS
• 15
Rumanian sharply off from its Slavic-Orthodox neighbours). Between
1789 and 1794, the Russian Academy, modelled on the
Academic Fran^aise, produced a six-volume Russian dictionary,
followed by an official grammar in 1802. Both represented a triumph
of the vernacular over Church Slavonic. Although right into the
eighteenth century Czech was the language only of the peasantry in
Bohemia (the nobility and rising middle classes spoke German), the
Catholic priest Josef Dobrovsky (1753-1829) produced in 1792 his
Geschichte der bohmischen Sprache und altern Literatur, the first systematic
history of the Czech language and literature. In 1835—39 appeared
Josef Jungmann's pioneering five-volume Czech-German
dictionary.
Of the birth of Hungarian nationalism Ignotus writes that it is an
event 'recent enough to be dated: 1772, the year of publication of some
unreadable works by the versatile Hungarian author Gyorgy Bessenyei,
then a resident in Vienna and serving in Maria Theresa's bodyguard. . . .
Bessenyei's magna opera were meant to prove that the Hungarian17
language was suitable for the very highest literary genre.' Further
stimulus was provided by the extensive publications of Ferenc Kazinczy
(1759-1831), 'the father of Hungarian literature,' and by the removal, in
1784, of what became the University of Budapest to that city from the
small provincial town of Trnava. Its first political expression was the
Latin-speaking Magyar nobility's hostile reaction in the 1780s to
Emperor Joseph II's decision to replace Latin by German as the prime18language of imperial administration.
In the period 1800-1850, as the result of pioneering work by native
15. Not pretending to any expert knowledge of Central and Eastern Europe, I
have relied heavily on Seton-Watson in the analysis that follows. On Rumanian, see
Nations and States, p. 177.
16. Ibid., pp. 150-153.
17. Paul Ignotus, Hungary, p. 44. 'He did prove it, but his polemical drive was
more convincing than the aesthetic value of the examples he produced.' It is perhaps
worth noting that this passage occurs in a subsection entitled 'The Inventing of the
Hungarian Nation,' which opens with this pregnant phrase: 'A nation is born when a
few people decide that it should be.'
18. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, pp. 158-61. The reaction was violent
enough to persuade his successor Leopold II (r. 1790-1792) to reinstate Latin. See
also below, Chapter VI. It is instructive that Kazinczy sided politically with Joseph II on
this issue. (Ignotus, Hungary, p. 48).
73
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
scholars, three distinct literary languages were formed in the northern
Balkans: Slovene, Serbo-Croat, and Bulgarian. If, in the 1830s,
'Bulgarians' had been widely thought to be of the same nation as
the Serbs and Croats, and had in fact shared in the Illyrian Movement,
a separate Bulgarian national state was to come into existence by 1878.
In the eighteenth century, Ukrainian (Little Russian) was contemptuously
tolerated as a language of yokels. But in 1798 Ivan Kotlarevsky
wrote his Aeneid, an enormously popular satirical poem on Ukrainian
life. In 1804, the University of Kharkov was founded and rapidly
became the centre for a boom in Ukrainian literature. In 1819
appeared the first Ukrainian grammar - only 17 years after the official
Russian one. And in the 1830s followed the works of Taras Shevchenko,
of whom Seton-Watson observes that 'the formation of an
accepted Ukrainian literary language owes more to him than to any
other individual. The use of this language was the decisive stage in the
19
formation of an Ukrainian national consciousness.' Shortly thereafter,
in 1846, the first Ukrainian nationalist organization was founded
in Kiev - by a historian!
In the eighteenth century the language-of-state in today's Finland
was Swedish. After the territory's union with Czardom in 1809, the
official language became Russian. But an 'awakening' interest in
Finnish and the Finnish past, first expressed through texts written in
Latin and Swedish in the later eighteenth century, by the 1820s was20
increasingly manifested in the vernacular. The leaders of the
burgeoning Finnish nationalist movement were 'persons whose
profession largely consisted of the handling of language: writers,
teachers, pastors, and lawyers. The study of folklore and the
rediscovery and piecing together of popular epic poetry went
together with the publication of grammars and dictionaries, and
led to the appearance of periodicals which served to standardize
Finnish literary [i.e. print-] language, on behalf of which stronger
19. Nations and States, p. 187. Needless to say, Czarism gave these people short
shrift. Shevchenko was broken in Siberia. The Habsburgs, however, gave some
encouragement to Ukrainian nationalists in Galicia — to counterbalance the Poles.
20. Kemilainen, Nationalism, pp. 208-15.
74
OLD LANGUAGES, NEW MODELS
?21
political demands could be advanced.' In the case of Norway,
which had long shared a written language with the Danes, though
with a completely different pronunciation, nationalism emerged
with Ivar Aasen's new Norwegian grammar (1848) and dictionary
(1850), texts which responded to and stimulated demands for a
specifically Norwegian print-language.
Elsewhere, in the latter portion of the nineteenth century, we find
Afrikaner nationalism pioneered by Boer pastors and litterateurs, who in
the 1870s were successful in making the local Dutch patois into a literary
language and naming it something no longer European. Maronites and
Copts, many of them products of Beirut's American College (founded
in 1866) and the Jesuit College of St. Joseph (founded in 1875) were
major contributors to the revival of classical Arabic and the spread of22
Arab nationalism. And the seeds of Turkish nationalism are easily
detectable in the appearance of a lively vernacular press in Istanbul in the
1870s.23
Nor should we forget that the same epoch saw the vernacularization
of another form of printed page: the score. After Dobrovsky came
Smetana, Dvorak, and Janacek; after Aasen, Grieg; after Kazinczy, Bela
Bartok; and so on well into our century.
At the same time, it is self-evident that all these lexicographers,
philologists, grammarians, folklorists, publicists, and composers did
not carry on their revolutionary activities in a vacuum. They were,
after all, producers for the print-market, and they were linked, via
that silent bazaar, to consuming publics. Who were these consumers?
In the most general sense: the families of the reading classes - not
merely the 'working father,' but the servant-girded wife and the
school-age children. If we note that as late as 1840, even in Britain
and France, the most advanced states in Europe, almost half the
population was still illiterate (and in backward Russia almost 98 per
21. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. 72.
22. Ibid., pp. 232 and 261.
23. Kohn, The Age of Nationalism, pp. 105-7. This meant rejection of'Ottoman', a
dynastic officialese combining elements of Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. Characteristically,
Ibrahim Sinasi, founder of the first such newspaper, had just returned from five
years study in France. Where he led, others soon followed. By 1876, there were seven
Turkish-language dailies in Constantinople.
75
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
cent), 'reading classes' meant people of some power. More concretely,
they were, in addition to the old ruling classes of nobilities
and landed gentries, courtiers and ecclesiastics, rising middle strata of
plebeian lower officials, professionals, and commercial and industrial
bourgeoisies.
Mid-nineteenth-century Europe witnessed a rapid increase in
state expenditures and the size of state bureaucracies (civil and
military), despite the absence of any major local wars. 'Between
1830 and 1850 public expenditure per capita increased by 25 per
cent in Spain, by 40 per cent in France, by 44 per cent in Russia, by
50 per cent in Belgium, by 70 per cent in Austria, by 75 per cent in
the USA, and by over 90 per cent in The Netherlands.' Bureaucratic
expansion, which also meant bureaucratic specialization,
opened the gates of official preferment to much greater numbers
and of far more varied social origins than hitherto. Take even the
decrepit, sinecure-filled, nobility-ridden Austro-Hungarian state
machinery: the percentage of men of middle class origins in the
top echelons of its civil half rose from 0 in 1804, through 27 in
1829, 35 in 1859, to 55 in 1878. In the armed services, the same
trend appeared, though characteristically at a slower, later pace: the
middle class component of the officer corps rose from 10 per cent to
75 per cent between 1859 and 1918.25
If the expansion of bureaucratic middle classes was a relatively even
phenomenon, occurring at comparable rates in both advanced and
backward states of Europe, the rise of commercial and industrial
bourgeoisies was of course highly uneven — massive and rapid in some
places, slow and stunted in others. But no matter where, this 'rise' has to
be understood in its relationship to vernacular print-capitalism.
The pre-bourgeois ruling classes generated their cohesions in some
sense outside language, or at least outside print-language. If the ruler of
Siam took a Malay noblewoman as a concubine, or if the King of
England married a Spanish princess — did they ever talk seriously
together? Solidarities were the products of kinship, clientship, and
24. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, p. 229.
25. Peter J. Katzenstein, Disjoined Partners, Austria and Germany since 1815, pp. 74,
112.
76
OLD LANGUAGES, N E W MODELS
personal loyalties. 'French' nobles could assist 'English' kings against
'French' monarchs, not on the basis of shared language or culture,
but, Machiavellian calculations aside, of shared kinsmen and friendships.
The relatively small size of traditional aristocracies, their fixed
political bases, and the personalization of political relations implied
by sexual intercourse and inheritance, meant that their cohesions as
classes were as much concrete as imagined. An illiterate nobility
could still act as a nobility. But the bourgeoisie? Here was a class
which, figuratively speaking, came into being as a class only in so
many replications. Factory-owner in Lille was connected to
factory-owner in Lyon only by reverberation. They had no
necessary reason to know of one another's existence; they did
not typically marry each other's daughters or inherit each other's
property. But they did come to visualize in a general way the
existence of thousands and thousands like themselves through printlanguage.
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. But in a
nineteenth-century Europe in which Latin had been defeated by
vernacular print-capitalism for something like two centuries, these
solidarities had an outermost stretch limited by vernacular legibilities.
To put it another way, one can sleep with anyone, but one
can only read some people's words.
Nobilities, landed gentries, professionals, functionaries, and men of
the market - these then were the potential consumers of the philological
revolution. But such a clientele was almost nowhere fully
realized, and the combinations of actual consumers varied considerably
from zone to zone. To see why, one has to return to the basic contrast
drawn earlier between Europe and the Americas. In the Americas
there was an almost perfect isomorphism between the stretch of the
various empires and that of their vernaculars. In Europe, however,
such coincidences were rare, and intra-European dynastic empires
were basically polyvernacular. In other words, power and printlanguage
mapped different realms.
The general growth in literacy, commerce, industry, communications
and state machineries that marked the nineteenth century created
powerful new impulses for vernacular linguistic unification within each
77
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
dynastic realm. Latin hung on as a language-of-state in Austro-Hungary
as late as the early 1840s, but it disappeared almost immediately
thereafter. Language-of-state it might be, but it could not, in the
nineteenth century, be the language of business, of the sciences, of
the press, or of literature, especially in a world in which these languages
continuously interpenetrated one another.
Meantime, 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 wall, and Castilian reduced Catalan to
marginality. In those realms, such as Britain and France, where, for
quite extraneous reasons, there happened to be, by mid-century, a
relatively high coincidence of language-of-state and language of the
population, the general interpenetration alluded to above did not
have dramatic political effects. (These cases are closest to those of the
Americas.) In many other realms, of which Austro-Hungary is probably
the polar example, the consequences were inevitably explosive. In
its huge, ramshackle, polyglot, but increasingly literate, domain the
replacement of Latin by any vernacular, in the mid nineteenth century,
promised enormous advantages to those of its subjects who already
used that print-language, and appeared correspondingly menacing to
those who did not. I emphasize the word any, since, as we shall be
discussing in greater detail below, German's nineteenth century
elevation by the Habsburg court, German as some might think it,
had nothing whatever to do with German nationalism. (Under these
circumstances, one would expect a self-conscious nationalism to arise
last in each dynastic realm among the native-readers of the official
vernacular. And such expectations are borne out by the historical
record.)
In terms of our lexicographers' clienteles, it is therefore not
surprising to find very different bodies of customers according to
different political conditions. In Hungary, for example, where virtually
26. As we have seen, vernacularization of the languages-of-state in these two
realms was under way very early. In the case of the UK, the military subjugation of the
Gaeltacht early in the eighteenth century and the Famine of the 1840s were powerful
contributory factors.
78
OLD LANGUAGES, N E W MODELS
no Magyar bourgeoisie existed, but one out of eight claimed some
aristocratic status, the parapets of print-Hungarian were defended
against the German tide by segments of the petty nobility and an
27
impoverished landed gentry . Much the same could be said of Polishreaders.
More typical, however, was a coalition of lesser gentries,
academics, professionals, and businessmen, in which the first often
provided leaders of'standing,' the second and third myths, poetry,
newspapers, and ideological formulations, and the last money and
marketing facilities. The amiable Koraes offers us a fine vignette of the
early clientele for Greek nationalism, in which intellectuals and28
entrepreneurs predominated:
In those towns which were less poor, which had some well-to-do
inhabitants and a few schools, and therefore a few individuals who
could at least read and understand the ancient writers, the revolution
began earlier and could make more rapid and more comforting
progress. In some of these towns, schools are already being enlarged,
and the study offoreign languages and even of those sciences which are
taught in Europe [sic] is being introduced into them. The wealthy
sponsor the printing of books translated from Italian, French, German,
and English; they send to Europe at their expense young men
eager to learn; they give their children a better education, not
excepting girls . . .
Reading coalitions, with compositions that lay variously on the spectrum
between Hungarian and Greek, developed similarly throughout
Central and Eastern Europe, and into the Near East as the century
29
proceeded. How far the urban and rural masses shared in the new
vernacularly imagined communities naturally also varied a great deal.
27. Hobsbzwm, The Age of Revolution, p. 165. For an excellent, detailed discussion,
see Ignotus, Hungary, pp. 44—56; also Jaszi, The Dissolution, pp. 224-25.
28. Kedourie, Nationalism in Asia and Africa, p. 170. Emphasis added. Everything
here is exemplary. If Koraes looks to 'Europe,' it is over his shoulder; he faces
Constantinople. Ottoman is not yet a foreign language. And non-labouring future
wives are entering the print-market.
29. For examples, see Seton-Watson, Nations and States, pp. 72 (Finland), 145
(Bulgaria), 153 (Bohemia), and 432 (Slovakia); Kohn, The Age of Nationalism, pp. 83
(Egypt) and 103 (Persia).
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Much depended on the relationship between these masses and the
missionaries of nationalism. At one extreme, perhaps, one might point
to Ireland, where a Catholic priesthood drawn from the peasantry and
close to it played a vital mediating role. Another extreme is suggested by
Hobsbawm's ironic comment that: 'The Galician peasants in 1846
opposed the Polish revolutionaries even though these actually proclaimed
the abolition of serfdom, preferring to massacre gentlemen and
30
trust to the Emperor's officials.' But everywhere, in fact, as literacy
increased, it became easier to arouse popular support, with the masses
discovering a new glory in the print elevation of languages they had
humbly spoken all along.
Up to a point, then, Nairn's arresting formulation - '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?31
understood' — is correct. But it will be hard to see why the invitation
came to seem so attractive, and why such different alliances were able to
issue it (Nairn's middle-class intelligentsia was by no means the only
host), unless we turn finally to piracy.
Hobsbawm observes 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. It hardly even
threw up "leaders" of the kind to which twentieth century revolutions
have accustomed us, until the post-revolutionary figure of* 32
Napoleon.' But once it had occurred, it entered the accumulating
memory of print. The overwhelming and bewildering concatenation
of events experienced by its makers and its victims became a 'thing'
— and with its own name: The French Revolution. Like a vast
shapeless rock worn to a rounded boulder by countless drops of
water, the experience was shaped by millions of printed words into a
'concept' on the printed page, and, in due course, into a model.
Why 'it' broke out, what 'it' aimed for, why 'it' succeeded or failed,
became subjects for endless polemics on the part of friends and foes:
30. The Age of Revolution, p. 169.
31. The Break-up of Britain, p. 340.
32. The Age of Revolution, p. 80.
80
OLD LANGUAGES, N E W MODELS
33
but of its 'it-ness', as it were, no one ever after had much doubt.
In much the same way, the independence movements in the
Americas became, as soon as they were printed about, 'concepts,'
'models', and indeed 'blueprints.' In 'reality', 'Bolivar's fear of Negro
insurrections and San Martin's summoning of his indigenes to Peruvianness
jostled one another chaotically. But printed words washed
away the former almost at once, so that, if recalled at all, it appeared an
inconsequential anomaly. Out of the American welter came these
imagined realities: nation-states, republican institutions, common citizenships,
popular sovereignty, national flags and anthems, etc., and the
liquidation of their conceptual opposites: dynastic empires, monarchical
institutions, absolutisms, subjecthoods, inherited nobilities, serfdoms,
ghettoes, and so forth. (Nothing more stunning, in this context, than
the general 'elision' of massive slavery from the 'modal' USA of the
nineteenth century, and of the shared language of the 'modal' Southern
republics.) Furthermore, the validity and generalizability of the blueprint
were undoubtedly confirmed by the plurality of the independent
states.
In effect, by the second decade of the nineteenth century, if not
earlier, a 'model' of 'the' independent national state was available for
pirating.34
(The first groups to do so were the marginalized vernacularbased
coalitions of the educated on which this chapter has been
focused.) But precisely because it was by then a known model, it
imposed certain 'standards' from which too-marked deviations were
impermissible. Even backward and reactionary Hungarian and Polish
gentries were hard put to it not to make a show of'inviting in' (if only to
the pantry) their oppressed compatriots. If you like, the logic of San
Martin's Peruvianization was at work. If 'Hungarians' deserved a
33. Compare: 'The very name of the Industrial Revolution reflects its relatively
tardy impact on Europe. The thing [sic] existed in Britain before the word. Not until the
1820s did English and French socialists - themselves an unprecedented group - invent
it, probably by analogy with the political revolution of France.' Ibid., p. 45.
34. 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 until
after 1870 was restored monarchies and the ersatz dynasticism of Napoleon's great-
nephew.
81
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
35
national state, then that meant Hungarians, all of them; it meant a state
in which the ultimate locus of sovereignty had to be the collectivity of
Hungarian-speakers and readers; and, in due course, the liquidation of
serfdom, the promotion of popular education, the expansion of the
suffrage, and so on. Thus the 'populist' character of the early European
nationalism, even when led, demagogically, by the most backward
social groups, was deeper than in the Americas: serfdom had to go, legal
slavery was unimaginable - not least because the conceptual model was
set in ineradicable place.
35. Not that this was a clear-cut matter. Half the subjects of the Kingdom of
Hungary were non-Magyar. Only one third of the serfs were Magyar-speakers. In the
early nineteenth century, the high Magyar aristocracy spoke French or German; the
middle and lower nobility 'conversed in a dog-Latin strewn with Magyar, but also with
Slovak, Serb, and Romanian expressions as well as vernacular German . . . .' Ignotus,
Hungary, pp. 45-46, and 81.
82
Official Nationalism
and Imperialism
In the course of the nineteenth century, and especially in its latter half,
the philological-lexicographic revolution and the rise of intraEuropean
nationalist movements, themselves the products, not only
of capitalism, but of the elephantiasis of the dynastic states, created
increasing cultural, and therefore political, difficulties for many dynasts.
For, as we have seen, the fundamental legitimacy of most of
these dynasties had nothing to do with nationalness. Romanovs ruled
over Tatars and Letts, Germans and Armenians, Russians and Finns.
Habsburgs were perched high over Magyars and Croats, Slovaks and
Italians, Ukrainians and Austro-Germans. Hanoverians presided over
Bengalis and Quebecois, as well as Scots and Irish, English and
Welsh.1
On the
continent, furthermore, members of the same
dynastic families often ruled in different, sometimes rivalrous, states.
What nationality should be assigned to Bourbons ruling in France and
1. It is nice that what eventually became the late British Empire has not been ruled
by an 'English' dynasty since the early eleventh century: since then a motley parade of
Normans (Plantagenets), Welsh (Tudors), Scots (Stuarts), Dutch (House of Orange) and
Germans (Hanoverians) have squatted on the imperial throne. No one much cared until
the philological revolution and a paroxysm of English nationalism in World War I.
House of Windsor rhymes with House of Schonbrunn or House of Versailles.
83
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Spain, Hohenzollerns in Prussia and Rumania, Wittelsbachs in Bavaria
and Greece?
We have also seen that for essentially administrative purposes these
dynasties had, at different speeds, settled on certain print-vernaculars as
languages-of-state - with the "choice' of language essentially a matter of
unselfconscious inheritance or convenience.
The lexicographic revolution in Europe, however, 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 groups,
imagined as communities, were entitled to their autonomous place in
a fraternity of equals. The philological incendiaries thus presented
the dynasts with a disagreeable dilemma which did not fail to sharpen
over time. Nowhere is this dilemma clearer than in the case of
Austro-Hungary. When the enlightened absolutist Joseph II decided
early in the 1780s to switch the language of state from Latin to
German, 'he did not fight, for instance, against the Magyar language,
but he fought against the Latin. . . . He thought that, on the basis of
the mediaeval Latin administration of the nobility, no effective work
in the interest of the masses could have been carried on. The
necessity of a unifying language connecting all parts of his empire
seemed to him a peremptory claim. Under this necessity he could
not choose any other language than German, the only one which
had a vast culture and literature under its sway and which had a
considerable minority in all his provinces.' Indeed, 'the Habsburgs
were not a consciously and consequentially Germanizing power. . . .
There were Habsburgs who did not even speak German. Even those
Habsburg emperors who sometimes fostered a policy of Germanization
were not led in their efforts by any nationalistic point of view,
but their measures were dictated by the intent of unification and
universalism of their empire.' Their essential aim was Hausmacht.
After the middle of the nineteenth century, however, German
2. Jaszi, The Dissolution, p. 71. It is interesting that Joseph had refused to take the
coronation oath as King of Hungary because this would have committed him to
respecting the 'constitutional' privileges of the Magyar nobility. Ignotus, Hungary, p.
47.
3. Ibid., p. 137. Emphasis added.
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OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
increasingly acquired a double status: 'universal-imperial' and
'particular-national'. The more the dynasty pressed German in its
first capacity, the more it appeared to be siding with its Germanspeaking
subjects, and the more it aroused antipathy among the rest.
Yet if it did not so press, indeed made concessions to other
languages, above all Hungarian, not only was unification set back,
but its German-speaking subjects allowed themselves to feel affronted.
Thus it threatened to be hated simultaneously as champion
of the Germans and traitor to them. (In much the same way, the
Ottomans came to be hated by Turkish-speakers as apostates and by
non-Turkish-speakers as Turkifiers.)
Insofar as all dynasts by mid-century were using some vernacular as
language-of-state,4
and also because of the 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. Romanovs discovered they were Great Russians, Hanoverians
that they were English, Hohenzollerns that they were Germans
- and with rather more difficulty their cousins turned Romanian,
Greek, and so forth. On the one hand, these new identifications shored
up legitimacies which, in an age of capitalism, scepticism, and science,
could less and less safely rest on putative sacrality and sheer antiquity. On
the other hand, they posed new dangers. If Kaiser Wilhelm II cast
himself as 'No. 1 German,' he implicitly conceded that he was one among
many of the same kind as himself that he had a representative function, and
therefore could, in principle, be a traitor to his fellow-Germans (something
inconceivable in the dynasty's heyday. Traitor to whom or to
what?). In the wake of the disaster that overtook Germany in 1918, he
was taken at his implied word. Acting in the name of the German
nation, civilian politicians (publicly) and the General Staff (with its usual
courage, secretly) sent him packing from the Fatherland to an obscure
Dutch suburb. So too Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi, having cast himself,
4. One could argue that a long era closed in 1844, when Magyar finally replaced
Latin as language-of-state in the Kingdom of Hungary. But, as we have seen, dog-Latin
was in fact the vernacular of the Magyar middle and lower nobility until well into the
nineteenth century.
85
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
not as Shah, but as Shah of Iran, came to be branded traitor. That he
himself accepted, not the verdict, but, as it were, the jurisdiction of the
national court, is shown by a small comedy at the moment of his
departure into exile. Before climbing the ramp of his jet, he kissed the
earth for the photographers and announced that he was taking a small
quantity of sacred Iranian soil with him. This take is lifted from a film
about Garibaldi, not the Sun King.5
The 'naturalizations' of Europe's dynasties — maneuvers that
required in many cases some diverting acrobatics — eventually led
to what Seton-Watson bitingly calls 'official nationalisms,'6
of which
Czarist Russification is only the best-known example. These 'official
nationalisms' can best be understood as a means for combining
naturalization with retention of dynastic power, in particular over
the huge polyglot domains accumulated since the Middle Ages, or,
to put it another way, for stretching the short, tight, skin of the
nation over the gigantic body of the empire. 'Russification' of the
heterogeneous population of the Czar's subjects thus represented a
violent, conscious welding of two opposing political orders, one
ancient, one quite new. (While there is a certain analogy with, say,
the Hispanization of the Americas and the Philippines, one central
difference remains. The cultural conquistadors of late-nineteenthcentury
Czardom were proceeding from a selfconscious Machiavellism,
while their sixteenth-century Spanish ancestors acted out of an
unselfconscious everyday pragmatism. Nor was it for them really
'Hispanization' — rather it was simply conversion of heathens and
savages.)
The key to situating 'official nationalism' — willed merger of
nation and dynastic empire - is to remember that it developed after,
and in reaction to, the popular national movements proliferating in
Europe since the 1820s. If these nationalisms were modelled on
5. From Professor Chehabi of Harvard University I have learned that the Shah was
in the first instance imitating his father, Reza Pahlavi, who, on being exiled by London
to Mauritius in 1941, included some Iranian soil in his luggage.
6. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. 148. Alas, the bite extends only to Eastern
Europe. Seton-Watson is rightly sardonic at the expense of Romanov and Soviet
regimes, but overlooks analogous policies being pursued in London, Paris, Berlin,
Madrid and Washington.
86
OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
American and French histories, so now they became modular in
turn. It was only that a certain inventive legerdemain was required
to permit the empire to appear attractive in national drag.
To gain some perspective on this whole process of reactionary,
secondary modelling, we may profitably consider some parallel, yet
usefully contrasting cases.
How uneasy Romanov autocracy initially felt at 'taking to the
streets' is excellently shown by Seton-Watson. As noted earlier, the
language of the court of St. Petersburg in the eighteenth century was
French, while that of much of the provincial nobility was German.
In the aftermath of Napoleon's invasion, Count Sergei Uvarov, in an
official report of 1832, proposed that the realm should be based on
the three principles of Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality
(natsionalnost). If the first two were old, the third was quite novel
— and somewhat premature in an age when half the 'nation' were still
serfs, and more than half spoke a mother-tongue other than Russian.
Uvarov's report won him the post of Minister of Education, but
little more. For another half-century Czarism resisted Uvarovian
enticements. It was not until the reign of Alexander III (1881-94)
that Russification became official dynastic policy: long after Ukrainian,
Finnish, Lett and other nationalisms had appeared within the
Empire. Ironically enough, the first Russifying measures were taken
against precisely those 'nationalities' which had been most Kaisertreu
— such as the Baltic Germans. In 1887, in the Baltic provinces,
Russian was made compulsory as the language of instruction in all
state schools above the lowest primary classes, a measure later
extended to private schools as well. In 1893, the University of
Dorpat, one of the most distinguished colleges in the imperial
domains, was closed down because it used German in the
lecture-rooms. (Recall that hitherto German had been a provincial
language-of-state, not the voice of a popular nationalist movement).
7. There is an instructive parallel to all this in the politico-military reforms of
Scharnhorst, Clausewitz and Gneisenau who in a selfconsciously conservative spirit
adapted many of the spontaneous innovations of the French Revolution for the erection
of the great modular professionally-officered, standing, conscript army of the nineteenth
century.
8. Ibid., pp. 83-87.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
And so on. Seton-Watson even goes so far as to venture that the
Revolution of 1905 was 'as much a revolution of non-Russians
against Russification as it was a revolution of workers, peasants, and
radical intellectuals against autocracy. The two revolts were of course
connected: the social revolution was in fact most bitter in nonRussian
regions, with Polish workers, Latvian peasants, and Georgian
peasants as protagonists.'9
At the same time, it would be a big mistake to suppose that since
Russification was a dynastic policy, it did not achieve one of its main
purposes - marshalling a growing 'Great Russian' nationalism behind
the throne. And not simply on the basis of sentiment. Enormous
opportunities were after all available for Russian functionaries and
entrepreneurs in the vast bureaucracy and expanding market that the
empire provided.
No less interesting than Alexander III, Russifying Czar of All the
Russias, is his contemporary Victoria von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha,
Queen of England and, late in life, Empress of India. Actually her
title is more interesting than her person, for it represents emblematically
the thickened metal of a weld between nation and empire.10
Her reign too marks the onset of a London-style 'official nationalism'
which has strong affinities with the Russification being pursued in St.
Petersburg. A good way to appreciate this affinity is by longitudinal
comparison.
In The Break-up of Britain, Tom Nairn raises the problem of why there
was no Scottish nationalist movement in the late eighteenth century, in
spite of a rising Scots bourgeoisie and a very distinguished Scots
l1
intelligentsia. Hobsbawm has peremptorily dismissed Nairn's
thoughtful discussion with the remark: 'It is pure anachronism to
expect [the Scots] to have demanded an independent state at this12
time.' Yet if we recall that Benjamin Franklin, who co-signed the
American Declaration of Independence, was born five years before
9. Ibid., p. 87.
10. This weld's disintegration is clocked by the procession from British Empire to
British Commonwealth, to Commonwealth, to . . . .?
11. The Break-up of Britain, pp. 106fF.
12. 'Some Reflections', p. 5.
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OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
David Hume, we may be inclined to think this judgement itself a shade
13 • • •
anachronistic. It seems to me that the difficulties - and their resolution
- lie elsewhere.
On the other hand, there is Nairn's good nationalist tendency to treat
his 'Scotland' as an unproblematic, primordial given. Bloch reminds us
of the chequered ancestry of this 'entity', observing that the ravages of
the Danes and William the Conqueror destroyed forever the cultural
hegemony of Northern, Anglo-Saxon Northumbria, symbolized by
such luminaries as Alcuin and Bede:14
A part of the northern zone was detached for ever from England
proper. Cut off from other populations of Anglo-Saxon speech by
the settlement of the Vikings in Yorkshire, the lowlands round about
the Northumbrian citadel of Edinburgh fell under the domination of
the Celtic chiefs of the hills. Thus the bilingual kingdom of Scotland
was by a sort of backhanded stroke a creation of the Scandinavian
invasions.
15
And Seton-Watson, for his part, writes that the Scottish language:
developed from the flowing together of Saxon and French, though
with less of the latter and with rather more from Celtic and Scandinavian
sources than in the south. This language was spoken not only in
the east of Scotland but also in northern England. Scots, or northern
English,' was spoken at the Scottish court and by the social elite (who
might or might not also speak Gaelic), as well as by the Lowland
population as a whole. It was the language of the poets Robert
Henryson and William Dunbar. It might have developed as a distinct
literary language into modern times had not the union of the crowns in
1603 brought the predominance of southern English through its
extension to the court, administration and upper class of Scotland.
13. In a book significantly entitled Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of
Independence, Gary Wills argues in fact that the nationalist Jefferson's thinking was
fundamentally shaped, not by Locke, but by Hume, Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and other
eminences of the Scottish Enlightenment.
14. Feudal Society, I, p. 42.
15. Nations and States, pp. 30-31.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
The key point here is that already in the early seventeenth century
large parts of what would one day be imagined as Scotland were
English-speaking and had immediate access to print-English, provided
a minimal degree of literacy existed. Then in the early
eighteenth century the English-speaking Lowlands collaborated with
London in largely exterminating the Gaeltacht. In neither 'northward
thrust' was a selfconscious Anglicizing policy pursued — in both
cases Anglicization was essentially a byproduct. But combined, they
had effectively eliminated, 'before' the age of nationalism, any
possibility of a European-style vernacular-specific nationalist movement.
Why not one in the American style? Part of the answer is
given by Nairn in passing, when he speaks of a 'massive intellectual
migration' southwards from the mid eighteenth century onwards.
But there was more than an intellectual migration. Scottish politicians
came south to legislate, and Scottish businessmen had open
access to London's markets. In effect, in complete contrast to the
Thirteen Colonies (and to a lesser extent Ireland), there were no
barricades on all these pilgrims' paths towards the centre. (Compare
the clear highway before Latin- and German-reading Hungarians to
Vienna in the eighteenth century.) English had yet to become an
'English' language.
The same point can be made from a different angle. It is true that in
the seventeenth century London resumed an acquisition of overseas
territories arrested since the disastrous ending to the Hundred Years
War. But the 'spirit' of these conquests was still fundamentally that of a
prenational age. Nothing more stunningly confirms this than the fact
that 'India' only became 'British' twenty years after Victoria's accession
to the throne. In other words, until after the 1857 Mutiny, 'India' was
ruled by a commercial enterprise — not by a state, and certainly not by a
nation-state.
But change was on the way. When the East India Company's
charter came up for renewal in 1813, Parliament mandated the
allocation of 100,000 rupees a year for the promotion of native
education, both 'oriental' and 'Western.' In 1823, a Committee of
Public Instruction was set up in Bengal; and in 1834, Thomas
16. The Break-up of Britain, p. 123.
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OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
Babington Macaulay became president of this committee. Declaring
that 'a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole
17
native literature of India and Arabia,' he produced the following year
his notorious 'Minute on Education.' Luckier than Uvarov, his
recommendations went into immediate effect. A thoroughly English
educational system was to be introduced which, in Macaulay's own
ineffable words, would create 'a class of persons, Indian in blood and. . i . . . . 1 8
colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect.'10
In
1836, he wrote that:19
No Hindu who has received an English education ever remains
sincerely attached to his religion. It is my firm belief [so they always
were] 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.
There is here, to be sure, a certain naive optimism, which reminds us of
Fermm in Bogota half a century earlier. But the important thing is that
we see a long-range (30 years!) policy, consciously formulated and
pursued, to turn 'idolaters,' not so much into Christians, as into people
culturally English, despite their irremediable colour and blood. A sort of
mental miscegenation is intended, which, when compared with Fermin's
physical one, shows that, like so much else in the Victorian age,
imperialism made enormous progress in daintiness. In any event, it can
be safely said that from this point on, all over the expanding empire, if at
20different speeds, Macaulayism was pursued.
Like Russification, Anglicization naturally also offered rosy
17. We can be confident that this bumptious young middle-class English Uvarov
knew nothing about either 'native literature'.
18. See Donald Eugene Smith, India as a Secular State, pp. 337-38; and Percival
Spear, India, Pakistan and the West, p. 163.
19. Smith, India, p. 339.
20. See, for example, RofFs poker-faced account of the founding in 1905 of the
Kuala Kangsar Malay College, which quickly became known, wholly without irony, as
'the Malay Eton.' True to Macaulay's prescriptions, its pupils were drawn from the
'respectable classes' - i.e. the compliant Malay aristocracy. Half the early boarders were
direct descendants of various Malay sultans. William R. Roff, The Origins of Malay
Nationalism, pp. 100-105.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
opportunities to armies of middle-class metropolitans (not least Scotsmen!)
— functionaries, schoolmasters, merchants, and planters — who
quickly fanned out over the vast, permanently sunlit realm. Nonetheless
there was a central difference between the empires ruled from St.
Petersburg and London. Czardom remained a 'continuous' continental
domain, confined to the temperate and arctic zones of Eurasia. One
could, so to speak, walk from one end of it to the other. Linguistic
kinship with the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe, and - to put it
pleasantly — historical, political, religious and economic ties with many
non-Slavic peoples, meant that relatively speaking, the barriers on the
21 i
road to St. Petersburg were not impermeable. The British Empire, on
the other hand, was a grab-bag of primarily tropical possessions scattered
over every continent. Only a minority of the subjected peoples had any
long-standing religious, linguistic, cultural, or even political and economic,
ties with the metropole. Juxtaposed to one another in the Jubilee
Year, they resembled those random collections of Old Masters hastily
assembled by English and American millionaires which eventually turn
into solemnly imperial state museums.
The consequences are well illustrated by the bitter recollections of
Bipin Chandra Pal, who, in 1932, a century after Macaulay's 'Minute',22
still felt angry enough to write that Indian Magistrates:
had not only passed a very rigid test on the same terms as British
members of the service, but had spent the very best years of the
formative period of their youth in England. Upon their return to their
homeland, they practically lived in the same style as their brother
Civilians, and almost religiously followed the social conventions and the
ethical standards of the latter. In those days the India-born [sic - compare
our Spanish-American Creoles] Civilian practically cut himself off from
his parent society, and lived and moved and had his being in the
atmosphere so beloved of his British colleagues. In mind and manners he
was as much an Englishman as any Englishman. It was no small sacrifice for
him, because in this way he completely estranged himself from the
society of his own people and became socially and morally a pariah
21. The trans-Ural populations were another story.
22. See his Memories of My Life and Times, pp. 331-32. Emphases added.
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OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
among them. . . . He was as much a stranger in his own native land as the
European residents in the country.
So far, so Macaulay. Much more serious, however, was that such
strangers in their native land were still condemned — no less fatally than
the American Creoles — to an 'irrational' permanent subordination to the
English maturrangos. It was not simply that, no matter how Anglicized a
Pal became, he was always barred from the uppermost peaks of the Raj.
He was also barred from movement outside its perimeter - laterally, say,
to the Gold Coast or Hong Kong, and vertically to the metropole.
'Completely estranged from the society of his own people' he might be,
but he was under life sentence to serve among them. (To be sure, who
'they' included varied with the stretch of British conquests on the
23
subcontinent. )
We shall be looking later at the consequences of official nationalisms
for the rise of twentieth-century Asian and African nationalisms.
For our purposes here, what needs to be stressed is that Anglicization
produced thousands of Pals all over the world. Nothing more sharply
underscores the fundamental contradiction of English official
nationalism, i.e. the inner incompatibility of empire and nation. I
say 'nation' advisedly, because it is always tempting to account for
these Pals in terms of racism. No one in their right mind would deny the
profoundly racist character of nineteenth-century English imperialism.
But the Pals also existed in the white colonies - Australia, New
Zealand, Canada and South Africa. English and Scottish schoolmasters
also swarmed there, and Anglicization was also cultural
policy. As to Pal, to them too the looping upward path still open to
the Scots in the eighteenth century was closed. Anglicized Australians
did not serve in Dublin or Manchester, and not even in Ottawa or
Capetown. Nor, until quite late on, could they become Governors-
23. It is true that Indian officials were employed in Burma; but Burma was
administratively part of British India until 1937. Indians also served in subordinate
capacities — especially in the police - in British Malaya and Singapore, but they served as
'locals' and 'immigrants', i.e. were not transferable 'back' to India's police forces. Note
that the emphasis here is on officials: Indian labourers, merchants, and even professionals,
moved in sizeable numbers to British colonies in Southeast Asia, South and East
Africa, and even the Caribbean.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
General in Canberra.24
Only 'English English' did, i.e. members of a
half-concealed English nation.
Three years before the East India Company lost its Indian
hunting-ground, Commodore Perry with his black ships peremptorily
battered down the walls that for so long had kept Japan in selfimposed
isolation. After 1854, the self-confidence and inner legitimacy
of the Bakufu (Tokugawa Shogunate regime) were rapidly
undermined by a conspicuous impotence in the face of the penetrating
West. Under the banner of Sonno Joi (Revere the Sovereign,
Expel the Barbarians), a small band of middle-ranking samurai,
primarily from the Satsuma and Choshu han, finally overthrew it
in 1868. Among the reasons for their success was an exceptionally
creative absorption, especially after 1860, of the new Western
military science systematized since 1815 by Prussian and French
staff professionals. They were thus able to make effective use of
7,300 ultra-modern rifles (most of them American Civil War scrap),
25purchased from an English arms-merchant. 'In the use of guns . . .
24. To be sure, by late Edwardian times, a few 'white colonials' did migrate to
London and become members of Parliament or prominent press-lords.
25. Here the key figure was Omura Masujiro (1824-1869), the so-called 'Father of
the Japanese Army'. A low-ranking Choshu samurai, he started his career by studying
Western medicine through Dutch-language manuals. (It will be recalled that until 1854
the Dutch were the only Westerners permitted access to Japan, and this access was
limited essentially to the island of Deshima off the Bakufu-controlled port of Nagasaki.)
On graduating from the Tekijyuku in Osaka, then the best Dutch-language training
centre in the country, he returned home to practise medicine - but without much
success. In 1853, he took a position in Uwajima as instructor in Western learning, with a
foray to Nagasaki to study naval science. (He designed and supervised the building of
Japan's first steamship on the basis of written manuals.) His chance came after Perry's
arrival; he moved to Edo in 1856 to work as an instructor at what would become the
National Military Academy and at the Bakufii's top research office for the study of
Western texts. His translations of European military works especially on Napoleon's
innovations in strategy and tactics, won him fame and recall to Choshu in 1860 to serve
as military adviser. In 1864-65, he proved the relevance of his writing as a successful
commander in the Choshu civil war. Subsequendy he became the first Meiji Minister of
War, and drew up the regime's revolutionary plans for mass conscription and
elimination of the samurai as a legal caste. For his pains he was assassinated by an
outraged samurai. See Albert M. Craig, Choshu in the Meiji Restoration, especially pp.
202-204, 267-280.
94
OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
the men of Choshu had such mastery that the old blood and thunder
26
slash and cut methods were quite useless against them.'
Once in power, however, the rebels, whom we remember today as
the Meiji oligarchs, found that their military prowess did not automatically
guarantee political legitimacy. If the Tenno ('Emperor')
could quickly be restored with the abolition of the Bakufu, the
barbarians could not so easily be expelled. Japan's geopolitical
security remained just as fragile as before 1868. One of the basic
means adopted for consolidating the oligarchy's domestic position was
thus a variant of mid-century 'official nationalism,' rather consciously
modelled on Hohenzollern Prussia-Germany. Between 1868 and
1871, all residual local 'feudal' military units were dissolved, giving
Tokyo a centralized monopoly of the means of violence. In 1872, an
Imperial Rescript ordered the promotion of universal literacy among
adult males. In 1873, well before the United Kingdom, Japan
introduced conscription. At the same time, the regime liquidated
the samurai as a legally-defined and privileged class, an essential step
not only for (slowly) opening the officer corps to all talents, but also
to fit the now 'available' nation-of-citizens model. The Japanese
peasantry was freed from subjection to the feudal fcm-system and
henceforth exploited directly by the state and commercial-agricultural28
landowners. In 1889, there followed a Prussian-style constitution
and eventually universal male suffrage.
In this orderly campaign the men of Meiji were aided by three
half-fortuitous factors. First was the relatively high degree of Japanese
ethnocultural homogeneity resulting from two and a half centuries of
isolation and internal pacification by the Bakufu. While the Japanese
spoken in Kyushu was largely incomprehensible in Honshu, and
26. A contemporary Japanese observer, quoted in E. Herbert Norman, Soldier and
Peasant in Japan, p. 31.
27. They knew this from bitter personal experience. In 1862, an English squadron
had levelled half the Satsuma port of Kagoshima; in 1864, a joint American, Dutch, and
English naval unit destroyed the Choshu coastal fortifications at Shimonoseki. John M.
Maki, Japanese Militarism, pp. 146—47.
28. All this reminds one of those reforms accomplished in Prussia after 1810 in
response to Blucher's impassioned plea to Berlin: 'Get us a national army!' Vagts, A
History of Militarism, p. 130; Cf. Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, ch. 2.
95
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
even Edo-Tokyo and Kyoto-Osaka found verbal communication
problematic, the half-Sinified ideographic reading-system was long
in place throughout the islands, and thus the development of mass
literacy through schools and print was easy and uncontroversial.
Second, the unique antiquity of the imperial house (Japan is the only
country whose monarchy has been monopolized by a single dynasty
throughout recorded history), and its emblematic Japanese-ness
(contrast Bourbons and Habsburgs), made the exploitation of the
29
Emperor for official-nationalist purposes rather simple. Third, the
penetration of the barbarians was abrupt, massive, and menacing
enough for most elements of the politically-aware population to rally
behind a programme of self-defence conceived in the new national
terms. It is worth emphasizing that this possibility had everything to
do with the timing of Western penetration, i.e. the 1860s as opposed
to the 1760s. For by then, in dominant Europe, the 'national
community' had been coming into its own for half a century, in
both popular and official versions. In effect, self-defence could be
fashioned along lines and in accordance with what were coming to
be 'international norms.'
That the gamble paid off, in spite of the terrible sufferings imposed
on the peasantry by the ruthless fiscal exactions required to pay for a
munitions-based programme of industrialization, was certainly due in
part to the single-minded determination of the oligarchs themselves.
Fortunate to come to power in an era in which numbered accounts in
Zurich lay in an undreamed-of future, they were not tempted to
move the exacted surplus outside Japan. Fortunate to rule in an age
when military technology was still advancing at a relative amble, they
were able, with their catch-up armaments programme, to turn Japan
into an independent military power by the end of the century.
Spectacular successes by Japan's conscript army against China in
1894-5, and by her navy against Czardom in 1905, plus the
annexation of Taiwan (1895) and Korea (1910), all consciously
29. But I have been informed by scholars of Japan that recent excavations of the
earliest royal tombs suggest strongly that the family may originally have been - horrors!
— Korean. The Japanese government has strongly discouraged further research on these
sites.
96
OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
propagandized through schools and print, were extremely valuable in
creating the general impression that the conservative oligarchy was an
authentic representative of the nation of which Japanese were coming
to imagine themselves members.
That this nationalism took on an aggressive imperialist character, even
outside ruling circles, can best be accounted for by two factors: the legacy
of Japan's long isolation and the power of the official-national model.
Maruyama shrewdly points out that all nationalisms in Europe arose in the
context of a traditional pluralism of interacting dynastic states - as I put it
30earlier, Latin's European universalism never had a political correlate:
National consciousness in Europe therefore bore from its inception
the imprint of a consciousness of international society. It was a selfevident
premise that disputes among sovereign states were conflicts
among independent members of this international society. Precisely
for this reason war, since Grotius, has come to occupy an important
and systematic place in international law.
31Centuries of Japanese isolation, however, meant that:
an awareness of equality in international affairs was totally absent. The
advocates of expulsion [of the barbarians] viewed international
relations from positions within the national hierarchy based on
the supremacy of superiors over inferiors. Consequently, when
the premises of the national hierarchy were transferred horizontally
into the international sphere, international problems were reduced to
a single alternative: conquer or be conquered. In the absence of any
higher normative standards with which to gauge international relations,
power politics is bound to be the rule and yesterday's timid
defensiveness will become today's unrestrained expansionism.
Secondly, the oligarchy's prime models were the self-naturalizing
dynasties of Europe. Insofar as these dynasties were more and more
defining themselves in national terms, while at the same time
30. Maruyama Masao, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics, p. 138.
31. Ibid., pp. 139-40.
113
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
expanding their power outside Europe, it is not surprising that the
32
model should have been understood imperially. As the parcellization
of Africa at the Congress of Berlin (1885) showed, great nations
were global conquerors. How plausible then to argue that, for Japan
to be accepted as 'great,' she too should turn Tenno into Emperor
and launch overseas adventures, even if she was late to the game and
had a lot of catching up to do. Few things give one a sharper sense of
the way these residues impinged on the consciousness of the reading
population than the following formulation by the radical-nationalist
ideologue and revolutionary Kita Ikki (1884-1937), in his very
influential Nihon Kaizo Hoan Taiko [Outline for the Reconstruction
of Japan], published in 1924:33
As the class struggle within a nation is waged for the readjustment of
unequal distinctions, so war between nations for an honorable cause
will reform the present unjust distinctions. The British Empire is a
millionaire possessing wealth all over the world; and Russia is a great
landowner in occupation of the northern half of the globe. Japan with
her scattered fringe [sic] of islands is one of the proletariat, and she has
the right to declare war on the big monopoly powers. The socialists
of the West contradict themselves when they admit the right of class
struggle to the proletariat at home and at the same time condemn
war, waged by a proletariat among nations, as militarism and
aggression . . . If it is permissible for the working class to unite to
overthrow unjust authority by bloodshed, then unconditional approval
should be given to Japan to perfect her army and navy and
make war for the rectification of unjust international frontiers. In the
name of rational social democracy Japan claims possession of Australia
and Eastern Siberia.
It remains only to add that, as the empire expanded after 1900,
Japanification a la Macaulay was selfconsciously pursued as state
policy. In the interwar years Koreans, Taiwanese and Manchurians,
32. Unluckily, the only alternative to the officially-nationalizing dynastic states of
the time - Austro-Hungary - was not among the powers with a significant presence in
the Far East.
33. As translated and cited in Richard Storry, The Double Patriots, p. 38.
98
OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
and, after the outbreak of the Pacific War, Burmese, Indonesians and
Filipinos, were subjected to policies for which the European model
was an established working practice. And just as in the British Empire,
Japanified Koreans, Taiwanese or Burmese had their passages to the
metropole absolutely barred. They might speak and read Japanese
perfectly, but they would never preside over prefectures in Honshu,
or even be posted outside their zones of origin.
Having considered these three varied cases of'official nationalism', it is
important to stress that the model could be selfconsciously followed by
states with no serious great power pretensions, so long as they were
states in which the ruling classes or leading elements in them felt
threatened by the world-wide spread of the nationally-imagined community.
A comparison between two such states, Siam and Hungarywithin-Austro-Hungary,
may prove instructive.
Meiji's contemporary, the long-reigning Chulalongkorn (r. 1868—
1910), defended his realm from Western expansionism in a style that
differed markedly from that of his Japanese opposite number.34
Squeezed between British Burma and Malaya, and French Indochina,
he devoted himself to a shrewd manipulative diplomacy rather than
attempting to build up a serious war machine. (A Ministry of War
was not established until 1894.) In a way that reminds one of
eighteenth-century Europe, his armed forces were primarily a motley
array of Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao, Malay, and Chinese mercenaries
and tributaries. Nor was anything much done to push an official
nationalism through a modernized educational system. Indeed, primary
education was not made compulsory till more than a decade
after his death, and the country's first university was not set up until
1917, four decades after the founding of the Imperial University in
Tokyo. Nonetheless, Chulalongkorn regarded himself as a modernizes
But his prime models were not the United Kingdom or
Germany, but rather the colonial beamtenstaaten of the Dutch East
34. The following section is a condensed version of part of my 'Studies of the Thai
State: the State of Thai Studies', in Eliezer B. Ayal (ed.), The State of Thai Studies.
99
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
35
Indies, British Malaya, and the Raj. Following these models meant
rationalizing and centralizing royal government, eliminating traditional
semi-autonomous tributary statelets, and promoting economic
development somewhat along colonial lines. The most striking
example of this - an example which in its odd way looks forward
to contemporary Saudi Arabia — was his encouragement of a massive
immigration of young, single, male foreigners to form the disoriented,
politically powerless workforce needed to construct port
facilities, build railway lines, dig canals, and expand commercial
agriculture. This importing of gastarbeiter paralleled, indeed was
modelled on, the policies of the authorities in Batavia and Singapore.
And as in the case of the Netherlands Indies and British Malaya, the
great bulk of the labourers imported during the nineteenth century
were from southeastern China. It is instructive that this policy caused
him neither personal qualms nor political difficulties — no more than
it did the colonial rulers on whom he modelled himself. Indeed the
policy made good short term sense for a dynastic state, since it created
an impotent working class 'outside' Thai society and left that society
largely 'undisturbed.'
Wachirawut, his son and successor (r. 1910-1925), had to pick up the
pieces, modelling himself this time on the self-naturalizing dynasts of
Europe. Although — and because — he was educated in late Victorian36 i i
England, he dramatized himself as his country's 'first nationalist.' The
target of this nationalism, however, was neither the United Kingdom,
which controlled 90 per cent of Siam's trade, nor France, which had
recently made off with easterly segments of the old realm: it was the
Chinese whom his father had so recently and blithely imported. The
style of his anti-Chinese stance is suggested by the titles of two of his
most famous pamphlets: The Jews of the Orient (1914), and Clogs on Our
Wheels (1915).
35. Batty e nicely shows that the purpose of the young monarch's visits to Batavia
and Singapore in 1870 and to India in 1872 was, in Ghulalongkorn's own sweet words,
'selecting what may be safe models.' See 'The Military, Government and Society in
Siam, 1868-1910,' p. 118.
36. 'The inspiration of Vajiravudh's [Wachirawut's] nationalist program was, first
and foremost, Great Britain, the Western nation Vajiravudh knew best, at this time a
nation caught up in imperialist enthusiasm.' Walter F. Vella, Chaiyo! King Vajiravudh and
the Development of Thai Nationalism, p. xiv. See also pp. 6 and 67-68.
100
OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
Why the change? Doubtless dramatic events immediately preceding
and following his coronation in November 1910 had their effect. The
previous June the police had had to be called out to suppress a general
stike by Bangkok's Chinese merchants (upwardly mobile children of early
37
immigrants) and workers, marking their initiation into Siamese politics.
The following year, the Celestial Monarchy in Peking was swept away by
a heterogeneous assortment of groups from which merchants were by no
means absent. 'The Chinese' thus appeared as harbingers of a popular
republicanism profoundly threatening to the dynastic principle. Second, as
the words 'Jews' and 'Orient' suggest, the Anglicized monarch had
imbibed the particular racisms of the English ruling class. But, in addition,
there was the fact that Wachirawut was a sort of Asian Bourbon. In a prenational
era his ancestors had readily taken attractive Chinese girls as
wives and concubines, with the result that, Mendelianly-speaking, he
himself had more Chinese 'blood' than Thai.38
Here is a fine example of the character of official nationalism — an
anticipatory strategy adopted by dominant groups which are threatened
with marginalization or exclusion from an emerging nationallyimagined
community. (It goes without saying that Wachirawut also
began moving all the policy levers of official nationalism: compulsory
state-controlled primary education, state-organized propaganda, official
rewriting of history, militarism — here more visible show than the
real thing - and endless affirmations of the identity of dynasty and39\nation. )
The development of Hungarian nationalism in the nineteenth century
shows in a different way the imprint of the 'official' model. We noted
37. The strike was occasioned by the government's decision to exact the same
head-tax on the Chinese as on the native Thai. Hitherto it had been lower, as an
inducement to immigration. See Bevars D. Mabry, The Development of Labor
Institutions in Thailand, p. 38. (Exploitation of the Chinese came mainly via the
opium-farm.)
38. For genealogical details, see my 'Studies of the Thai State,' p. 214.
39. He also coined the slogan, Chat, Sasana, Kasat (Nation, Religion, Monarch)
which has been the shibboleth of rightwing regimes in Siam for the last quarter of a
century. Here Uvarov's Autocracy, Orthodoxy, Nationality appear in reversed Thai
order.
101
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
earlier the Latin-speaking Magyar nobility's enraged opposition to
Joseph II's attempt in the 1780s to make German the sole imperial
language-of-state. The more advantaged segments of this class feared
losing their sinecures under a centralized, streamlined administration
dominated by imperial-German bureaucrats. The lower echelons
were panicked by the possibility of losing their exemptions from
taxes and compulsory military service, as well as their control over the
serfs and rural counties. Yet alongside the defence of Latin, Magyar
was, quite opportunistically, spoken for, 'since in the long run a
Magyar administration seemed the only workable alternative to a
German one.'40
Bela Griinwald sardonically noted that 'the same
counties which (arguing against the decree of the Emperor) emphasized
the possibility of an administration in the Magyar tongue,
decared it in 1811 — that is, twenty-seven years later — an impossibility.'
Two decades later still, in a very 'nationalistic' Hungarian
county it was said that 'the introduction of the Magyar language
would endanger our constitution and all our interests.'41
It was really
only in the 1840s that the Magyar nobility - a class consisting of
about 136,000 souls monopolizing land and political rights in a
country of eleven million people42
— became seriously committed
to Magyarization, and then only to prevent its own historic margin-
alization.
At the same time, slowly increasing literacy (by 1869 one third
of the adult population), the spread of print-Magyar, and the
growth of a small, but energetic, liberal intelligentsia all stimulated
40. Ignotus, Hungary, pp. 47-48. Thus in 1820 the Tiger in Schlafrock (Tiger in a
Nightgown), Emperor Franz II, made a fine impression with his Latin address to the
Hungarian magnates assembled in Pest. In 1825, however, the romantic-radical grand
seigneur Count Istvan Szechenyi 'staggered his fellow-magnates' in the Diet by
addressing them in Magyar! Jaszi, The Dissolution, p. 80; and Ignotus, Hungary, p. 51.
41. Translated citation from his The Old Hungary (1910) in Jaszi, The Dissolution,
pp. 70-71. Griinwald (1839-1891) was an interesting and tragic figure. Born to a
Magyarized noble family of Saxon descent, he became both a superb administrator and
one of Hungary's earliest social scientists. The publication of his research demonstrating
that the famous Magyar gentry-controlled 'counties' were parasites on the nation
evoked a savage campaign of public obloquy. He fled to Paris and there drowned
himself in the Seine. Ignotus, Hungary, pp. 108-109.
42. Jaszi, The Dissolution, p. 299.
102
OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
a popular Hungarian nationalism conceived very differently from
that of the nobility. This popular nationalism, symbolized for later
generations by the figure of Lajos Kossuth (1802—1894), had its
hour of glory in the Revolution of 1848. The revolutionary regime
not only got rid of the imperial governors appointed by Vienna,
but abolished the supposedly Ur-Magyar feudal Diet of Noble
Counties, and proclaimed reforms to put an end to serfdom and
noblemen's tax-exempt status, as well as to curb drastically the
entailment of estates. In addition, it was decided that all Hungarianspeakers
should be Hungarian (as only the privileged had been
before) and every Hungarian should speak Magyar (as only some
Magyars had hitherto been accustomed to do). As Ignotus drily
comments, 'The "nation" was, by the standard of that time (which
viewed the rise of the twin stars of Liberalism and Nationalism with
boundless optimism), justified in feeling itself extremely generous
when it "admitted" the Magyar peasant with no discrimination
save for that relating to property; and the non-Magyar Christians
on condition they became Magyar; and eventually, with some
reluctance and a delay of twenty years, the Jews.'44
Kossuth's own
position, in his fruitless negotiations with leaders of the various
non-Magyar minorities, was that these peoples should have exactly
the same civil rights as the Magyars, but that since they lacked
'historical personalities' they could not form nations on their own.
Today, this position may seem a trifle arrogant. It will appear in a
better light if we recall that the brilliant, young, radical-nationalist
poet Sandor Petofi (1823-1849), a leading spirit of 1848, on one
occasion referred to the minorities as 'ulcers on the body of the
motherland.'45
After the suppression of the revolutionary regime by Czarist
armies in August 1849, Kossuth went into life-long exile. The
stage was now set for a revival of 'official' Magyar nationalism,
epitomized by the reactionary regimes of Count Kalman Tisza
43. The Kossuth regime instituted adult male suffrage, but with such high property
qualifications that relatively few persons were in a position to vote.
44. Ignotus, Hungary, p. 56.
45. Ibid., p. 59.
103
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
(1875-1890) and his son Istvan (1903-1906). The reasons for this
revival are very instructive. During the 1850s, the authoritarianbureaucratic
Bach administration in Vienna combined severe political
repression with a firm implementation of certain social and
economic policies proclaimed by the revolutionaries of 1848 (most
notably the abolition of serfdom and noblemen's tax-exempt status)
and the promotion of modernized communications and large-scale
capitalist enterprise.46
Largely deprived of its feudal privileges and
security, and incapable of competing economically with the great
latifundists and energetic German and Jewish entrepreneurs, the old
middle and lower Magyar nobility declined into an angry, frightened
rural gentry.
Luck, however, was on their side. Humiliatingly defeated by
Prussian armies on the field of Koniggratz in 1866, Vienna was
forced to accede to the institution of the Dual Monarchy in the
Ausgleich (Compromise) of 1867. From them on, the Kingdom of
Hungary enjoyed a very considerable autonomy in the running of its
internal affairs. The initial beneficiaries of the Ausgleich were a group
of liberal-minded high Magyar aristocrats and educated professionals.
In 1868, the administration of the cultivated magnate Count Gyula
Andrassy enacted a Nationalities Law which gave the non-Magyar
minorities 'every right they had ever claimed or could have claimed short
of turning Hungary into a federation.'47
But Tisza's accession to
the premiership in 1875 opened an era in which the reactionary
gentry successfully reconstituted their position, relatively free from
Viennese interference.
In the economic field, the Tisza regime gave the great agrarian
48
magnates a free hand, but political power was essentially monopolized
by the gentry. For,
46. Ignotus observes that Bach did provide the noblemen with some financial
compensation for the loss of their privileges, 'probably neither more nor less than they
would have got under Kossuth' (pp. 64—65).
47. Ibid., p. 74.
48. As a result, the number of entailed estates trebled between 1867 and 1918. If
one includes Church property, fully one third of all land in Hungary was entailed by the
end of the Dual Monarchy. German and Jewish capitalists also did well under Tisza.
104
OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
there remained only one refuge for the dispossessed: the administrative
network of national and local government and the army. For
these, Hungary needed a tremendous staff; and if she did not she
could at least pretend to. Half the country consisted of'nationalities'
to be kept in check. To pay a host of reliable, Magyar, gentlemanly
country magistrates to control them, so the argument ran, was a
modest price for the national interest. The problem of multinationalities
was also a godsend; it excused the proliferation of
sinecures.
Thus 'the magnates held their entailed estates; the gentry held their
entailed jobs.'49
Such was the social basis for a pitiless policy of enforced
Magyarization which after 1875 made the Nationalities Law a dead
letter. Legal narrowing of the suffrage, proliferation of rotten boroughs,
rigged elections, and organized political thuggery in the rural areas50
simultaneously consolidated the power of Tisza and his constituency
and underscored the 'official' character of their nationalism.
Jaszi rightly compares this late-nineteenth-century Magyarization to
'the policy of Russian Tsardom against the Poles, the Finns, and the
Ruthenians; the policy of Prussia against the Poles and Danes; and the
51i
policy of feudal England against the Irish.' The nexus of reaction and
official nationalism is nicely illustrated by these facts: while linguistic
Magyarization was a central element of regime policy, by the end of
the 1880s only 2 per cent of the officials in the more important
branches of central and local governments were Romanian, although
Romanians constituted 20 per cent of the population, and 'even these
2 per cent are employed in the lowest grades.' On the other hand, in
49. Ibid., pp. 81 and 82.
50. The thuggery was mainly the work of the notorious 'pandoors,' part of the
army put at the disposal of the county administrators and deployed as a violent rural
police.
51. The Dissolution, p. 328.
52. According to the calculations of Lajos Mocsary (Some Words on the Nationality
Problem, Budapest, 1886), cited in ibid., pp. 331-332. Mocsary (1826-1916) had in
1874 established a small Independence Party in the Hungarian parliament to fight for
Kossuth's ideas, particularly on the minorities question. His speeches denouncing
Tisza's blatant violations of the 1868 Nationalities Law led first to.his physical
extrusion from parliament and then expulsion from his own party. In 1888, he
105
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
the Hungarian parliament prior to World War I, there was 'not a single
representative of the working classes and of the landless peasantry (the
great majority of the country) . . . and there were only 8 Romanians
and Slovaks out of a total membership of 413 in a country in which
only 54 per cent of the inhabitants spoke Magyar as their mother-
53
tongue.' Small wonder, then, that when Vienna sent in troops to
dissolve this parliament in 1906, 'not even a single mass-meeting, a
single placard, or a single popular proclamation protested against the
new era of "Viennese absolutism." On the contrary the working
masses and nationalities regarded with malicious joy the impotent
struggle of the national oligarchy.'54
The triumph of the reactionary Magyar gentry's 'official nationalism'
after 1875 cannot, however, be explained solely by that group's
own political strength, nor by the freedom of manoeuvre it inherited
from the Ausgleich. The fact is that until 1906 the Habsburg court
did not feel in a position to assert itself decisively against a regime
which in many respects remained a pillar of the empire. Above
all, the dynasty was incapable of superimposing a strenuous official
nationalism of its own. Not merely because the regime was, in the
words of the eminent socialist Viktor Adler, 'Absolutismus gemildert
durch Schlamperei [absolutism tempered by slovenliness].'55
Later
was returned to parliament from a wholly Romanian constituency and became largely
a political outcast. Ignotus, Hungary, p. 109.
53. Jaszi, The Dissolution, p. 334.
54. Ibid., p. 362. Right into the twentieth century there was a spurious quality to
this 'national oligarchy.' Jaszi reports the diverting story of one correspondent of a
famous Hungarian daily who during World War I interviewed the wounded officer
who would become the reactionary dictator of Hungary in the inter-war years. Horthy
was enraged by the article's description of his thoughts 'winging back to the Hungarian
father land, home of the ancestors.' 'Remember,' he said 'that, if my chief warlord is in
Baden, then my fatherland is also there!' The Dissolution, p. 142.
55. Ibid., p. 165. 'And in the good old days when there was still such a place as
Imperial Austria, one could leave the train of events, get into an ordinary train on an
ordinary railway-line, and travel back home. . . . Of course cars also drove along those
roads — but not too many cars! The conquest of the air had begun here too; but not too
intensively. Now and then a ship was sent off to South America or the Far East; but not
too often. There was no ambition to have world markets and world power. Here one
was in the centre of Europe, at the focal point of the world's old axes; the words 'colony'
and 'overseas' had the ring of something as yet utterly untried and remote. There was
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OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
than almost anywhere else, the dynasty clung to vanished conceptions.
'In his religious mysticism, each Habsburg felt himself connected
by a special tie with divinity, as an executor of the divine
will. This explains their almost unscrupulous attitude in the midst of
historical catastrophes, and their proverbial ungratefulness. Der Dank
vom Hause Habsburg became a widely spread slogan.'56
In addition,
bitter jealousy of Hohenzollern Prussia, which increasingly made off
with the plate of the Holy Roman Empire and turned itself into
Germany, kept the dynasty insisting on Franz II's splendid 'patriotism
for me.'
At the same time, it is interesting that in its last days the dynasty
discovered, perhaps to its own surprise, affinities with its Social
Democrats, to the point that some of their common enemies spoke
sneeringly of 'Burgsozialismus [Court Socialism]'. In this tentative
coalition there was doubtless a mixture of Machiavellism and idealism
on each side. One can see this mixture in the vehement campaign led by
the Austrian Social Democrats against the economic and military
'separatism' pressed by the regime of Count Istvan Tisza in 1905 . Karl
Renner, for example, 'chastized the cowardice of the Austrian bourgeoisie
who began to acquiesce in the separatistic plans of the Magyars,
though "the Hungarian market is incomparably more significant for
Austrian capital than [the] Moroccan is for the German," which German
foreign policy defends so energetically. In the claim for an independent
Hungarian customs territory he saw nothing else than the clamouring of
city sharks, swindlers, and political demagogues, against the very interests
of Austrian industry, of the Austrian working-classes, and of the Hungar-
57 58ian agricultural population.' Similarly, Otto Bauer wrote that:
some display of luxury, but it was not, of course as oversophisticated as the French. One
went in for sport; but not in madly Anglo-Saxon fashion. One spent tremendous sums
on the army; but only just enough to assure one of remaining the second weakest among
the great powers.' Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, I, pp. 31-32. This book is
the great comic novel of our century.
56. Jaszi, The Dissolution, p. 135. Author's emphasis. When Metternich was
dismissed after the 1848 insurrections and had to flee, 'nobody in the whole court
asked him where he would go and how he could live.' Sic transit.
57. Ibid., p. 181. Emphases added.
58. Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitatenfrage und die Sozialdemocratie (1907), as found in
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
In the era of the Russian revolution [of 1905], no one will dare to use
naked military force to subjugate the country [Hungary], rent as it is
by class and national antagonisms. But the inner conflicts of the
country will provide the Crown with another instrument of power
which it will have to exploit if it does not wish to suffer the fate of the
House of Bernadotte. It can not be the organ of two wills and yet still
intend to rule over Hungary and Austria. Hence it must take steps to
ensure that Hungary and Austria have a common will, and that it
constructs a single realm [Reich]. Hungary's inward fragmentation
offers her the possibility to achieve this goal. She will dispatch her
army to Hungary to recapture it for the realm, but she will inscribe on
her banners: Uncorrupted, universal and equal suffrage! Right of
coalition for the agricultural laborer! National autonomy! She will
counterpose to the idea of an independent Hungarian nation-state
[Nationals taat\ the idea of the United States of Great Austria [sic], the
idea of a federative state [Bundesstaat], in which each nation will
administer independently its own national affairs, and all the nations
will unite in one state for the preservation of their common interests.
Inevitably and unavoidably, the idea of a federative state of nationalities
[Nationalitatenbundesstaat] will become an instrument of the
Crown [sic! - Werkzeug der Krone], whose realm is being destroyed by
the decay of Dualism.
It seems reasonable to detect in this United States of Great Austria
(USGA) residues of the USA and the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland (one day to be ruled by a Labour Party),
as well as a foreshadowing of a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
whose stretch is strangely reminiscent of Czardom's. The fact is that
this USGA seemed, in its imaginer's mind, the necessary heir of a
particular dynastic dominion (Great Austria) - with its enfranchised
components exactly those produced by centuries of Habsburg
'hucksterings'.
Such 'imperial' imaginings were partly the misfortune of a
socialism born in the capital of one of Europe's great dynastic
his Werkausgabe, I, p. 482. Italics in the original. Comparison of this translation with that
of Jaszi, given in the original version of this book, offers food for thought.
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OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
empires.59
As we have noted earlier, the new imagined communities
(including the still-born, but still imagined USGA) conjured up by
lexicography and print-capitalism always regarded themselves as
somehow ancient. In an age in which 'history' itself was still widely
conceived in terms of'great events' and 'great leaders', pearls strung
along a thread of narrative, it was obviously tempting to decipher the
community's past in antique dynasties. Hence a USGA in which the
membrane separating empire from nation, crown from proletariat, is
almost transparent. Nor was Bauer unusual in all this. A William the
Conqueror and a George I, neither of whom could speak English,
continue to appear unproblematically as beads in the necklace 'Kings
of England'. 'Saint' Stephen (r. 1001-1038) might admonish his
successor that:60
The utility of foreigners and guests is so great that they can be given a
place of sixth importance among the royal ornaments. . . . For, as the
guests come from various regions and provinces, they bring with
them various languages and customs, various knowledges and arms.
All these adorn the royal court, heighten its splendour, and terrify the
haughtiness of foreign powers . For a country unified in language and
customs is fragile and weak. . . .
But such words would not in the least prevent his subsequent apotheosis
as the First King of Hungary.
In conclusion, then it has been argued that from about the middle
of the nineteenth century there developed what Seton-Watson
terms 'official nationalisms' inside Europe. These nationalisms were
historically 'impossible' until after the appearance of popular
linguistic-nationalisms, for, at bottom, they were responses by
power-groups - primarily, but not exclusively, dynastic and
59. Surely they also reflect the characteristic mindset of a well-known type of
leftwing European intellectual, proud of his command of the civilized languages, his
Enlightenment heritage, and his penetrating understanding of everyone else's problems.
In this pride, internationalist and aristocratic ingredients are rather evenly mixed.
60. Jaszi, The Dissolution, p. 39.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
aristocratic - threatened with exclusion from, or marginalization in,
popular imagined communities. A sort of tectonic upheaval was
beginning, which, after 1918 and 1945, tipped these groups towards
drainages in Estoril and Monte Carlo. Such official nationalisms
were conservative, not to say reactionary, policies, adapted from the
model of the largely spontaneous popular nationalisms that preceded
61
them.1
Nor were they ultimately confined to Europe and the
Levant. In the name of imperialism, very similar policies were
pursued by the same sorts of groups in the vast Asian and African
territories subjected in the course of the nineteenth century.
Finally, refracted into non-European cultures and histories, they
were picked up and imitated by indigenous ruling groups in those
few zones (among them Japan and Siam) which escaped direct
subjection.
In almost every case, official nationalism concealed a discrepancy
between nation and dynastic realm. Hence a world-wide contradiction:
Slovaks were to be Magyarized, Indians Anglicized, and
Koreans Japanified, but they would not be permitted to join pilgrimages
which would allow them to administer Magyars, Englishmen,
or Japanese. The banquet to which they were invited always
61. Half a century ago Jaszi had already suspected as much: 'One may ask whether
the late imperialist developments of nationalism do really emanate from the genuine
sources of the national idea and not from the monopolistic interests of certain groups
which were alien to the original conception of national aims.' Ibid., p. 286. Emphasis
added.
62. The point is nicely underlined by inversion in the case of the Netherlands
Indies, which in its last days was still to a large extent ruled through a language which we
know today as 'Indonesian.' This is, I think, the only case of a large colonial possession
in which to the end a non-European language remained a language-of-state. The
anomaly is primarily to be explained by the sheer antiquity of the colony, which was
founded early in the seventeenth century by a corporation (the Vereenigde Oostindische
Compagnie) — long before the age of official nationalism. Doubtless there was
also a certain lack of confidence on the part of the Dutch in modern times that their
language and culture had a European cachet comparable to that of English, French,
German, Spanish, or Italian. (Belgians in the Congo would use French rather than
Flemish.) Finally, colonial educational policy was exceptionally conservative: in 1940,
when the indigenous population numbered well over 70 millions, there were only 637
'natives' in college, and only 37 graduated with BAs. See George McT. Kahin,
Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, p. 32. For more on the Indonesian case, see
below, Chapter VII.
110
OFFICIAL NATIONALISM A N D IMPERIALISM
turned out to be a Barmecide feast. The reason for all this was not
simply racism; it was also the fact that at the core of the empires
nations too were emerging — Hungarian, English, and Japanese. And
these nations were also instinctively resistant to 'foreign' rule. Imperialist
ideology in the post-1850 era thus typically had the character
of a conjuring-trick. How much it was a conjuring-trick is suggested
by the equanimity with which metropolitan popular classes eventually
shrugged off the 'losses' of the colonies, even in cases like Algeria
where the colony had been legally incorporated into the metropole. In
the end, it is always the ruling classes, bourgeois certainly, but above
all aristocratic, that long mourn the empires, and their grief always has
a stagey quality to it.
ill
The Last Wave
The First World War brought the age of high dynasticism to an end. By
1922, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs and Ottomans were gone.
In place of the Congress of Berlin came the League of Nations, from
which non-Europeans were not excluded. From this time on, the
legitimate international norm was the nation-state, so that in the League
even the surviving imperial powers came dressed in national costume
rather than imperial uniform. After the cataclysm of World War II the
nation-state tide reached full flood. By the mid-1970s even the
Portuguese Empire had become a thing of the past.
The new states of the post-World War II period have their own
character, which nonetheless is incomprehensible except in terms of
the succession of models we have been considering. One way of
underlining this ancestry is to remind ourselves that a very large
number of these (mainly non-European) nations came to have
European languages-of-state. If they resembled the 'American' model
in this respect, they took from linguistic European nationalism its
ardent populism, and from official nationalism its Russifying policyorientation.
They did so because Americans and Europeans had lived
through complex historical experiences which were now everywhere
modularly imagined, and because the European languages-of-state
they employed were the legacy of imperialist official nationalism.
This is why so often in the 'nation-building' policies of the new
113
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
states one sees both a genuine, popular nationalist enthusiasm and a
systematic, even Machiavellian, instilling of nationalist ideology
through the mass media, the educational system, administrative
regulations, and so forth. In turn, this blend of popular and official
nationalism has been the product of anomalies created by European
imperialism: the well-known arbitrariness of frontiers, and bilingual
intelligentsias poised precariously over diverse monoglot populations.
One can thus think of many of these nations as projects the
achievement of which is still in progress, yet projects conceived
more in the spirit of Mazzini than that of Uvarov.
In considering the origins of recent 'colonial nationalism', one central
similarity with the colonial nationalisms of an earlier age immediately
strikes the eye: the isomorphism between each nationalism's territorial
stretch and that of the previous imperial administrative unit. The
similarity is by no means fortuitous; it is clearly related to the geography
of all colonial pilgrimages. The difference lies in the fact that the
contours of eighteenth-century Creole pilgrimages were shaped not only
by the centralizing ambitions of metropolitan absolutism, but by real
problems of communication and transportation, and a general technological
primitiveness. In the twentieth century, these problems had
largely been overcome, and in their place came a Janus-faced 'Russi-
fication'.
I argued earlier that in the late eighteenth century the imperial
administrative unit came to acquire a national meaning in part
because it circumscribed the ascent of Creole functionaries. So too in
the twentieth century. For even in cases where a young brown or
black Englishman came to receive some education or training in the
metropole, in a way that few of his Creole progenitors had been able
to do, that was typically the last time he made this bureaucratic
pilgrimage. From then on, the apex of his looping flight was the highest
administrative centre to which he could be assigned: Rangoon, Accra,
Georgetown, or Colombo. Yet in each constricted journey he found
bilingual travelling companions with whom he came to feel a
growing communality. In his journey he understood rather quickly
that his point of origin — conceived either ethnically, linguistically, or
geographically - was of small significance. At most it started him on
this pilgrimage rather than that: it did not fundamentally determine
114
THE LAST WAVE
his destination or his companions. Out of this pattern came that
subde, half-concealed transformation, step by step, of the colonialstate
into the national-state, a transformation made possible not only
by a solid continuity of personnel, but by the established skein of
journeys through which each state was experienced by its
functionaries.1
Yet increasingly after the middle of the nineteenth century, and
above all in the twentieth, the journeys were no longer made by a
mere handful of travellers, but rather by huge and variegated crowds.
The central factors at work were three. First and foremost was the
enormous increase in physical mobility made possible by the astonishing
achievements of industrial capitalism — railways and steamships
in the last century, motor transport and aviation in this. The
interminable journeys of the old Americas were quickly becoming
things of the past.
Second, imperial 'Russification' had its practical as well as ideological
side. The sheer size of the global European empires, and the
vast populations subjected, meant that purely metropolitan, or even
Creole, bureaucracies were neither recruitable nor affordable. The
colonial state, and, somewhat later, corporate capital, needed armies
of clerks, who to be useful had to be bilingual, capable of mediating
linguistically between the metropolitan nation and the colonized
peoples. The need was all the greater as the specialized functions
of the state everywhere multiplied after the turn of the century.
Alongside the old district officer appeared the medical officer, the
irrigation engineer, the agricultural extension-worker, the schoolteacher,
the policeman, and so on. With every enlargement of the
state, the swarm of its inner pilgrims swelled.
1. Not only, of course by functionaries, though they were the main group.
Consider, for example, the geography of Noli Me Tangere (and many other nationalist
novels). Though some of the most important characters in Rizal's text are Spanish, and
some of the Filipino characters have been to Spain (off the novel's stage), the
circumambience of travel by any of the characters is confined to what, eleven years
after its publication and two years after its author's execution, would become the
Republic of the Philippines.
2. To give only one example: by 1928, there were almost 250,000 indigenes on
the payroll of the Netherlands East Indies, and these formed 90% of all state
functionaries. (Symptomatically, the widely discrepant salaries and pensions of Dutch
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Third was the spread of modern-style education, not only by the
colonial state, but also by private religious and secular organizations.
This expansion occurred not simply to provide cadres for governmental
and corporate hierarchies, but also because of the growing
acceptance of the moral importance of modern knowledge even for
colonized populations. (Indeed the phenomenon of the educated
unemployed was already beginning to be apparent in a variety of
colonial states.)
It is generally recognized that the intelligentsias 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
monopolized 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 recognized that the
intelligentsias' 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
4
century.
In 1913, the Dutch colonial regime in Batavia, taking its lead from
and native officials, when combined, ate up 50% of state expenditures!). See Amry
Vandenbosch, The Dutch East Indies, pp. 171-73. Yet Dutchmen were proportionately
nine times as thick on the bureaucratic ground as were Englishmen in British (non'
native state') India.
3. Even in the ultra-conservative Netherlands Indies, the number of natives
receiving a primary Western-style education shot up from an average of 2,987 in
the years 1900-04 to 74,697 in 1928; while those receiving a Western-style secondary
education increased in the same span of time from 25 to 6,468. Kahin, Nationalism, p.
31.
4. To borrow from Anthony Barnett, it also 'allowed the intellectuals to say to
their fellow-speakers [of the indigenous vernaculars] that "we" can be like
"them" '.
116
THE LAST WAVE
The Hague, sponsored massive colony-wide festivities to celebrate the
centennial of the 'national liberation' of the Netherlands from French
imperialism. Orders went out to secure physical participation and
financial contributions, not merely from the local Dutch and Eurasian
communities, but also from the subject native population. In protest,
the early Javanese-Indonesian nationalist Suwardi Suijaningrat (Ki
Hadjar Dewantoro) wrote his famous Dutch-language newspaper
article 'Als ik eens Nederlander was' (If I were for once to be a
Dutchman).5
In my opinion, there is something out of place - something indecent
— if we (I still being a Dutchman in my imagination) ask the natives to
join the festivities which celebrate our independence. Firstly, we will
hurt their sensitive feelings because we are here celebrating our own
independence in their native country which we colonize. At the
moment we are very happy because a hundred years ago we liberated
ourselves from foreign domination; and all of this is occurring in front
of the eyes of those who are still under our domination. Does it not
occur to us that these poor slaves are also longing for such a moment
as this, when they like us will be able to celebrate their independence?
Or do we perhaps feel that because of our soul-destroying policy we
regard all human souls as dead? If that is so, then we are deluding
ourselves, because no matter how primitive a community is, it is
against any type of oppression. If I were a Dutchman, I would not
organize an independence celebration in a country where the
independence of the people has been stolen.
With these words Suwardi was able to turn Dutch history against the
Dutch, by scraping boldly at the weld between Dutch nationalism
and imperialism. Furthermore, by the imaginary transformation of
5. It appeared originally in De Expres on July 13, 1913, but was quickly translated
into 'Indonesian' and published in the native press. Suwardi was then 24 years old. An
unusually well-educated and progressive aristocrat, he had in 1912 joined with a
Javanese commoner, Dr. Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo, and a Eurasian, Eduard Douwes
Dekker, to from the Indische Partij, the colony's first political party. For a brief, but
useful, study of Suwardi, see Savitri Scherer, 'Harmony and Dissonance: Early
Nationalist Thought in Java', chapter 2. Her Appendix I gives an English translation
of the famous article, from which this passage is drawn.
til
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
himself into a temporary Dutchman (which invited a reciprocal
transformation of his Dutch readers into temporary Indonesians),
he undermined all the racist fatalities that underlay Dutch colonial
ideology.6
Suwardi's broadside - which delighted his Indonesian as much
as it irritated his Dutch audience - is exemplary of a world-wide
twentieth-century phenomenon. For the paradox of imperial official
nationalism was that it inevitably brought what were increasingly
thought of and written about as European 'national histories' into the
consciousnesses of the colonized - not merely via occasional obtuse
festivities, but also through reading-rooms and classrooms. Vietnamese
youngsters could not avoid learning about the philosophes and
the Revolution, and what Debray calls 'our secular antagonism to
?8
Germany'. Magna Carta, the Mother of Parliaments, and the
Glorious Revolution, glossed as English national history, entered
schools all over the British Empire. Belgium's independence struggle
against Holland was not erasable from schoolbooks Congolese children
would one day read. So also the histories of the USA in the
Philippines and, last of all, Portugal in Mozambique and Angola. The
irony, of course, is that these histories were written out of a
historiographical consciousness which by the turn of the century
was, all over Europe, becoming nationally defined. (The barons who
imposed Magna Carta on John Plantagenet did not speak 'English,'
and had no conception of themselves as 'Englishmen,' but they were
firmly defined as early patriots in the classrooms of the United
Kingdom 700 years later.)
Yet there is a characteristic feature of the emerging nationalist
intelligentsias in the colonies which to some degree marks them off
6. Notice the educational linkage here between 'imagined' and 'imaginary'
communities.
7. The celebrations of 1913 were agreeably emblematic of official nationalism in
another sense. The 'national liberation' commemorated was in fact the restoration of the
House of Orange by the victorious armies of the Holy Alliance (not the establishment of
the Batavian Republic in 1795); and half the liberated nation soon seceded to form the
Kingdom of Belgium in 1830. But the 'national liberation' gloss was certainly what
Suwardi imbibed in his colonial classroom.
8. 'Marxism and the National Question,' p. 41.
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THE LAST WAVE
from the vernacularizing nationalist intelligentsias of nineteenthcentury
Europe. Almost invariably they were very young, and
attached a complex political significance to their youth — a significance
which, though it has changed over time, remains important
to this day. The rise of (modern/organized) Burmese
nationalism is often dated to the founding in 1908 of the Young
Men's Buddhist Association in Rangoon; and of Malayan by the
establishment in 1938 of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda (Union of
Malay Youth). Indonesians annually celebrate the Sumpah Pemuda
(Oath of Youth) drawn up and sworn by the nationalist youth
congress of 1928. And so on. 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 middleaged
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 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 from the vast bulk of their
colonized agemates (cf. B. C. Pal). Burma's 'English-language'
YMBA, modelled in part on the YMCA, was built by Englishreading
schoolboys. In the Netherlands Indies one finds, inter alia,
Jong Java (Young Java), Jong Ambon (Young Amboina), and Jong
Islamietenbond (League of Young Muslism) - titles incomprehensible
to any young native unacquainted with the colonial tongue. In the
colonies, then, by 'Youth' we mean 'Schooled Youth,' at least at the
start. This in turn reminds us again of the unique role played by
119
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
colonial school-systems in promoting colonial nationalisms.9
The case of Indonesia affords a fascinatingly intricate illustration of
this process, not least because of its enormous size, huge population
(even in colonial times), geographical fragmentation (about 3,000
islands), religious variegation (Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, assorted
Protestants, Hindu-Balinese, and 'animists'), and ethnolinguistic diversity
(well over 100 distinct groups). Furthermore, as its hybrid
pseudo-Hellenic name suggests, its stretch does not remotely correspond
to any precolonial domain; on the contrary, at least until
General Suharto's brutal invasion of ex-Portuguese East Timor in
1975, its boundaries have been those left behind by the last Dutch
conquests (c. 1910).
Some of the peoples on the eastern coast of Sumatra are not only
physically close, across the narrow Straits of Malacca, to the
populations of the western littoral of the Malay Peninsula, but they
are ethnically related, understand each other's speech, have a
common religion, and so forth. These same Sumatrans share neither
mother-tongue, ethnicity, nor religion with the Ambonese, located
9. Our focus here will be on civilian schools. But their military counterparts were
often important too. The professionally officered standing army pioneered by Prussia
early in the nineteenth century has required an educational pyramid in some ways more
elaborate, if not more specialized, than its civilian analogue. Young officers ('Turks')
produced by new military academies have often played significant roles in the
development of nationalism. Emblematic is the case of Major Chukuma Nzeogwu,
who masterminded the January 15, 1966 coup in Nigeria. A Christian Ibo, he was
among the first group of young Nigerians sent for training to Sandhurst to make possible
the transformation of a white-officered colonial mercenary force into a national army,
on Nigeria's attainment of independence in 1960. (If he attended Sandhurst with the
future Brigadier Afrifa, who, also in 1966, was to overthrow his government, each
native was destined to return to his own imperial habitat). It is striking evidence of the
power of the Prussian model that he was able to lead Muslim Hausa troops in
assassinating the Sardauna of Sokoto and other Muslim Hausa aristocrats, and, consequently,
destroy the Muslim-Hausa-dominated government of Abubakar Tafawa
Balewa. It is no less striking a sign of colonial-school-generated nationalism that over
Radio Kaduna he assured his countrymen that 'you will no more be ashamed to say that
you are Nigerian.' (Quotation taken from Anthony H.M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and
Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Source Book, p. 126.) Yet nationalism was thinly
enough then spread in Nigeria for Nzeogwu's nationalist coup to be quickly interpreted
as an Ibo plot; hence the military mutinies of July, the anti-Ibo pogroms of September
and October, and Biafra's secession in May 1967. (See Robin Luckham's superb The
Nigerian Military, passim.)
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THE LAST WAVE
on islands thousands of miles away to the east. Yet during this century
they have come to understand the Ambonese as fellow-Indonesians,
the Malays as foreigners.
Nothing nurtured this bonding more than the schools that the
regime in Batavia set up in increasing numbers after the turn of the
century. To see why, one has to remember that in complete contrast
to traditional, indigenous schools, which were always local and
personal enterprises (even if, in good Muslim fashion, there was
plenty of horizontal movement of students from one particularly
well-reputed ulama-teacher to another), the government schools
formed a colossal, highly rationalized, tightly centralized hierarchy,
structurally analogous to the state bureaucracy itself. Uniform textbooks,
standardized diplomas and teaching certificates, a strictly
10
regulated gradation of age-groups, classes and instructional materials,
in themselves created a self-contained, coherent universe of
experience. But no less important was the hierarchy's geography.
Standardized elementary schools came to be scattered about in
villages and small townships of the colony; junior and senior middleschools
in larger towns and provincial centres; while tertiary education
(the pyramid's apex) was confined to the colonial capital of
Batavia and the Dutch-built city of Bandung, 100 miles southwest in
the cool Priangan highlands. Thus the twentieth-century colonial
school-system brought into being pilgrimages which paralleled longerestablished
functionary journeys. The Rome of these pilgrimages
was Batavia: not Singapore, not Manila, not Rangoon, not even the
old Javanese royal capitals of Jogjakarta and Surakarta.11
From all over
the vast colony, but from nowhere outside it, the tender pilgrims
made their inward, upward way, meeting fellow-pilgrims from
different, perhaps once hostile, villages in primary school; from
different ethnolinguistic groups in middle-school; and from every
10. The idea of a student being 'too old' to be in class X or Y, unthinkable in a
traditional Muslim school, was an unselfconscious axiom of the colonial Western-style
school.
11. Ultimately, of course, the apices were The Hague, Amsterdam, and Leiden;
but those who could seriously dream of studying there were a tiny handful.
121
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
part of the realm in the tertiary institutions of the capital.12
And they
knew that from wherever they had come they still had read the same
books and done the same sums. They also knew, even if they never got
so far - and most did not — that Rome was Batavia, and that all these
journeyings derived their 'sense' from the capital, in effect explaining
why 'we' are 'here' 'together.' To put it another way, their common
experience, and the amiably competitive comradeship of the classroom,
gave the maps of the colony which they studied (always coloured
differently from British Malaya or the American Philippines) a territorially
specific imagined reality which was every day confirmed by the
\ 3
accents and physiognomies of their classmates.
And what were they all together? The Dutch were quite clear on this
point: whatever mother-tongue they spoke, they were irremediably
inlanders, a word which, like the English 'natives' and the French
'indigenes,' always carried an unintentionally paradoxical semantic load.
In this colony, as in each separate, other colony, it meant that the persons
referred to were both 'inferior' and 'belonged there' (just as the Dutch,
being 'natives' of Holland, belonged there). Conversely, the Dutch
by such language assigned themselves, along with superiority, 'notbelonging-there'.
The word also implied that in their common
inferiority, the inlanders were equally contemptible, no matter what
ethnolinguistic group or class they came from. Yet even this miserable
equality of condition had a definite perimeter. For inlander always raised
the question 'native of what?'. If the Dutch sometimes spoke as if
inlanders were a world-category, experience showed that this notion was
hardly sustainable in practice. Inlanders stopped at the coloured colony's
drawn edge. Beyond that were, variously, 'natives', indigenes and indios.
Moreover, colonial legal terminology included the category vreemde
oosterlingen (foreign Orientals), which had the dubious ring of false coin —
as it were 'foreign natives.' Such 'foreign Orientals,' mainly Chinese,
Arabs and Japanese, though they might live in the colony, had a politico-
12. Being secular, twentieth-century schools they were usually co-educational,
though with boys the preponderant majority. Hence love-affairs, and quite often
marriages, 'off the school-bench,' which crossed all traditional lines.
13. Sukarno never saw the West Irian for which he fought so hard till he was over
60. Here, as in the schoolroom maps, we see fiction seeping into reality — cf. Noli and El
Periquillo Sarniento.
122
THE LAST WAVE
legal legal status superior to that of the 'native natives'. Furthermore, tiny
Holland was sufficiently awed by the Meiji oligarchs' economic strength
and military prowess for Japanese in the colony to be legally promoted,
from 1899 on, to 'honorary Europeans'. From all this, by a sort of
sedimentation, inlander - excluding whites, Dutchmen, Chinese, Arabs,
Japanese, 'natives,' indigenes, and indios — grew ever more specific in
content; until, like a ripe larva, it was suddenly transmogrified into the
spectacular butterfly called'Indonesian'.
While it is true that the concepts inlander and 'native' could never be
truly generalized racist notions, since they always implied roots in some
specific habitat,14
the case of Indonesia should not lead us to assume that
each 'native' habitat had preordained or immutable frontiers. Two
examples will show the contrary: French West Africa and French
Indochina.
In its heyday, the Ecole Normale William Ponty in Dakar, though
only a secondary school, was still the apex of the colonial educational
pyramid in French West Africa. To William Ponty came intelligent
students from what we know today as Guinea, Mali, the Ivory Coast,
Senegal, and so on. We should not be surprised therefore if the
pilgrimages of these boys, terminating in Dakar, were initially read in
French [West] African terms, of which the paradoxical concept
nigritude — essence of African-ness expressible only in French, language
of the William Ponty classrooms - is an unforgettable symbol.
Yet the apicality of William Ponty was accidental and evanescent. As
more secondary schools were constructed in French West Africa, it
was no longer necessary for bright boys to make so distant a
14. Compare, by contrast, 'half-breeds' or 'niggers,' who, beginning at Calais,
could crop up anywhere on the planet outside the United Kingdom.
15. On the origins and development of this famous school, see Abdou Moumouni,
L'Education en Afrique, pp. 41-49; on its political significance, Ruth Schachter Morgenthau,
Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, pp. 12-14, 18-21. Originally an
untitled ecole normale located in Saint-Louis, it was moved to Goree, just outside Dakar,
in 1913. Subsequently it was named after William Merlaud-Ponty, the fourth governorgeneral
(1908-15) of French West Africa. Serge Thion informs me that the name
William (as opposed to Guillaume) has long been in vogue in the area around Bordeaux.
He is surely right in attributing this popularity to the historic ties with England created
by the wine trade; but it seems just possible that it goes back to the era when Bordeaux
(Guyenne) was still a solid part of the realm ruled from London.
123
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
pilgrimage. And in any case the educational centrality of William
Ponty was never matched by a comparable administrative centrality of
Dakar. The interchangeability of French West African boys on the
benches of William Ponty was not paralleled by their later bureaucratic
substitutability in the French West African colonial administration.
Hence, the school's Old Boys went home to become,
eventually, Guinean or Malian nationalist leaders, while retaining a
'West African' camaraderie and solidary intimacy lost to succeeding
generations.16
In much the same way, for one generation of relatively well educated
adolescents, the curious hybrid 'Indochine' had a real, experienced,
17
imagined meaning. This entity, it will be recalled, was not legally
proclaimed until 1887, and did not acquire its fullest territorial form
until 1907, though active French meddling in the general area went
back a century earlier.
Broadly speaking, the educational policy pursued by the colonial
t i s *rulers of'Indochine' had two fundamental purposes - both of which,
as it turned out, contributed to the growth of an 'Indochinese'
consciousness. One aim was to break existing politico-cultural ties
between the colonized peoples and the immediate extra-Indochinese
16. There seems to have been nothing similar in British West Africa, whether
because the British colonies were non-contiguous, or because London was wealthy and
liberal enough to start secondary schools almost simultaneously in the major territories,
or because of the localism of rival Protestant missionary organizations. Achimota
School, a secondary school founded by the colonial state in Accra in 1927, quickly
became the main peak of a Gold Coast-specific educational pyramid, and after
independence it was where the children of cabinet ministers began learning how to
succeed their fathers. A rival peak, Mfantsipim Secondary School, had the advantage of
seniority (it was founded in 1876), but the weaknesses of locale (Cape Coast) and semidetachment
from the state (it was in denominational hands till well after independence).
I owe this information to Mohamed Chambas.
17. It led, inter alia, to a one-generation (1930—1951?) Indochinese Communist
Party in which, for a time, youngsters whose mother tongues might be Vietnamese,
Khmer, or Lao participated. Today, the formation of this party is sometimes viewed
merely as an expression of'age-old Vietnamese expansionism.' In fact, it was sired by
the Comintern out of the educational (and to a lesser extent administrative) system of
French Indochina.
18. This policy is ably and thoroughly discussed in Gail Paradise Kelly, 'FrancoVietnamese
Schools, 1918 to 1938'. Unluckily, the author concentrates exclusively on
the Vietnamese-speaking population of Indochina.
124
THE LAST WAVE
world. As far as 'Cambodge' and 'Laos' were concerned,19
the target
was Siam, which had previously exercised a variable suzerainty over
them and shared with both the rituals, institutions, and sacred language
of Hinayana Buddhism. (In addition, the language and script of the
lowland Lao were, and are, closely related to those of the Thai). It was
precisely out of this concern that the French experimented first in those
zones last seized from Siam with the so-called 'renovated pagoda
schools,' which were designed to move Khmer monks and their pupils
20
out of the Thai orbit into that of Indochina.
In eastern Indochina (my shorthand for 'Tonkin,' 'Annam,' and
'Cochin China'), the target was China and Chinese civilization.
Although the dynasties ruling in Hanoi and Hue had for centuries
defended their independence from Peking, they came to rule through
a mandarinate consciously modelled on that of the Chinese. Recruitment
into the state machinery was geared to written examinations in
the Confucian classics; dynastic documents were written in Chinese
characters; and the ruling class was heavily Sinicized in culture.
These long-standing ties assumed an additionally unwelcome character
after about 1895, when the writings of such Chinese reformers as
K'ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, and nationalists like Sun Yatsen,
began seeping across the northern frontier of the colony.
19. I use this perhaps clumsy terminology to emphasize the colonial origins of
these entities. 'Laos' was assembled out of a cluster of rival principalities, leaving more
than half of the Lao-speaking population in Siam. The boundaries of 'Cambodge'
conformed neither to any particular historical stretch of the precolonial realm, nor to the
distribution of the Khmer-speaking peoples. Some hundreds of thousands of such
people ended up trapped in 'Cochin China,' producing in time that distinct community
known as the Khmer Krom (down-river Khmer).
20. They pursued this aim by establishing in the 1930s an Ecole Superieure de Pali
in Phnom Penh, an ecclesiastical college attended by both Khmer- and Lao-speaking
monks. The attempt to turn Buddhist eyes away from Bangkok seems not to have been
wholly successful. In 1942 (shortly after Siam regained control of much of northwestern
'Cambodge' with Japanese assistance), the French arrested a venerable professor of the
Ecole for possession and distribution of'subversive' Thai educational materials. (Most
likely, these materials were some of the strongly nationalist school-texts produced by the
vociferously anti-French regime of Field-Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram (1938—
1944).
21. David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945, p. 146. No less
alarming were smuggled Chinese translations of such troubling French authors as
Rousseau. (Kelly, 'Franco-Vietnamese Schools', p. 19).
125
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Accordingly, Confucian examinations were successively abolished in
'Tonkin' in 1915 and in 'Annam' in 1918. Henceforth, recruitment into
the civil services of Indochina was to take place exclusively through a
developing French colonial education system. Furthermore, quoc ngu, a
romanized phonetic script originally devised by Jesuit missionaries in the
22 ,
seventeenth century, and adopted by the authorities for use in 'Cochin
China' as early as the 1860s, was consciously promoted to break the links
with China — and perhaps also with the indigenous past — by making
dynastic records and ancient literatures inaccessible to a new generation
* 23
of colonized Vietnamese.
The second aim of educational policy was to produce a carefullycalibrated
quantum of French-speaking and French-writing Indochinese
to serve as a politically reliable, grateful, and acculturated
indigenous elite, filling the subordinate echelons of the colony's bureaucracy
and larger commercial enterprises.24
The intricacies of the colonial educational system need not detain
us here. For our present purposes, the key characteristic of the system
was that it formed a single, if ramshackle, pyramid, of which, until the
mid-1930s, the upper terraces all lay in the east. Up until then, for
22. In its final form, this script is usually attributed to the gifted lexicographer
Alexandre de Rhodes, who in 1651 published his remarkable Dictionarium annamiticum,
lusitanum et latinum.
23. '[Most] French colonial officials of the late nineteenth century . . . were
convinced that to achieve permanent colonial success required the harsh curtailment
of Chinese influences, including the writing system. Missionaries often saw the
Confucian literati as the main obstacle to the general Catholic conversion of
Vietnam. Hence, in their view, to eliminate the Chinese language was simultaneously
to isolate Vietnam from its heritage and to neutralize the traditional elite.'
(Marr, Vietnamese Tradition, p. 145). Kelly quotes one colonial writer thus: 'in effect,
the teaching of quoc ngu alone . . . will have the result of communicating to
Vietnamese only the French writing, literature, and philosophy which we wish them
[to be exposed to]. That is those [works] which we judge useful to them and easily
assimilable: only the texts which we transcribe into quoc ngu.' 'Franco-Vietnamese
Schools', p. 22.
24. See ibid., pp. 14-15. For a wider, lower stratum of the Indochinese population
Governor-General Albert Sarraut (author of the 1917 Code of Public Instruction)
urged: 'a simple education, reduced to essentials, permitting the child to learn all that
will be useful to him to know in his humble career of farmer or artisan to ameliorate the
natural and social conditions of his existence.' Ibid., p. 17.
126
THE LAST WAVE
example, the only state-sponsored lycees were located in Hanoi and
Saigon; and throughout the prewar colonial period, the sole university
in Indochina was located in Hanoi, so to speak 'just down the
25
street' from the palace of the Governor-General. The climbers of
these terraces included all the major vernacular-speakers of the French
domain: Vietnamese, Chinese, Khmer, and Lao (and not a few young
French colonials). For the climbers, coming from, shall we say, My
Tho, Battambang, Vientiane, and Vinh, the meaning of their convergence
had to be 'Indochinese,' in the same way that the polyglot
and polyethnic student body of Batavia and Bandung had to read\ 2 6 \
theirs as 'Indonesian.' This Indochinese-ness, although it was quite
real, was nonetheless imagined by a tiny group, and not for very long.
Why did it turn out to be so evanescent, while Indonesian-ness
survived and deepened?
First there was a marked change of course in colonial education,
above all as applied in eastern Indochina, from about 1917 on. The
actual, or immediately impending, liquidation of the traditional
Confucian examination system persuaded more and more members
of the Vietnamese elite to try to place their children in the best
French schools available, so as to ensure their bureaucratic futures.
The resulting competition for places in the few good schools available
25. In 1937, a total of 631 students were enrolled, 580 of them in the faculties of
law and medicine. Ibid., p. 79; see also pp. 69-79, for the bizarre history of this
institution, founded in 1906, closed in 1908, reopened in 1918, and never, till the late
1930s, much more than a glorified vocational college.
26. As I shall be concentrating on Khmers and Vietnamese below, this may be the
place to make a brief reference to some prominent Lao. The present Prime Minister of
Laos, Kaysone Phoumvihan attended the University of Hanoi's medical faculty in the
late 1930s. The head of state, Prince Souphanouvong, graduated from Hanoi's Lycee
Albert Sarraut before obtaining an engineering degree in metropolitan France. His elder
brother, Prince Phetsarath Ratanavongsa, who headed the short-lived Lao Issara (Free
Lao) anticolonial government in Vientiane from October 1945 to April 1946, had as a
youth been graduated from Saigon's Lycee Chasseloup-Laubat. Prior to World War II,
the highest educational institution in 'Laos' was the small College [i.e. junior high
school] Pavie in Vientiane. See Joseph J. Zasloff, Pathet Lao, pp. 104-105; and '3349'
[pseudonym of Phetsarath Ratanavongsa], Iron Man of Laos, pp. 12 and 46. It is
revealing, I think, that in his account of his later schooldays in Paris, Phetsarath regularly
and unselfconsciously speaks of his identifiably Lao, Khmer, and Vietnamese classmates
as 'the Indochinese students.' See, e.g., ibid., pp. 14—15.
12 7
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
aroused a particularly strong reaction from the colons, who regarded
these schools as by right a largely French preserve. The colonial
regime's solution to the problem was to create a separate and
subordinate 'Franco-Vietnamese' educational structure which placed
special emphasis, in its lower grades, on Vietnamese-language instruction
in quoc ngu (with French taught as a second language via the
a 27
medium of quoc ngu). This policy shift had two complementary
results. On the one hand, government publication of hundreds of
thousands of quoc ngu primers significantly accelerated the spread of
this European-invented script, unintentionally helping to turn it,
between 1920 and 1945, into the popular medium for the expression28
of Vietnamese cultural (and national) solidarity. For even if only 10
per cent of the Vietnamese-speaking population was literate by the
late 1930s, this was a proportion unprecedented in the history of this
people. Moreover, these literates were, unlike the Confucian literati,
deeply committed to a rapid increase in their own numbers.
(Similarly, in 'Cambodge' and 'Laos', if on a more limited scale,
the authorities promoted the printing of elementary school-texts in
the vernaculars, initially and mainly in the traditional orthographies,29
later and more feebly in romanized scripts). On the other hand, the
policy worked to exclude non-native-Vietnamese-speakers residing
in eastern Indochina. In the case of the Khmer Krom of 'Cochin
27. Thus in the previously 'integrated' lycees Chasseloup-Laubat and Albert
Sarraut, sub-standard 'native sections' were established in 1917-1918. These 'native
sections' eventually turned respectively into the Lycee Petrus Ky and the Lycee du
Protectorat. (Ibid., pp. 60-63). Nonetheless, a minority of privileged indigenes
continued to attend the 'real French' lycees (the adolescent Norodom Sihanouk
graced Chasseloup-Laubat), while a minority of 'French' (mainly Eurasians and
natives with French legal status) attended Petrus Ky and its sister institution in
Hanoi.
28. Marr notes that in the 1920s 'even the most optimistic member of the
intelligentsia [committed to quoc ngu] could not have guessed that only two decades
later, citizens of a Democratic Republic of Vietnam would be able to conduct all
important affairs - political, military, economic, scientific and academic - in spoken
Vietnamese linked to the quoc ngu writing system.' Vietnamese Tradition, p. 150. It was
also a disagreeable surprise to the French.
29. It is instructive that one of the first issues raised by the early Khmer nationalists
of the late 1930s was the 'menace' of a so-called 'quoc ngu-ization' of the Khmer script
by the colonial authorities.
128
THE LAST WAVE
China,' it worked, in combination with the colonial regime's
willingness to permit them to have 'Franco-Khmer' elementary
schools like those being encouraged in the Protectorate, to reorient
ambitions back up the Mekong. Thus those Khmer Krom
adolescents who aspired to higher education in the administrative
capital of Indochina (and, for a select few, even in metropolitan
France) increasingly took the detour via Phnom Penh rather than
the highway through Saigon.
Second, in 1935 the College Sisowath in Phnom Penh was upgraded
into a full-fledged state lycee, with a status equal to, and a curriculum
identical with, those of the existing state lycees in Saigon and Hanoi.
Although its students were at first drawn heavily (in the tradition of the
College) from local Sino-Khmer merchant families and those of resident
Vietnamese functionaries, the proportion of native Khmers steadily
30
increased. It is probably fair to say that, after 1940, the great bulk of
Khmer-speaking adolescents who achieved a solid French high-school
education did so in the neat colonial capital the colonialists had built for
the Norodoms.
Third was the fact that there was no real isomorphism between the
educational and administrative pilgrimages in Indochina. The French
made no bones about expressing the view that if the Vietnamese were
untrustworthy and grasping, they were nonetheless decisively more
energetic and intelligent than the 'child-like' Khmer and Lao.
Accordingly, they made extensive use of Vietnamese functionaries31)
in western Indochina. The 176,000 Vietnamese residing in 'Cambodge'
in 1937 — representing less than one per cent of the 19 million
Vietnamese-speakers of the colony, but about 6 per cent of the
Protectorate's population - formed a relatively successful group, for
whom therefore Indochina had a rather solid meaning, as it did for
30. The pattern was not immediately followed in Vientiane. Toye reports that in
the course of the 1930s only 52 Lao were graduated from the College [he wrongly terms
it Lycee] Pavie, as opposed to 96 Vietnamese. Laos, p. 45.
31. It is possible that this influx paralleled the institution of the Franco-Vietnamese
school system, in that it deflected Vietnamese from competing with French nationals in
the more advanced, eastern parts of Indochina, In 1937, there were 39,000 Europeans
living in 'Cochin China,' 'Annam' and 'Tonkin,' and only 3,100 in 'Cambodge' and
'Laos' combined. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition, p. 23.
129
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
the 50,000 sent into 'Laos' prior to 1945. Particularly the functionaries
among them, who might be posted from place to place in all five
subsections of the colony, could well imagine Indochina as the wide
stage on which they would continue to perform.
Such imagining was much less easy for Lao and Khmer functionaries,
although there was no formal or legal prohibition on fully-Indochinese
careers for them. Even the more ambitious youngsters coming from the
c.326,000 (1937) Khmer Krom community in eastern Indochina
(representing perhaps 10 per cent of the entire Khmer-speaking
population) found that in practice they had very limited career prospects
outside 'Cambodge'. Thus Khmer and Lao might sit alongside Vietnamese
in French-language secondary and tertiary schools in Saigon and
Hanoi, but they were unlikely to go on to share administrative offices
there. Like youngsters from Cotonou and Abidjan in Dakar, they were
destined to go back, on graduation, to the 'homes' colonialism had
demarcated for them. To put it another way, if their educational
pilgrimages were directed towards Hanoi, their administrative journeys
ended in Phnom Penh and Vientiane.
Out of these contradictions emerged those Khmer-speaking students
who subsequently came to be remembered as the first Cambodian
nationalists. The man who can reasonably be regarded as the 'father' of
Khmer nationalism, Son Ngoc Thanh, was, as his Vietnamized name
suggests, a Khmer Krom who was educated in Saigon and for a while
held a minor judicial post in that city. But in the mid-1950s he
abandoned the Paris of the Mekong Delta to seek a more promising
future in its Blois. Prince Sisowath Youtevong attended secondary
school in Saigon before leaving for France for further study. When he
returned to Phnom Penh fifteen years later, after World War II, he
helped to found the (Khmer) Democratic Party and served as Prime
Minister in 1946-1947. His Defence Minister, Sonn Voeunnsai, undertook
virtually the same journeys. Huy Kanthoul, Democratic Prime
Minister in 1951-1952, had graduated from an ecole normale in Hanoi in
1931, and was then returned to Phnom Penh, where he eventually
32
joined the Lycee Sisowath's teaching staff. Perhaps most exemplary of
32. Biographical materials on these men were kindly provided to me by Steve
Heder.
130
THE LAST WAVE
all is the figure of leu Koeus, first of a melancholy line of assassinated
Khmer political leaders. Born in the province of Battambang in 1905
— when it was still ruled from Bangkok - he attended a local 'reformed
pagoda school' before entering an 'Indochinese' elementary school in
Battambang town. In 1921, he proceeded to the College Sisowath in
the Protectorate's capital, and then to a college de commerce in Hanoi,
from which he graduated in 1927 at the top of his French-reading
class. Hoping to study chemistry in Bordeaux, he took and passed the
scholarship examination. But the colonial state blocked his way
abroad. He returned to his native Battambang, where he ran a
pharmacy, continuing to do so even after Bangkok regained the
province in 1941. After the Japanese collapse in August 1945, he
reappeared in 'Cambodge' as a Democratic parliamentarian. It is
notable that he was in his way a lineal descendant of the illustrious
philologists of an earlier Europe, insofar as he designed a typewriter
keyboard for the Khmer script and published a weighty two-volume
Pheasa Khmer [The Khmer Language], or as the misleading title-page
of the 1967 edition has it, La Langue Cambodgienne (Un Essai d'etude
raisonne).34
But this text made its first appearance - volume 1 only - in
1947, when its author was Chairman of the Constituent Assembly in
Phnom Penh, not in 1937, when he was vegetating in Battambang,
when as yet no Khmer-speaking lyceens had been produced by the
Lycee Sisowath, and when Indochina still had an ephemeral reality. By
1947, Khmer-speakers - at least those from 'Cambodge' - were no
longer attending classes in Saigon or Hanoi. A new generation was
coming on the scene for whom 'Indochine' was history and 'Vietnam'
now a real and foreign country.
It is true that brutal invasions and occupations during the
nineteenth century, ordered by the Nguyen dynasts in Hue, left bitter
folk-memories among the Khmer, including those in that 'Cochin
China' fated to become part of Vietnam. But comparable bitternesses
33. He died in 1950, in a grenade attack on the Democratic Party headquarters
organized by an unknown, but probably princely, hand.
34. Published in Phnom Penh by the Librairie Mitserei [Free Friends]. 'Misleading'
because the entire text is in Khmer. Biographical details on leu Koeus,
drawn from his 1964 cremation volume, were generously passed on to me by Steve
Heder.
131
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
existed in the Netherlands Indies: Sundanese against Javanese; Batak
against Minangkabau; Sasak against Balinese; Toraja against Buginese;
Javanese against Ambonese, and so on. The so-called 'federalist
policy' pursued between 1945 and 1948 by the formidable Lieutenant
Governor-General Hubertus van Mo ok to outflank the infant In-
35
donesian Republic attempted precisely to exploit such bitternesses.
But in spite of a spate of ethnic rebellions in almost all parts of
independent Indonesia between 1950 and 1964, 'Indonesia' survived.
In part it survived because Batavia remained the educational apex to
the end, but also because colonial administrative policy did not
rusticate educated Sundanese to the 'Sundalands,' or Batak to their
place of origin in the highlands of North Sumatra. Virtually all the
major ethnolinguistic groups were, by the end of the colonial period,
accustomed to the idea that there was an archipelagic stage on which
they had parts to play. Thus, only one of the rebellions of 1950-64
had separatist ambitions; all the rest were competitive within a single36
Indonesian political system.
In addition, one can not ignore the curious accident that by the
1920s an 'Indonesian language' had come into self-conscious existence.
How this accident came about is so instructive that it seems worth a
brief digression. Earlier, mention was made of the fact that only to a
limited and late extent were the Indies ruled through Dutch. How
could it not be so, when the Dutch had begun their local conquests in
the early seventeenth century, while Dutch-language instruction for
inlanders was not seriously undertaken until the early twentieth? What
happened instead was that by a slow, largely unplanned process, a
strange language-of-state evolved on the basis of an ancient inter-37insular lingua franca. Called dienstmaleisch (perhaps 'service-Malay' or
35. See Kahin, Nationalism, chapter 12; Anthony Reid, The Indonesian National
Revolution, i945-50, chapter 6; and Henri Alers, Om een rode of groene Merdeka, passim.
36. The exception was the abortive Republic of the South Moluccas. Christianized
Ambonese had long been heavily recruited for the repressive colonial army. Many
fought under van Mook against the new-born revolutionary Indonesian Republic; after
Holland's recognition of Indonesian independence in 1950, they had some reason to
expect an unpleasant future.
37. See the valuable account in John Hoffman, 'A Foreign Investment: Indies
Malay to 1902,' Indonesia, 27 (April 1979), pp. 65-92.
132
THE LAST WAVE
'administrative-Malay'), it belonged typologically with 'Ottoman' and
that 'fiscal German' which emerged from the polyglot barracks of the
38
Habsburg empire. By the early nineteenth century it was solidly in
place inside officialdom. When print-capitalism arrived on the scene in
a sizeable way after mid-century, the language moved out into the
marketplace and the media. Used at first mainly by Chinese and
Eurasian newspapermen and printers, it was picked up by inlanders
at the century's close. Quickly the dienst branch of its family tree was
forgotten and replaced by a putative ancestor in the Riau Islands (of
which the most important had - perhaps fortunately - since 1819
become British Singapore). By 1928, shaped by two generations of
urban writers and readers, it was ready to be adopted by Young
Indonesia as the national(-ist) language bahasa Indonesia. Since then,
it has never looked back.
Yet, in the end, the Indonesian case, interesting as it is, should not39
mislead us into thinking that, if Holland had been a bigger power,
and had arrived in 1850 rather than 1600, the national language could
not just as well have been Dutch. 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 certain nationalist ideologues 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.
A£tcr all, imperial languages are still vernaculars, and thus
38. The military 'constituted something like an anational caste, the members of
which lived even in their private lives ordinarly distinct from their national environments
and spoke very often a special language, the so-called ararisch deutsch ("fiscal
German") , as it was ironically named by the representatives of the literary German,
meaning by it a strange linguistic mixture which does not take the rules of grammar very
seriously.' Jaszi, The Dissolution, p, 144. Author's emphases.
39. Not merely in the obvious sense. Because, in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, Holland had, for all intents and purposes, only one colony, and a huge,
profitable one at that, it was quite practical to train its functionaries in a (single) nonEuropean
diensttaal. Over time, special schools and faculties grew up in the metropole to
prepare future functionaries linguistically. For multi-continental empires like the
British, no single locally-based diensttaal would have sufficed.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
particular vernaculars among many. If radical Mozambique speaks
Portuguese, the significance of this is that Portuguese is the medium
through which Mozambique is imagined (and at the same time limits
its stretch into Tanzania and Zambia). Seen from this perspective the
use of Portuguese in Mozambique (or English in India) is basically no
different than the use of English in Australia or Portuguese in Brazil.
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.40
The only question-mark standing over
languages like Portuguese in Mozambique and English in India is
whether the administrative and educational systems, particularly the
latter, can generate a politically sufficient diffusion of bilingualism.
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 dozens of ethnolinguistic backgrounds, who
speak Indonesian as their mother-tongue.
It is not clear yet whether thirty years from now there will be a
generation of Mozambiquians who speak only MozambiquePortuguese.
But, in this late twentieth century, it is not necessarily
the case that the emergence of such a generation is a sine qua non for
40. Marr's account of language-development in eastern Indochina is very revealing
on this point. He notes that as late as c. 1910 'most educated Vietnamese assumed
that Chinese or French, or both, were essential modes of "higher" communication.'
(Vietnamese Tradition, p. 137)v After 1920, however, and partly as a result of state
promotion of the phonetic quoc ngu script, things changed quickly. By then 'the belief
was growing that spoken Vietnamese was an important and perhaps [sic] essential
component of national identity. Even intellectuals more at home in French than in their
mother tongue came to appreciate the significance of the fact that at least 85% of their
fellow-countrymen spoke the same language.' (p. 138) They were by then fully aware of
the role of mass literacy in advancing the nation-states of Europe and Japan. Yet Marr
also shows that for a long time there was no clear correlation between languagepreference
and political stance: 'Upholding the Vietnamese mother tongue was not
inherently patriotic, any more than promoting the French language was inherently
collaborationist.' (p. 150).
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THE LAST WAVE
Mozambiquian national solidarity. In the first place, 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 representations
and bilingual literati.) In the second place, twentieth-century
nationalisms have, as I have been arguing, 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. Nationalist
leaders are thus in a position consciously to deploy civil and
military educational systems modelled on official nationalism's; elections,
party organizations, and cultural celebrations modelled on the
popular nationalisms of ninteenth-century Europe; and the citizenrepublican
idea brought into the world by the Americas. Above all,
the very idea of 'nation' is now nestled firmly in virtually all printlanguages;
and nation-ness is virtually inseparable from political
consciousness.
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 native spirit of nosotros los Americanos, but out
of a general awareness of what modern history has demonstrated to be
possible. It seems fitting, in this context, to conclude this chapter by
returning to Europe and considering briefly that nation whose linguistic
diversity has so often been used as a cudgel to club proponents of
language-based theories of nationalism.
In 1891, amidst novel jubilees marking the 600th anniversary of the
Confederacy of Schwyz, Obwalden, and Nidwalden, the Swiss state
'decided on' 1291 as the date of the 'founding' of Switzerland.42
Such a
decision, waiting 600 years to be made, has its diverting aspects, and
suggests already that modernity rather than antiquity characterizes
41. I say 'can' because there are obviously plenty of cases where the possibility has
been, and is being, rejected. In such cases, for example Old Pakistan, the explanation is
not ethno-cultural pluralism, but barred pilgrimages.
42. Christopher Hughes, Switzerland, p. 107. This excellent text, for which SetonWatson
rightly expresses his admiration, is the basis for the argument that follows.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Swiss nationalism. Indeed, Hughes goes so far as to argue that the 1891
jubilees mark the birth of this nationalism, commenting that 'in the first
half of the nineteenth century . . . nationhood sat rather lightly on the
shoulders of the cultivated middle classes: Mme de Stael [1766-1817],
Fuseli [1741-1825], Angelica Kauffinann [1741-1807], Sismondi
[1773-1842], Benjamin Constant [1767-1830], are they all Swiss?'43
If the implied answer is 'hardly,' its significance derives from the fact
that, all over the Europe surrounding Switzerland, the first half of the
nineteenth century saw the burgeoning of vernacular nationalist movements
in which 'cultivated middle classes' (as it were, philologists +
capitalists) played central parts. Why then did nationalism come so late
to Switzerland, and what consequences did that lateness have for its
ultimate shaping (in particular, its contemporary multiplicity of'national
languages')?
Part of the answer lies in the youth of the Swiss state, which,
Hughes drily observes, is difficult to trace back beyond 1813-15
'without the aid of some prevarication.'44
He reminds us that the first
real Swiss citizenship, the introduction of direct (male) suffrage, and
the ending of 'internal' tolls and customs areas were achievements of
the Helvetic Republic forcibly brought into being by the French
occupation of 1798. Only in 1803 did the state include significant
numbers of Italian-speakers, with the acquisition of Ticino. Only in
1815 did it gain the populous French-speaking areas of Valais,
Geneva, and Neuchatel from a vengefully anti-French Holy Alliance
- in exchange for neutrality and a highly conservative constitution. 5
In effect, today's multilingual Switzerland is a product of the early
nineteenth century.46
A second factor was the country's backwardness (which, combined
43. Ibid., p. 218. The dates are my interpolations.
44. Ibid., p. 85.
45. Plus Aargau, St. Gallen and Grisons. This last is of special interest since today it
is the surviving home of Romansch, the most echt-Swiss of the country's national
languages - a status it achieved, however, only in 1937! Ibid., pp. 59 and 85.
46. We might note in passing that Mme. de Stael barely survived long enough to
see its birth. Besides, her family, like that of Sismondi, came from Geneva, which was an
independent statelet outside 'Switzerland' until 1815. Small wonder that Swiss nationhood
rested 'rather lightly' on their shoulders.
136
THE LAST WAVE
with its forbidding topography and lack of exploitable resources,
helped to keep it from absorption by more powerful neighbours).
Today it may be difficult to remember that until World War II
Switzerland was a poor country, with a standard of living half that of
England's, and an overwhelmingly rural country. In 1850, barely 6 per
cent of the population lived in minimally urban areas, and as late as
1920 the figure had risen only to 27.6 per cent. Throughout the
nineteenth century, then, the bulk of the population was an immobile
(except for the age-old export of hardy youths as mercenaries and
Papal Guards) peasantry. The country's backwardness was not merely
economic, it was also political and cultural. 'Old Switzerland,' the
area of which did not change between 1515 and 1803, and most of
whose inhabitants spoke one or other of numerous German patois,
was ruled by a loose coalition of cantonal aristocratic oligarchies. 'The
secret of the long duration of the Confederacy was its double nature.
Against outside enemies it produced a sufficient unity of peoples.
Against internal rebellion, it produced a sufficient unity of oligarchies.
If peasants rebelled, as they did three times or so in every century,
then differences would be put aside and the governments of other
cantons would lend their assistance, mediating often, but not always,
in favour of their fellow-ruler.' Except for the absence of monarchical
institutions, the picture is not much different from that of the
innumerable petty principalities within the Holy Roman Empire, of
which Liechtenstein, on Switzerland's eastern border, is a last odd
relic.49
It is instructive that as late as 1848, almost two generations after
the Swiss state came into being, ancient religious cleavages were
much more politically salient than linguistic ones. Remarkably
enough, in territories unalterably-denoted Catholic Protestantism
was unlawful, and in those so-denoted Protestant Catholicism was
47. Ibid., pp. 173 and 274. Any nineteenth-century 'cultivated middle class' had to
be very small.
48. Ibid., p. 86. Emphasis added.
49. An absence of monarchies also characterized the Hanseatic League, a loose
political coalition to which it would be problematic to attribute either statehood or
nationhood.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
illegal; and these laws were strictly enforced. (Language was a matter
of personal choice and convenience). Only after 1848, in the backwash
of Europe-wide revolutionary upheavals and the general spread
of vernacularizing national movements, did language take religion's
place, and the country become segmented into unalterably-denoted
linguistic zones. (Religion now became a matter of personal
choice).50
Finally, the persistence - in such a small country - of a large variety
of sometimes mutually-unintelligible German idiolects suggests the
late arrival of print-capitalism and standardized modern education to
much of Swiss peasant society. Thus Hochsprache (print-German) has
had, until rather recently, the language-of-state status of ararisch deutsch
and dienstmaleisch. Furthermore, Hughes remarks that today 'higher'
officials are expected to have a working knowledge of two federal
languages, implying that the same competence is not expected of their
subordinates. Indirectly, a similar point is made by the Federal
Directive of 1950 which insists that 'Educated German Swiss are
>51
certainly able to work in French, as are educated Italian Swiss.'
We have, in effect, a situation which at bottom is not too different
from Mozambique's - a bilingual political class ensconced over a
variety of monolingual populations, with only this dissimilarity: the
'second language' is that of a powerful neighbour rather than of a
former colonial ruler.
Nonetheless, in view of the fact that in 1910 the maternal
language of almost 73 per cent of the population was German,
22 per cent French, 4 per cent Italian, and 1 per cent Romansch
(these proportions have scarcely varied over the intervening decades),
it is perhaps surprising that in the second half of the nineteenth
century - era of official nationalisms — Germanification was not
attempted. Certainly up to 1914 strong pro-German sympathies
existed. Between Germany and German Switzerland borders were
porous in the extreme. Trade and investment, as well as aristocrats
and professionals, moved back and forth quite freely. But Switzerland
also abutted on two other major European powers, France and Italy,
50. Ibid., p. 274.
51. Ibid., pp. 59—60. Emphases added.
138
THE LAST WAVE
and the political risks of Germanizing were plain. Legal parity
between German, French, and Italian was thus the obverse side
52
of the coin of Swiss neutrality.
All of the preceding evidence indicates that Swiss nationalism is
best understood as part of the 'last wave'. If Hughes is right in dating
its birth to 1891, it is not much more than a decade older than
Burmese or Indonesian nationalism. In other words, it arose in that
period of world history in which the nation was becoming an
international norm, and in which it was possible to 'model' nationness
in a much more complex way than hitherto. If the conservative
political, and backward socio-economic, structure of Switzerland53
'delayed' the rise of nationalism, the fact that its pre-modern
political institutions were non-dynastic and non-monarchical helped
to prevent the excesses of official nationalism (contrast the case of
Siam discussed in Chapter 6). Finally, as in the case of the Southeast
Asian examples, the appearance of Swiss nationalism on the eve of the
communications revolution of the twentieth century made it possible
and practical to 'represent' the imagined community in ways that did
not require linguistic uniformity.
In conclusion, it may be worth restating the general argument of this
chapter. The 'last wave' of nationalisms, most of them in the colonial
territories of Asia and Africa, was in its origins a response to the newstyle
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.'54
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-
52. Romansch's elevation in 1937 scarcely disguised the original calculation.
53. The social structure of Hungary was also backward, but Magyar aristocrats sat
inside a huge polyethnic dynastic empire, in which their putative language-group
formed merely a minority, albeit a very important one. Small, republican Switzerland's
aristocratic oligarchy was never threatened in the same way.
54. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 37. Who but Marx would have
described this world-transforming class as being 'chased'?
139
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
naturalization every dynasty positioned to do so. Official nationalism
— weld of the new national and old dynastic principles (the British
Empire) - led in turn to what, for convenience, one can call
'Falsification' in the extra-European colonies. This ideological tendency
meshed neatly with practical exigencies. The late-nineteenthcentury
empires were too large and too far-flung to be ruled by a
handful of nationals. Moreover, in tandem with capitalism the state
was rapidly multiplying its functions, in both the metropoles and the
colonies. Combined, these forces generated 'Russifying' schoolsystems
intended in part to produce the required subordinate cadres
for state and corporate bureaucracies. These school-systems, centralized
and standardized, created quite new pilgrimages which typically had
their Romes in the various colonial capitals, for the nations hidden at
the core of the empires would permit no more inward ascension.
Usually, but by no means always, these educational pilgrimages were
paralleled, or replicated, in the administrative sphere. The interlock
between particular educational and administrative pilgrimages provided
the territorial base for new 'imagined communities' in which natives
could come to see themselves as 'nationals'. The expansion of the
colonial state which, so to speak, invited 'natives' into schools and
offices, and of colonial capitalism which, as it were, excluded them from
boardrooms, meant that to an unprecedented extent the key early
spokesmen for colonial nationalism were lonely, bilingual intelligentsias
unattached to sturdy local bourgeoisies.
As bilingual intelligentsias, however, and above all as early-twentiethcentury
intelligentsias, they had access, inside the classroom and outside,
to models of nation, nation-ness, and nationalism distilled from the
turbulent, chaotic experiences of more than a century of American and
European history. These models, in turn, helped to give shape to a
thousand inchoate dreams. In varying combinations, the lessons of
creole, vernacular and official nationalism were copied, adapted, and
improved upon. Finally, as with increasing speed capitalism transformed
the means of physical and intellectual communication, the intelligentsias
found ways to bypass print in propagating the imagined community, not
merely to illiterate masses, but even to literate masses reading different
languages.
140
Patriotism and Racism
In the preceding chapters I have tried to delineate the processes by
which the nation came to be imagined, and, once imagined, modelled,
adapted and transformed. Such an analysis has necessarily been concerned
primarily with social change and different forms of consciousness.
But it is doubtful whether either social change or transformed
consciousnesses, in themselves, do much to explain the attachment that
peoples feel for the inventions of their imaginations — or, to revive a
question raised at the beginning of this text - why people are ready to
die for these inventions.
In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan
intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological
character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the
Other, and its affinities with racism,1
it is useful to remind ourselves
that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.
The cultural products of nationalism — poetry, prose fiction, music,
plastic arts - show this love very clearly in thousands of different
forms and styles. On the other hand, how truly rare it is to find
1. Cf. the passage in Nairn's Break-up of Britain, pp. 14—15 above, and Hobsbawm's
somewhat Biedermeier dictum: 'the basic fact [is] that Marxists as such are not
nationalists.' 'Some Reflections,' p. 10.
141
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
analogous nationalist products expressing fear and loathing. Even in
the case of colonized peoples, who have every reason to feel hatred
for their imperialist rulers, it is astonishing how insignificant the
element of hatred is in these expressions of national feeling. Here, for
example, are the first and last stanzas of Ultimo Adios, the famous
poem written by Rizal as he awaited execution at the hands of
a
Spanish imperialism:
1. Adios, Patria adorada, region del sol querida,
Perla del Mar de Oriente, nuestro perdido eden,
A darte voy, alegre, la triste mustia vida;
Y fuera mas brillante, mas fresca, mas florida,
Tambien por ti la diera, la diera por tu bien . . .
12. Entonces nada importa me pongas en olvido:
Tu atmosfera, tu espacio, tus valles cruzare;
Vibrante y limpia nota sere par tu oido;
Aroma, luz, colores, rumor, canto, gemido,
Constante repitiendo la esencia de mi fe.
13. Mi Patria idolatrada, dolor de mis dolores,
Querida Filipinas, oye el postrer adios.
Ahi, te dejo todo: mis padres, mis amores.
Voy donde no hay esclavos, verdugos ni opresores;
Donde la fe no mata, donde el que reina es Dios.
14. Adios, padres y hermanos, trozos del alma mia,
Amigos de la infancia, en el perdido hogar;
Dad gracias, que descanso del fatigoso dia;
Adios, dulce extranjera, mi amiga, mi alegria;
Adios, queridos seres. Morir es descansar.
2. Can the reader think immediately of even three Hymns of Hate? The second
stanza of God Save the Queen/King is worded instructively: 'O Lord our God, arise/
Scatter her/his enemies,/And make them fall;/Confound their politics,/ Frustrate their
knavish tricks;/On Thee our hopes we fix;/God save us all.' Notice that these enemies
have no identity and could as well be Englishmen as anyone else since they are 'her/his'
enemies not 'ours.' The entire anthem is a paean to monarchy, not to the/a nation which
is not once mentioned.
3. Or in the translation of Trinidad T. Subido:
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PATRIOTISM A N D RACISM
Notice not only that the nationality of the 'tyrants' goes unmentioned,
but that Rizal's passionate patriotism is expressed superbly in 'their'
language.
Something of the nature of this political love can be deciphered
from the ways in which languages describe its object: either in the
vocabulary of kinship (motherland, Vaterland, patria) or that of home
(heimat or tanah air [earth and water, the phrase for the Indonesians'
native archipelago]). Both idioms denote something to which one is
naturally tied. As we have seen earlier, in everything 'natural' there is
always something unchosen. In this way, nation-ness is assimilated to
skin-colour, gender, parentage and birth-era - all those things one can
not help. And in these 'natural ties' one senses what one might call
'the beauty of gemeins chaff. To put it another way, precisely because
such ties are not chosen, they have about them a halo of disinter-
estedness.
While it is true that in the past two decades the idea of the family-
1. Farewell, dear Land, beloved of the sun,
Pearl of the Orient seas, lost Paradise!
Gladly, I will to you this life undone;
Were it a fairer, fresher, fuller one,
I'd cede it still, your weal to realize . . .
12. What matters then that you forget me, when
I might explore your ev'ry dear retreat?
Be as a note, pulsing and pure; and then,
Be scent, light, tone; be song or sign, again;
And through it all, my theme of faith, repeat.
13. Land I enshrine, list to my last farewell!
Philippines, Love, of pains my pain extreme,
I leave you all, all whom I love so well,
To go where neither slaves nor tyrants dwell,
Where Faith kills not, and where God reigns supreme.
14. Farewell to all my soul does comprehend O
kith and kin in my home dispossessed;
Give thanks my day oppressive is at end;
Farewell, sweet stranger, my delight and friend;
Farewell, dear ones. To die is but to rest.
Jaime C. de Veyra, El (
Ultimo Adios' de Rizal: estudio cntico-expositivo, pp. 89-90, and
101-102 (the translation).
4. It was, however, quickly translated into TagaLog by the great Filipino revolutionary
Andres Bonifacio. His version is given in ibid., pp. 107-109.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
as-articulated-power-structure has been much written about, such a
conception is certainly foreign to the overwhelming bulk of mankind.
Rather, the family has traditionally been conceived as the domain of
disinterested love and solidarity. So too, if historians, diplomats, politicians,
and social scientists are quite at ease with the idea of 'national
interest,' for most ordinary people of whatever class the whole point of
the nation is that it is interestless. Just for that reason, it can ask for
sacrifices.
As noted earlier, the great wars of this century are extraordinary not
so much in the unprecedented scale on which they permitted people to
kill, as in the colossal numbers persuaded to lay down their lives. Is it not
certain that the numbers of those killed vastly exceeded those who
killed? The idea of the ultimate sacrifice comes only with an idea of
purity, through fatality.
Dying for one's country, which usually one does not choose,
assumes a moral grandeur which dying for the Labour Party, the
American Medical Association, or perhaps even Amnesty International
can not rival, for these are all bodies one can join or leave at
easy will. Dying for the revolution also draws its grandeur from the
degree to which it is felt to be something fundamentally pure. (If
people imagined the proletariat merely as a group in hot pursuit of
refrigerators, holidays, or power, how far would they, including
members of the proletariat, be willing to die for it?)5
Ironically
enough, it may be that to the extent that Marxist interpretations of
history are felt (rather than intellected) as representations of
ineluctable necessity, they also acquire an aura of purity and
disinterestedness.
Here we may usefully return once more to language. First, one
notes the primordialness of languages, even those known to be
modern. No one can give the date for the birth of any language.
Each looms up imperceptibly out of a horizonless past. (Insofar as
homo sapiens is homo dicens, it can seem difficult to imagine an origin of
5. This formulation should not at all be taken to mean that revolutionary
movements do not pursue material objectives. But these objectives are envisioned,
not as a congeries of individual acquisitions, but as the conditions of Rousseau's shared
bonheur.
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PATRIOTISM A N D RACISM
language newer than the species itself.) Languages thus appear rooted
beyond almost anything else in contemporary societies. At the same
time, nothing connects us affectively to the dead more than language.
If English-speakers hear the words 'Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust
to dust' — created almost four-and-a-half centuries ago - they get a
ghostly intimation of simultaneity across homogeneous, empty time.
The weight of the words derives only in part from their solemn
meaning; it comes also from an as-it-were ancestral 'Englishness'.
Second, there is a special kind of contemporaneous community
which language alone suggests - above all in the form of poetry and
songs. Take national anthems, for example, sung on national holidays.
No matter how banal the words and mediocre the tunes, there is in this
singing an experience of simultaneity. At precisely such moments,
people wholly unknown to each other utter the same verses to the
same melody. The image: unisonance.6
Singing the Marseillaise, Waltzing
Matilda, and Indonesia Raya provide occasions for unisonality, for
the echoed physical realization of the imagined community. (So does
listening to [and maybe silently chiming in with] the recitation of
ceremonial poetry, such as sections of The Book of Common Prayer.) How
selfless this unisonance feels! If we are aware that others are singing these
songs precisely when and as we are, we have no idea who they may be,
or even where, out of earshot, they are singing/Nothing connects us all
but imagined sound.
Yet such choruses are joinable in time. If I am a Lett, my daughter
may be an Australian. The son of an Italian immigrant to New York will
find ancestors in the Pilgrim Fathers. If nationalness has about it an aura
of fatality, it is nonetheless a fatality embedded in history. Here San
Martin's edict baptizing Quechua-speaking Indians as 'Peruvians' — a
movement that has affinities with religious conversion - is exemplary.
For it shows that from the start the nation was conceived in language,
not in blood, and that one could be 'invited into' the imagined
community. Thus today, even the most insular nations accept the
principle of naturalization (wonderful word!), no matter how difficult in
practice they may make it.
6. Contrast this a capella chorus with the language of everyday life, which is
typically experienced decani/cantoris-fashion as dialogue and exchange.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
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:
1. Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O'er the grave where our hero we buried.
2. We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning;
By the struggling moonbeams' misty light,
And the lantern dimly burning.
3. No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him;
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,
With his martial cloak around him . . .
5. We thought, as we hollowed his narrow bed,
And smoothed down his lonely pillow,
That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head
And we far away on the billow . . .
8. Slowly and sadly we laid him down.
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone —
But we left him alone with his glory!
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 Toes' can not
fully hear the poem's resonance: English, like any other language, is
always open to new speakers, listeners, and readers.
7. 'The Burial of Sir John Moore,' in The Poems of Charles Wolfe, pp. 1-2.
146
PATRIOTISM A N D RACISM
Listen to Thomas Browne, encompassing in a pair of sentences the
8
length and breadth of man's history:
Even the old ambitions had the advantage of ours, in the attempts of
their vainglories, who acting early and before the probable Meridian
of time, have by this time found great accomplishment of their
designs, whereby the ancient Heroes have already out-lasted their
Monuments, and Mechanicall preservations. But in this latter Scene
of time we cannot expect such Mummies unto our memories, when
ambition may fear the Prophecy of Elias, and Charles the Fifth can
never hope to live within two Methusela's of Hector.
Here ancient Egypt, Greece, and Judaea are united with the Holy
Roman Empire, but their unification across thousands of years and
thousands of miles is accomplished within the particularity of Browne's
seventeenth-century English prose.9
The passage can, of course, up to a
point be translated. But the eerie splendour of'probable Meridian of
time,' 'Mechanicall preservations,' 'such Mummies unto our memories,'
and 'two Methusela's of Hector' can bring goose-flesh to the
napes only of English-readers.
On this page, it opens itself wide to the reader. On the other hand,
the no less eerie splendour of the final lines of'Yang Sudah Hilang' by
t ^ 10
the great Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer:
Suara itu hanya terdengar beberapa detik saja daiam hidup. Getarannya
sebentar berdengung, takkan terulangi lagi. Tapi seperti juga halnya
dengan kali Lusi yang abadi menggarisi kota Blora, dan seperti kali itu
juga, suara yang tersimpan menggarisi kenangan dan ingatan itu mengalir
juga — mengalir kemuaranya, kelaut yang tak bertepi. Dan tak
seorangpun tahu kapan laut itu akan kering dan berhenti berdeburan.
8. Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, or, A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in
Norfolk, pp. 72-73. On 'the probable Meridian of time' compare Bishop Otto of
Freising.
9. Yet 'England' goes unmentioned in this unification. We are reminded of those
provincial newspapers which brought the whole world, through Spanish, into Caracas
and Bogota.
10. In Tjerita dari Blora [Tales from Blora], pp. 15-44, at p. 44.
147
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Hilang.
Semua itu sudah hilang dari jangkauan panc[h]a-indera.
l1
on the same print page, are most likely closed.
If every language is acquirable, its acquisition requires a real
portion of a person's life: each new conquest is measured against
shortening days. What limits one's access to other languages is not
their imperviousness but one's own mortality. Hence a certain
privacy to all languages. French and American imperialists governed,
exploited, and killed Vietnamese over many years. But whatever else
they made off with, the Vietnamese language stayed put. Accordingly,
only too often, a rage at Vietnamese 'inscrutability,' and that
obscure despair which engenders the venomous argots of dying12
colonialisms: 'gooks,' 4
ratons\ etc. (In the longer run, the only
responses to the vast privacy of the language of the oppressed are
retreat or further massacre.)
Such epithets are, in their inner form, characteristically racist, and
decipherment of this form will serve to show why Nairn is basically
mistaken in arguing that racism and anti-semitism derive from
nationalism — and thus that 'seen in sufficient historical depth, fascism513
tells us more about nationalism than any other episode.' A word
like 'slant,' for example, abbreviated from 'slant-eyed', does not
simply express an ordinary political enmity. It erases nation-ness
by reducing the adversary to his biological physiognomy.14
It denies,
by substituting for, 'Vietnamese;' just as raton denies, by substituting
for, 'Algerian'. At the same time, it stirs 'Vietnamese' into a nameless
sludge along with 'Korean,' 'Chinese,' 'Filipino,' and so on. The
character of this vocabulary may become still more evident if it is
contrasted with other Vietnam-War-period words like 'Charlie' and
11. Still, listen to them! I have adapted the original spelling to accord with current
convention and to make the quotation completely phonetic.
12. The logic here is: 1.1 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.
13. The Break-up of Britain, pp. 337 and 347.
14. Notice that there is no obvious, selfconscious antonym to 'slant.' 'Round'?
'Straight'? 'Oval'?
148
PATRIOTISM A N D RACISM
'V.C.', or from an earlier era, 'Boches,' 'Huns,' 'Japs' and 'Frogs,' all
of which apply only to one specific nationality, and thus concede, in
15
hatred, the adversary's membership in a league of nations.
The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of
historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations,
transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of
loathsome copulations: outside history. Niggers are, thanks to the
invisible tar-brush, forever niggers; Jews, the seed of Abraham, forever
Jews, no matter what passports they carry or what languages they
speak and read. (Thus for the Nazi, the Jewish German was always an
^ n 1 6
impostor.)
The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of
class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity
among rulers and to 'blue' or 'white' blood and 'breeding' among
aristocracies. No surprise then that the putative sire of modern
racism should be, not some petty-bourgeois nationalist, but Joseph
18Arthur, Comte de Gobineau. Nor that, on the whole, racism and
15. Not only, in fact, in an earlier era. Nonetheless, there is a whiff of the
antique-shop about these words of Debray: T can conceive of no hope for Europe
save under the hegemony of a revolutionary France, firmly grasping the banner of
independence. Sometimes I wonder if the whole "anti-Boche" mythology and our
secular antagonism to Germany may not be one day indispensable for saving the
revolution, or even our national-democratic inheritance.' 'Marxism and the National
Question,' p. 41.
16. The significance of the emergence of Zionism and the birth of Israel is that the
former marks the reimagining of an ancient religious community as a nation, down
there among the other nations — while the latter charts an alchemic change from
wandering devotee to local patriot.
17. 'From the side of the landed aristocracy came conceptions of inherent
superiority in the ruling class, and a sensitivity to status, prominent traits well into
the twentieth century. Fed by new sources, these conceptions could later be
vulgarized [sic] and made appealing to the German population as a whole in
doctrines of racial superiority.' Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship
and Democracy, p. 436.
18. Gobineau's dates are perfect. He was born in 1816, two years after the
restoration of the Bourbons to the French throne. His diplomatic career, 1848-1877,
blossomed under Louis Napoleon's Second Empire and the reactionary monarchist
regime of Marie Edme Patrice Maurice, Comte de MacMahon, former imperialist
proconsul in Algiers. His Essai sur ITnegalite des Races Humaines appeared in 1854 should
one say in response to the popular vernacular-nationalist insurrections of
1848?
149
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
anti-semitism manifest themselves, not across national boundaries, but
within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as
19
domestic repression and domination.
Where racism developed outside Europe in the nineteenth century,
it was always associated with European domination, for two
converging reasons. First and most important was the rise of official
nationalism and colonial 'Russification'. As has been repeatedly
emphasized official nationalism was typically a response on the part
of threatened dynastic and aristocratic groups — upper classes — to
popular vernacular nationalism. Colonial racism was a major element
in that conception of 'Empire' which attempted to weld dynastic
legitimacy and national community. It did so by generalizing a
principle of innate, inherited superiority on which its own domestic
position was (however shakily) based to the vastness of the overseas
possessions, covertly (or not so covertly) conveying the idea that if,
say, English lords were naturally superior to other Englishmen, no
matter: these other Englishmen were no less superior to the subjected
natives. Indeed one is tempted to argue that the existence of late
colonial empires even served to shore up domestic aristocratic bastions,
since they appeared to confirm on a global, modern stage antique
conceptions of power and privilege.
It could do so with some effect because — and here is our second
reason — the colonial empire, with its rapidly expanding bureaucratic
apparatus and its 'Russifying' policies, permitted sizeable numbers of
bourgeois and petty bourgeois to play aristocrat off centre court: i.e.
anywhere in the empire except at home. In each colony one found
this grimly amusing tableau vivant: the bourgeois gentilhomme
speaking poetry against a backcloth of spacious mansions and
gardens filled with mimosa and bougainvillea, and a large supporting
cast of houseboys, grooms, gardeners, cooks, amahs, maids, washer-
19. South African racism has not, in the age of Vorster and Botha, stood in the
way of amicable relations (however discreetly handled) with prominent black
politicians in certain independent African states. If Jews suffer discrimination in
the Soviet Union, that did not prevent respectful working relations between
Brezhnev and Kissinger.
150
PATRIOTISM A N D RACISM
20
women, and, above all, horses. Even those who did not manage to
live in this style, such as young bachelors, nonetheless had the
grandly equivocal status of a French nobleman on the eve of a
• 2 1
jacquerie:
In Moulmein, in lower Burma [this obscure town needs explaining to
readers in the metropole], I was hated by large numbers of people the
only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to
happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town.
This 'tropical Gothic' was made possible by the overwhelming power
that high capitalism had given the metropole — a power so great that
it could be kept, so to speak, in the wings. Nothing better illustrates
capitalism in feudal-aristocratic drag than colonial militaries, which
were notoriously distinct from those of the metropoles, often even in
22 i
formal institutional terms. Thus in Europe one had the 'First Army,'
recruited by conscription on a mass, citizen, metropolitan base;
ideologically conceived as the defender of the heimat; dressed in
practical, utilitarian khaki; armed with the latest affordable weapons;
in peacetime isolated in barracks, in war stationed in trenches or
behind heavy field-guns. Outside Europe one had the 'Second
Army,' recruited (below the officer level) from local religious or
ethnic minorities on a mercenary basis; ideologically conceived as an
internal police force; dressed to kill in bed- or ballroom; armed with
swords and obsolete industrial weapons; in peace on display, in war
on horseback. If the Prussian General Staff, Europe's military teacher,
stressed the anonymous solidarity of a professionalized corps, ballistics,
railroads, engineering, strategic planning, and the like, the colonial
army stressed glory, epaulettes, personal heroism, polo, and an
archaizing courtliness among its officers. (It could afford to do so
20. For a stunning collection of photographs of such tableaux vivants in the
Netherlands Indies (and an elegantly ironical text), see 'E. Breton de Nijs,' Tempo
Doeloe.
21. George Orwell, 'Shooting an Elephant,' in The Orwell Reader, p. 3. The words
in square brackets are of course my interpolation.
22. The KNIL (Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger) was quite separate from
the KL (Koninklijk Leger) in Holland. The Legion Etrangere was almost from the start
legally prohibited from operations on continental French soil.
151
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
because the First Army and the Navy were there in the background.)
This mentality survived a long time. In Tonkin, in 1894, Lyautey
, 23wrote:
Quel dommage de n'etre pas venu ici dix ans plus tot! Quelles
carrieres a y fonder et a y mener. II n'y a pas ici un de ces petits
lieutenants, chefs de poste et de reconnaissance, qui ne developpe en
6 mois plus d'initiative, de volonte, d'endurance, de personnalite,
qu'un officier de France en toute sa carriere.
In Tonkin, in 1951, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, 'who liked officers
who combined guts with "style," took an immediate liking to the
dashing cavalryman [Colonel de Castries] with his bright-red Spahi
cap and scarf, his magnificent riding-crop, and his combination of
easy-going manners and ducal mien, which made him as irresistible to
women in Indochina in the 1950s as he had been to Parisiennes of the
1930s.'24
Another instructive indication of the aristocratic or pseudoaristocratic
derivation of colonial racism was the typical 'solidarity
23. Lettres du Tonkin et de Madagascar (1894-1899% p. 84. Letter of December 22,
1894, from Hanoi. Emphases added.
24. Bernard B. Fall, Hell is a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu, p. 56.
One can imagine the shudder of Clausewitz's ghost. [Spahi, derived like Sepoy from
the Ottoman Sipahi, meant mercenary irregular cavalrymen of the 'Second Army' in
Algeria.] It is true that the France of Lyautey and de Lattre was a Republican France.
However, the often talkative Grande Muette had since the start of the Third
Republic been an asylum for aristocrats increasingly excluded from power in all
other important institutions of public life. By 1898, a full quarter of all Brigadier- and
Major-Generals were aristocrats. Moreover, this aristocrat-dominated officer corps
was crucial to nineteenth and twentieth-century French imperialism. 'The rigorous
control imposed on the army in the metropole never extended fully to la France
d'outremer. The extension of the French Empire in the nineteenth century was
partially the result of uncontrolled initiative on the part of colonial military
commanders. French West Africa, largely the creation of General Faidherbe, and
the French Congo as well, owed most of their expansion to independent military
forays into the hinterland. Military officers were also responsible for the faits accomplis
which led to a French protectorate in Tahiti in 1842, and, to a lesser extent, to the
French occupation of Tonkin in Indochina in the 1880's . . . In 1897 Gallieni
summarily abolished the monarchy in Madagascar and deported the Queen, all
without consulting the French government, which later accepted the fait accompli . . .'
John S. Ambler, The French Army in Politics, 1945-1962, pp. 10-11 and 22.
152
PATRIOTISM A N D RACISM
among whites,' which linked colonial rulers from different national
metropoles, whatever their internal rivalries and conflicts. This solidarity,
in its curious trans-state character, reminds one instantly of the
class solidarity of Europe's nineteenth-century aristocracies, mediated
through each other's hunting-lodges, spas, and ballrooms; and of that
brotherhood of 'officers and gentlemen,' which in the Geneva
convention guaranteeing privileged treatment to captured enemy
officers, as opposed to partisans or civilians, has an agreeably
twentieth-century expression.
The argument adumbrated thus far can also be pursued from the side
of colonial populations. For, the pronouncements of certain colonial
ideologues aside, it is remarkable how little that dubious entity known as
'reverse racism' manifested itself in the anticolonial movements. In this
matter it is easy to be deceived by language. There is, for example, a
sense in which the Javanese word londo (derived from Hollander or
Nederlander) meant not only 'Dutch' but 'whites.' But the derivation
itself shows that, for Javanese peasants, who scarcely ever encountered
any 'whites' but Dutch, the two meanings effectively overlapped.
Similarly, in French colonial territories, 'les Manes' meant rulers whose
Frenchness was indistinguishable from their whiteness. In neither case,
so far as I know, did londo or blanc either lose caste or breed derogatory
25
secondary distinctions.
On the contrary, the spirit of anticolonial nationalism is that of the
heart-rending Constitution of Makario Sakay's short-lived Republic of
Katagalugan (1902), which said, among other things:26
25. I have never heard of an abusive argot word in Indonesian or Javanese for
either 'Dutch' or 'white.' Compare the Anglo-Saxon treasury: niggers, wops, kikes,
gooks, slants, fuzzywuzzies, and a hundred more. It is possible that this innocence of
racist argots is true primarily of colonized populations. Blacks in America - and
surely elsewhere - have developed a varied counter-vocabulary (honkies, ofays,
etc.).
26. As cited in Reynaldo Ileto's masterly Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements
in the Philippines, 1840-1910, p. 218. Sakay's rebel republic lasted until 1907, when he
was captured and executed by the Americans. Understanding the first sentence requires
remembering that three centuries of Spanish rule and Chinese immigration had
produced a sizeable mestizo population in the islands.
153
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
No Tagalog, born in this Tagalog archipelago, shall exalt any person
above the rest because of his race or the colour of his skin; fair, dark,
rich, poor, educated and ignorant - all are completely equal, and
should be in one bob [inward spirit]. There may be differences in
education, wealth, or appearance, but never in essential nature
(pagkatao) and ability to serve a cause.
One can find without difficulty analogies on the other side of the
globe. Spanish-speaking mestizo Mexicans trace their ancestries, not to
Castilian conquistadors, but to half-obliterated Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecs
and Zapotecs. Uruguayan revolutionary patriots, Creoles themselves,
took up the name of Tupac Amaru, the last great indigenous rebel
against Creole oppression, who died under unspeakable tortures in 1781.
It may appear paradoxical that the objects of all these attachments are
'imagined' — anonymous, faceless fellow-Tagalogs, exterminated tribes,
Mother Russia, or the tanah air. But amor patriae does not differ in this
respect from the other affections, in which there is always an element of
fond imagining. (This is why looking at the photo-albums of strangers'
weddings is like studying the archaeologist's groundplan of the Hanging
Gardens of Babylon.) What the eye is to the lover — that particular,
ordinary eye he or she is born with - language - whatever language
history has made his or her mother-tongue — is to the patriot. Through
that language, encountered at mother's knee and parted with only at the
grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed.
154
The Angel of History
We began this brief study with the recent wars between the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam, Democratic Kampuchea, and the People's Republic
of China; so it is only fitting to return finally to that point of
departure. Does anything of what has meantime been said help to
deepen our understanding of their outbreak?
In The Break-up of Britain, Tom Nairn has some valuable words on the
relationship between the British political system and those of the rest of
the modern world.
Alone, [the British system] represented a 'slow, conventional growth,
not like the others, the product of deliberate invention, resulting from
a theory.' Arriving later, those others 'attempted to sum up at a stroke
the fruits of the experience of the state which had evolved its
constitutionalism through several centuries' . . . Because it was first,
the English - later British - experience remained distinct. Because
they came second, into a world where the English Revolution had
already succeeded and expanded, later bourgeois societies could not
repeat this early development. Their study and imitation engendered
something substantially different: the truly modern doctrine of the
1. At pp. 17-18. Emphases added. The inner quotation is taken from Charles
Frederick Strong's Modern Political Constitutions, p. 28.
155
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
abstract or 'impersonal' state which, because of its abstract nature,
could be imitated in subsequent history.
This may of course be seen as the ordinary logic of developmental
processes. It was an early specimen of what was later dignified with
such titles as 'the law of uneven and combined development.' Actual
repetition and imitation are scarcely ever possible, whether politically,
economically, socially, or technologically, because the universe
is already too much altered by the first cause one is copying.
What Nairn says of the modern state is no less true of the twin
conceptions of which our three embattled socialist countries are
contemporary realizations: revolution and nationalism. It is perhaps
too easy to forget that this pair, like capitalism and Marxism, are
inventions, on which patents are impossible to preserve. They are
there, so to speak, for the pirating. Out of these piracies and only out
of them, comes this well-known anomaly: societies such as those of
Cuba, Albania, and China, which, insofar as they are revolutionarysocialist,
conceive of themselves as 'ahead' of those of France,
Switzerland, and the United States, but which, insofar as they are
characterized by low productivity, miserable living standards, and
backward technology, are no less certainly understood as 'behind.'
(Thus Chou En-lai's melancholy dream of catching up with capitalist
Britain by the year 2000.)
As noted earlier, Hobsbawm 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 learnablefrom.
Out of almost a century of modular theorizing and practical
experimentation came the Bolsheviks, who made the first successful
'planned' revolution (even if the success would not have been possible
without Hindenburg's earlier triumphs at Tannenberg and the Masurian
Lakes) and attempted to carry out a systematic programme (even if in
practice improvisation was the order of the day). It also seems clear that
without such plans and programmes a revolution in a realm barely
entering the era of industrial capitalism was out of the question. The
Bolshevik revolutionary model has been decisive for all twentieth-
156
THE ANGEL OF HISTORY
century revolutions because it made them imaginable in societies still
more backward than All the Russias. (It opened the possibility of, so to
speak, cutting history off at the pass.) The skilful early experimentations
of Mao Tse-tung confirmed the utility of the model outside Europe.
One can thus see a sort of culmination of the modular process in the case
of Cambodia, where in 1962 less than 2.5 per cent of the two-and-ahalf-million-strong
adult work-force was 'working class,' and less than
0.5 per cent 'capitalists.'
In much the same way, since the end of the eighteenth century
nationalism has undergone a process of modulation and adaptation,
according to different eras, political regimes, economies and social
structures. The 'imagined community' has, as a result, spread out to
every conceivable contemporary society. If it is permissible to use
modern Cambodia to illustrate an extreme modular transfer of 'revolution,'
it is perhaps equitable to use Vietnam to illustrate that of
nationalism, by a brief excursus on the nation's name.
On his coronation in 1802, Gia-long wished to call his realm 'Nam
Viet' and sent envoys to gain Peking's assent. The Manchu Son of
Heaven, however, insisted that it be 'Viet Nam.' The reason for this
inversion is as follows: 'Viet Nam' (or in Chinese Yiieh-nan) means,
roughly, 'to the south of Viet (Yiieh),' a realm conquered by the Han
seventeen centuries earlier and reputed to cover today's Chinese
provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi, as well as the Red River
valley. Gia-long's 'Nam Viet,' however, meant 'Southern Viet/
Yiieh,' in effect a claim to the old realm. In the words of Alexander
Woodside, 'the name "Vietnam" as a whole was hardly so well
esteemed by Vietnamese rulers a century ago, emanating as it had
from Peking, as it is in this century. An artificial appellation then, it
was used extensively neither by the Chinese nor by the Vietnamese.
The Chinese clung to the offensive T'ang word "Annam" . . . The
2. According to the calculations of Edwin Wells, on the basis of Table 9 in
Cambodge, Ministere du Plan et Institut National de la Statistique et des Recherches
Economiques, Resultatsfinals du Recensement General de la Population 1962. Wells divides
the rest of the working population as follows: government officials and new petty
bourgeoisie, 8%; traditional petty bourgeoisie (traders, etc.), 7.5%; agricultural proletariat,
1.8%; peasants, 78.3%. There were less than 1,300 capitalists owning actual
manufacturing enterprises.
157
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Vietnamese court, on the other hand, privately invented another
name for its kingdom in 1838-39 and did not bother to inform the
Chinese. Its new name, Dai Nam, the "Great South" or "Imperial
South," appeared with regularity on court documents and official
historical compilations. But it has not survived to the present.' This
new name is interesting in two respects. First, it contains no 'Vietnamese
element. Second, its territorial reference seems purely relational
- 'south' (of the Middle Kingdom).4
That today's Vietnamese proudly defend a Vieet Nam scornfully
invented by a nineteenth-century Manchu dynast reminds us of
Renan's dictum that nations must have 'oublie bien des choses,' but
also, paradoxically, of the imaginative power of nationalism.
If one looks back at the Vietnam of the 1930s or the Cambodia of
the 1960s, one finds, mutatis mutandis, many similarities: a huge,
illiterate, exploited peasantry, a minuscule working class, a fragmentary
bourgeoisie, and a tiny, divided intelligentsia.5
No sober contemporary
analyst, viewing these conditions objectively, would in
either case have predicted the revolutions soon to follow, or their
wrecked triumphs. (In fact, much the same could be said, and for
much the same reasons, of the China of 1910.) What made them
possible, in the end, was 'planning revolution' and 'imagining the
,6nation.
3. Vietnam and the Chinese Model, pp. 120-21.
4. This is not altogether surprising. 'The Vietnamese bureaucrat looked Chinese;
the Vietnamese peasant looked Southeast Asian. The bureaucrat had to write
Chinese, wear Chinese-style gowns, live in a Chinese-style house, ride in a Chinesestyle
sedan chair, and even follow Chinese-style idiosyncracies of conspicuous
consumption, like keeping a goldfish pond in his Southeast Asian garden.' Ibid.,
p. 199.
5. According to the 1937 census, 93-95% of the Vietnamese population was still
living in rural areas. No more than 10% of the population was functionally literate in any
script. No more than 20,000 persons had completed upper primary (grade 7-10)
schooling between 1920 and 1938. And what Vietnamese Marxists called the 'indigenous
bourgeoisie' - described by Marr as mainly absentee landlords, combined with
some entrepreneurs and a few higher officials - totalled about 10,500 families, or about
0.5% of the population. Vietnamese Tradition, 25-26, 34, and 37. Compare the data in
note 2 above.
6. And, as in the case of the Bolsheviks, fortunate catastrophes: for China, Japan's
massive invasion in 1937; for Vietnam, the smashing of the Maginot Line and her own
158
THE ANGEL OF HISTORY
The policies of the Pol Pot regime can only in a very limited sense
be attributed to traditional Khmer culture or to its leaders' cruelty,
paranoia, and megalomania. The Khmer have had their share of
megalomaniac despots; some of these, however, were responsible for
Angkor. Far more important are the models of what revolutions
have, can, should, and should not do, drawn from France, the USSR,
China, and Vietnam — and all the books written about them in
French.7
Much the same is true of nationalism. 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. For
the legators include not only San Martin and Garibaldi, but Uvarov and
Macaulay. 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, and by
the same variety of political and social systems. The one persistent
feature of this style of nationalism was, and is, that it is official — i.e.
something emanating from the state, and serving the interests of the state
first and foremost,
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. Some of
brief occupation by the Japanese; for Cambodia, the massive overflow of the American
war on Vietnam into her eastern territories after March 1970. In each case the existing
ancien regime, whether Kuomintang, French colonial, or feudal-monarchist, was fatally
undermined by extraneous forces.
7. One might suggest yes' to the levee en masse and the Terror, 'no' to
Thermidor and Bonapartism, for France; yes' to War Communism, collectivization,
and the Moscow Trials, 'no' to N.E.P. and de-Stalinization, for the Soviet Union;
'yes' to peasant guerrilla communism, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural
Revolution, 'no' to the Lushan Plenum, for China; 'yes' to the August Revolution
and the formal liquidation of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1945, 'no' to
damaging concessions to 'senior' communist parties as exemplified in the Geneva
Accords, for Vietnam.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
these legacies are symbolic, but not the less important for that.
Despite Trotsky's unease, the capital of the USSR was moved back
to the old Czarist capital of Moscow; and for over 65 years CPSU
leaders have made policy in the Kremlin, ancient citadel of Czarist
power — out of all possible sites in the socialist state's vast territories.
Similarly, the PRC's capital is that of the Manchus (while Chiang
Kai-shek had moved it to Nanking), and the CCP leaders congregate
in the Forbidden City of the Sons of Heaven. In fact, there are very
few, if any, socialist leaderships which have not clambered up into
such worn, warm seats. At a less obvious level, successful revolutionaries
also inherit the wiring of the old state: sometimes functionaries
and informers, but always files, dossiers, archives, laws, financial
records, censuses, maps, treaties, correspondence, memoranda, and so
on. Like the complex electrical system in any large mansion when the
owner has fled, the state awaits the new owner's hand at the switch to
be very much its old brilliant self again.
One should therefore not be much surprised if revolutionary leaderships,
consciously or unconsciously, come to play lord of the manor. We
are not thinking here simply of Djugashvili's self-identification with
Ivan Groznii, or Mao's expressed admiration for the tyrant Ch'in Shihg
Huang-ti, or Josip Broz's revival of Ruritanian pomp and ceremony.
'Official nationalism' enters post-revolutionary leadership styles in a
much more subtle way. By this I mean that such leaderships come easily
to adopt the putative nationalnost of the older dynasts and the dynastic
state. In a striking retroactive movement, dynasts who knew nothing of
'China,' 'Yugoslavia,' 'Vietnam' or 'Cambodia' become nationals (even
if not always 'deserving' nationals). Out of this accommodation comes
invariably that 'state' Machiavellism which is so striking a feature of
post-revolutionary regimes in contrast to revolutionary nationalist
movements. The more the ancient dynastic state is naturalized, the
more its antique finery can be wrapped around revolutionary shoulders.
The image of Suryavarman II's Angkor Wat, emblazoned on the flag of
Marxist Democratic Kampuchea (as on those of Lon Nol's puppet
8. See the extraordinary account, by no means wholly polemical, in Milovan
Djilas, Tito: the Story from Inside, chapter 4, especially pp. 133 ff.
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THE ANGEL OF HISTORY
republic and of Sihanouk's monarchical Cambodge), is a rebus not of
piety but of power.9
I emphasize leaderships, because it is leaderships, not people, who
inherit old switchboards and palaces. No one imagines, I presume,
that the broad masses of the Chinese people give a fig for what
happens along the colonial border between Cambodia and Vietnam.
Nor is it at all likely that Khmer and Vietnamese peasants wanted wars
between their peoples, or were consulted in the matter. In a very real
sense these were 'chancellory wars' in which popular nationalism was
mobilized largely after the fact and always in a language of selfdefence.
(Hence the particularly low enthusiasm in China, where this
language was least plausible, even under the neon-lit blazon of 'Soviet
i • n10hegemomsm. )
In all of this, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia are not in the least
11
unique. This is why there are small grounds for hope that the
precedents they have set for inter-socialist wars will not be followed,
or that the imagined community of the socialist nation will soon be
remaindered. But nothing can be usefully done to limit or prevent such
wars unless we abandon fictions like 'Marxists as such are not nationalists,'
or 'nationalism is the pathology of modern developmental
history,' and, instead, do our slow best to learn the real, and imagined,
experience of the past.
. . 12Of the Angel of History, Walter Benjamin wrote that:
9. Obviously, the tendencies outlined above are by no means characteristic only
of revolutionary Marxist regimes. The focus here is on such regimes both because of the
historic Marxist commitment to proletarian internationalism and the destruction of
feudal and capitalist states, and because of the new Indochina wars. For a decipherment
of the archaizing iconography of the right-wing Suharto regime in Indonesia, see my
Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia, chapter 5.
10. The difference between the inventions of 'official nationalism' and those of
other types is usually that between lies and myths.
11. On the other hand, it is possible that at the end of this century historians
may attribute 'official nationalist' excesses committed by post-revolutionary socialist
regimes in no small part to the disjuncture between socialist model and agrarian
reality.
12. Illuminations, p. 259. The angel's eye is that of Weekend's back-turned moving
camera, before which wreck after wreck looms up momentarily on an endless highway
before vanishing over the horizon.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
His face is turned towards 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 angel would like
to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
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 irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is
turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This
storm is what we call progress.
But the Angel is immortal, and our faces are turned towards the
obscurity ahead.
162
Census, Map, Museum
In the original edition of Imagined Communities I wrote that 'so often in
the "nation-building" policies of the new states one sees both a
genuine, popular nationalist enthusiasm, and a systematic, even Machiavellian,
instilling of nationalist ideology through the mass media, the
educational system, administrative regulations, and so forth.' My shortsighted
assumption then was that official nationalism in the colonized
worlds of Asia and Africa was modelled directly on that of the dynastic
states of nineteenth-century Europe. Subsequent reflection has persuaded
me that this view was hasty and superficial, and that the
immediate genealogy should be traced to the imaginings of the colonial
state. At first sight, this conclusion may seem surprising, since colonial
states were typically tfnft'-nationalist, and often violently so. But if one
looks beneath colonial ideologies and policies to the grammar in which,
from the mid nineteenth century, they were deployed, the lineage
becomes decidedly more clear.
Few things bring this grammar into more visible relief than three
institutions of power which, although invented before the mid nineteenth
century, changed their form and function as the colonized zones
entered the age of mechanical reproduction. These three institutions
were the census, the map, and the museum: together, they profoundly
1. See above, pp. 113-14.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion - the
nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and
the legitimacy of its ancestry. To explore the character of this nexus I
shall, in this chapter, confine my attention to Southeast Asia, since my
conclusions are tentative, and my claims to serious specialization limited
to that region. Southeast Asia does, however, offer those with comparative
historical interests special advantages, since it includes territories
colonized by almost all the 'white' imperial powers — Britain, France,
Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, and the United States — as well as
uncolonized Siam. Readers with greater knowledge of other parts of
Asia and Africa than mine will be better positioned to judge if my
argument is sustainable on a wider historical and geographical stage.
T H E C E N S U S
In two valuable recent papers the sociologist Charles Hirschman has
begun the study of the mentalites of the British colonial census-makers
for the Straits Settlements and peninsular Malaya, and their successors
working for the independent conglomerate state of Malaysia.
Hirschman's facsimiles of the 'identity categories' of successive
censuses from the'late nineteenth century up to the recent present
show an extraordinarily rapid, superficially arbitrary, series of
changes, in which categories are continuously agglomerated, disaggregated,
recombined, intermixed, and reordered (but the politically
powerful identity categories always lead the list). From these censuses
he draws two principal conclusions. The first is that, as the colonial
period wore on, the census categories became more visibly and
exclusively racial. Religious identity, on the other hand, gradually
2. Charles Hirschman, 'The Meaning and Measurement of Ethnicity in Malaysia:
An Analysis of Census Classifications,'J. of Asian Studies, 46:3 (August 1987), pp. 552-
82; and 'The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial
Ideology' Sociological Forum, 1:2 (Spring 1986), pp. 330-62.
3. An astonishing variety of 'Europeans' were enumerated right through the
colonial era. But whereas in 1881 they were still grouped primarily under the headings
'resident,' 'floating,' and 'prisoners,' by 1911 they were fraternizing as members of a
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CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM
disappeared as a primary census classification. 'Hindoos' - ranked
alongside 'Klings,' and 'Bengalees' - vanished after the first census of
1871. 'Parsees' lasted until the census of 1901, where they still
appeared — packed in with 'Bengalis,' 'Burmese,' and 'Tamils' —
under the broad category 'Tamils and Other Natives of India,' His
second conclusion is that, on the whole, the large racial categories
were retained and even concentrated after independence, but now
redesignated and reranked as 'Malaysian,' 'Chinese,' 'Indian,' and
'Other.' Yet anomalies continued up into the 1980s. In the 1980
census 'Sikh' still appeared nervously as a pseudoethnic subcategory —
alongside 'Malayali' and 'Telegu,' 'Pakistani' and 'Bangladeshi,' 'Sri
Lankan Tamil,' and 'Other Sri Lankan,' - under the general heading
'Indian.'
But Hirschman's wonderful facsimiles encourage one to go beyond
his immediate analytical concerns. Take, for example, the 1911 Federated
Malay States Census, which lists under 'Malay Population by
Race' the following: 'Malay,' 'Javanese,' 'Sakai,' 'Banjarese,' 'Boyanese,"Mendeling'
(sic), 'Krinchi' (sic), 'Jambi,' 'Achinese,' 'Bugis,' and
'Other.' Of these 'groups' all but (most) 'Malay' and 'Sakai' originated
from the islands of Sumatra, Java, Southern Borneo, and the Celebes, all
parts of the huge neighbouring colony of the Netherlands East Indies.
But these extra-FMS origins receive no recognition from the censusmakers
who, in constructing their 'Malays,' keep their eyes modestly
lowered to their own colonial borders. (Needless to say, across the
waters, Dutch census-makers were constructing a different imagining of
'Malays,' as a minor ethnicity alongside, not above, 'Achinese,' 'Javanese,'
and the like.) 'Jambi' and 'Krinchi' refer to places, rather than to
anything remotely identifiable as ethnolinguistic. It is extremely unlikely
that, in 1911, more than a tiny fraction of those categorized and
subcategorized would have recognized themselves under such labels.
These 'identities,' imagined by the (confusedly) classifying mind of the
colonial state, still awaited a reification which imperial administrative
penetration would soon make possible. One notices, in addition, the
(white) race'. It is agreeable that up to the end, the census-makers were visibly uneasy
about where to place those they marked as 'Jews.'
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
census-makers' passion for completeness and unambiguity. Hence their
intolerance of multiple, politically 'transvestite,' blurred, or changing
identifications. Hence the weird subcategory, under each racial group,
of'Others' — who, nonetheless, are absolutely not to be confused with
other 'Others.' 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, so that, in order fully to
understand why the late-nineteenth-century censuses are yet profoundly
novel, it is useful to look back to the earliest days of
European penetration of Southeast Asia. Two examples, drawn from
the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagoes, are instructive. In an
important recent book, William Henry Scott has attempted meticulously
to reconstruct the class structure of the pre-Hispanic Philippines,
on the basis of the earliest Spanish records.4
As a professional
historian Scott is perfectly aware that the Philippines owes its name to
Felipe II of 'Spain,' and that, but for mischance or luck, the
archipelago might have fallen into Dutch or English hands, become
politically segmented, or been recombined with further conquests.b
It
is tempting therefore to attribute his curious choice of topic to his
long residence in the Philippines and his strong sympathy with a
Filipino nationalism that has been, for a century now, on the trail of
an aboriginal Eden. But the chances are good that the deeper basis for
the shaping of his imagination was the sources on which he was
4. William Henry Scott, Cracks in the Parchment Curtain, chapter 7, 'Filipino Class
Structure in the Sixteenth Century.'
5. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Spanish settlements in the
archipelago came under repeated attack from the forces of the Vereenigde OostIndische
Compagnie, the greatest 'transnational' corporation of the era. For their
survival, the pious Catholic settlers owed a great debt to the arch-heretical
Protector, who kept Amsterdam's back to the wall for much of his rule. Had
the VOC been successful, Manila, rather than Batavia [Jakarta], might have become
the centre of the 'Dutch' imperium in Southeast Asia. In 1762, London seized
Manila from Spain, and held it for almost two years. It is entertaining to note that
Madrid only got it back in exchange for, of all places, Florida, and the other
'Spanish' possessions east of the Mississippi. Had the negotiations proceeded
differently, the archipelago could have been politically linked with Malaya and
Singapore during the nineteenth century.
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CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM
compelled to rely. For the fact is that wherever in the islands the
earliest clerics and conquistadors ventured they espied, on shore,
principales, hidalgos, pecheros, and esclavos (princes, noblemen, commoners
and slaves) - quasi-estates adapted from the social classifications
of late mediaeval Iberia. The documents they left behind offer
plenty of incidental evidence that the 4
hidalgos' were mostly unaware
of one another's existence in the huge, scattered, and sparsely
populated archipelago, and, where aware, usually saw one another
not as hidalgos, but as enemies or potential slaves. But the power of
the grid is so great that such evidence is marginalized in Scott's
imagination, and therefore it is hard for him to see that the 'class
structure' of the precolonial period is a 'census' imagining created
from the poops of Spanish galleons. Wherever they went, hidalgos and
esclavos loomed up, who could only be aggregated as such, that is
'structurally,' by an incipient colonial state.
For Indonesia we have, thanks to the research of Mason Hoadley,
a detailed account of an important judicial case decided in the coastal
port of Cirebon, Java, at the end of the seventeenth century. By
luck, the Dutch (VOC) and local Cirebonese records are still
available. If the Cirebonese account only had survived, we would
know the accused murderer as a high official of the Cirebonese court,
and only by his title Ki Aria Marta Ningrat, not a personal name. The
VOC records, however, angrily identify him as a Chinees — indeed
that is the single most important piece of information about him that
they convey. It is clear then that the Cirebonese court classified
people by rank and status, while the Company did so by something
like 'race.' There is no reason whatever to think that the accused
murderer - whose high status attests to his and his ancestors' long
integration into Cirebonese society, no matter what their origins thought
of himself as 'a' Chinees. How then did the VOC arrive at
this classification? From what poops was it possible to imagine
Chinees? Surely only those ferociously mercantile poops which, under
centralized command, roved ceaselessly from port to port between
the Gulf of Mergui and the mouth of the Yangtze-kiang. Oblivious
6. Mason C. Hoadley, 'State vs. Ki Aria Marta Ningrat (1696) and Tian Siangko
(1720-21)' (unpublished ms., 1982).
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of the heterogeneous populations 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
coastal 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 categorized as
Chinezen dress, reside, marry, be buried, and bequeath property
according to that census. It is striking that the much less far-faring
and commercially minded Iberians in the Philippines imagined a
quite different census category: what they called sangley. Sangley was
an incorporation into Spanish of the Hokkien sengli — meaning
'trader.'7
One can imagine Spanish proto-census men asking the
traders drawn to Manila by the galleon trade: 'Who are you?', and
( 8being sensibly told: 'We are traders.' Not sailing the seven Asian
seas, for two centuries the Iberians remained in a comfortably
provincial conceptual fog. Only very slowly did the sangley turn
into 'Chinese' - until the word disappeared in the early nineteenth
century to make way for a VOC-style chino.
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. Precolonial rulers in the MalayoJavanese
world had attempted enumerations of the populations under
their control, but these took the form of tax-rolls and levy-lists. Their
purposes were concrete and specific: to keep track of those on whom
taxes and military conscription could effectively be imposed - for
these rulers were interested solely in economic surplus and armable
manpower. Early European regimes in the region did not, in this
respect, differ markedly from their predecessors. But after 1850
colonial authorities were using increasingly sophisticated administrative
means to enumerate populations, including the women and
children (whom the ancient rulers had always ignored), according to
7. See, e.g., Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850—1898, chapters 1
and 2.
8. The galleon trade — for which Manila was, for over two centuries, the entrepot exchanged
Chinese silks and porcelain for Mexican silver.
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CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM
a maze of grids which had no immediate financial or military
purpose. In the old days, those subjects liable for taxes and conscription
were usually well aware of their numerability; ruler and
ruled understood each other very well, if antagonistically, on the
matter. But by 1870, a non-taxpaying, unlevyable 'Cochin-Chinese'
woman could live out her life, happily or unhappily, in the Straits
Settlements, without the slightest awareness that this was how she was
being mapped from on high. Here the peculiarity of the new census
becomes apparent. It tried carefully to count the objects of its feverish
imagining. Given the exclusive nature of the classificatory system, and
the logic of quantification itself, a 'Cochin-Chinese' had to be
understood as one digit in an aggregable series of replicable
'Cochin-Chinese' - within, of course, the state's domain. 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 organized the new educational, juridical, publichealth,
police, and immigration bureaucracies 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 of differential schools, courts, clinics, police stations
and immigration offices created 'traffic-habits' which in time gave real
social life to the state's earlier fantasies.
Needless to say, it was not always plain sailing, and the state
frequently bumped into discomforting realities. Far and away the
most important of these was religious affiliation, which served as the
basis of very old, very stable imagined communities not in the least
aligned with the secular state's authoritarian grid-map. To different
degrees, in different Southeast Asian colonies, the rulers were compelled
to make messy accommodations, especially to Islam and
Buddhism. In particular, religious shrines, schools, and courts - access
to which was determined by individual popular self-choice, not the
census - continued to flourish. The state could rarely do more than
try to regulate, constrict, count, standardize, and hierarchically subordiante
these institutions to its own.9
It was precisely because
9. See chapter 7, above (p. 125) for mention of French colonialism's struggle to
sever Buddhism in Cambodia from its old links with Siam.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
temples, mosques, schools and courts were topographically anomalous
that they were understood as zones of freedom and — in time —
fortresses from which religious, later nationalist, anticolonials could
go forth to battle. At the same time, there were frequent endeavours to
force a better alignment of census with religious communities by — so
far as was possible - politically and juridically ethnicizing the latter. In
the Federated States of colonial Malaya, this task was relatively easy.
Those whom the regime regarded as being in the series 'Malay' were
hustled off to the courts of 'their' castrated Sultans, which were in
10 4 J
substantial part administered according to Islamic law. 'Islamic' was
thus treated as really just another name for 'Malay.' (Only after
independence in 1957 were efforts made by certain political groups
to reverse this logic by reading 'Malay' as really another name for
'Islamic'). In the vast, heterogeneous Netherlands Indies, where by the
end of the colonial era an array of quarrelling missionary organizations
had made substantial conversions in widely scattered zones, a parallel
drive faced much more substantial obstacles. Yet even there, the 1920s
and 1930s saw the growth of'ethnic' Christianities (the Batak Church,
the Karo Church, later the Dayak Church, and so on) which developed
in part because the state allocated proselytizing zones to different
missionary groups according to its own census-topography. With Islam
Batavia had no comparable success. It did not dare to prohibit the
pilgrimage to Mecca, though it tried to inhibit the growth of the
pilgrims' numbers, policed their travels, and spied on them from an
outpost at Jiddah set up just for this purpose. None of these measures
sufficed to prevent the intensification of Indies Muslim contacts with
the vast world of Islam outside, and especially the new currents of11
thought emanating from Cairo.
T H E M A P
In the meantime, however, Cairo and Mecca were beginning to be
visualized in a strange new way, no longer simply as sites in a sacred
10. See William Roff, The Origins of Malay Nationalism, pp. 72—4.
11. See Harry J. Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun, chapters 1-2.
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CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM
Muslim geography, but also as dots on paper sheets which included
dots for Paris, Moscow, Manila and Caracas; and the plane relationship
between these indifferently profane and sacred dots was determined
by nothing beyond the mathematically calculated flight of the
crow. The Mercatorian map, brought in by the European colonizers,
was beginning, via print, to shape the imagination of Southeast
Asians.
In a recent, brilliant thesis the Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul
has traced the complex processes by which a bordered 'Siam' came into
12
being between 1850 and 1910. His account is instructive precisely
because Siam was not colonized, though what, in the end, came to be its
borders were colonially determined. In the Thai case, therefore, one can
see unusually clearly the emergence of a new state-mind within a
'traditional' structure of political power.
Up until the accession, in 1851, of the intelligent Rama IV (the
Mongkut of The King and I) , only two types of map existed in Siam,
and both were hand-made: the age of mechanical reproduction had
not yet there dawned. One was what could be called a 'cosmograph,'
a formal, symbolic representation of the Three Worlds of traditional
Buddhist cosmology. The cosmograph was not organized horizontally,
like our own maps; rather a series of supraterrestrial heavens and
sub terrestrial hells wedged in the visible world along a single vertical
axis. It was useless for any journey save that in search of merit and
salvation. The second type, wholly profane, consisted of diagrammatic
guides for military campaigns and coastal shipping. Organized
roughly by the quadrant, their main features were written-in notes
on marching and sailing times, required because the mapmakers had
no technical conception of scale. Covering only terrestrial, profane
space, they were usually drawn in a queer oblique perspective or
mixture of perspectives, as if the drawers' eyes, accustomed from
daily life to see the landscape horizontally, at eye-level, nonetheless
were influenced subliminally by the vertically of the cosmograph.
Thongchai points out that these guide-maps, always local, were
12. Thongchai Winichakul, 'Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of Siam'
(Ph.D. Thesis, University of Sydney, 1988).
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
never situated in a larger, stable geographic context, and that the
bird's-eye view convention of modern maps was wholly foreign to
them.
Neither type of map marked borders. Their makers would have
found incomprehensible the following elegant formulation of Richard
Muir:13
Located at the interfaces between adjacent state territories, international
boundaries have a special significance in determining the
limits of sovereign authority and defining the spatial form of the
contained political regions. . . . Boundaries . . occur where the
vertical interfaces between state sovereignties intersect the surface
of the earth. . . . As vertical interfaces, boundaries have no
horizontal extent. . . .
Boundary-stones and similar markers did exist, and indeed multiplied
along the western fringes of the realm as the British pressed in from
Lower Burma. But these stones were set up discontinuously at
strategic mountain passes and fords, and were often substantial
distances from corresponding stones set up by the adversary. They
were understood horizontally, at eye level, as extension points of
royal power; not 'from the air.' Only in the 1870s did Thai leaders
begin thinking of boundaries as segments of a continuous map-line
corresponding to nothing visible on the ground, but demarcating an
exclusive sovereignty wedged between other sovereignties. In 1874
appeared the first geographical textbook, by the American missionary
J. W. Van Dyke - an early product of the print-capitalism that was by
then sweeping into Siam. In 1882, Rama V established a special
mapping school in Bangkok. In 1892, Minister of Education Prince
Damrong Rajanuphab, inaugurating a modern-style school system for
the country, made geography a compulsory subject at the junior
secondary level. In 1900, or thereabouts, was published Phumisat
Say am [Geography of Siam] by W.G. Johnson, the model for all
printed geographies of the country from that time onwards.14
13. Richard Muir, Modern Political Geography, p. 119.
14. Thongchai, 'Siam Mapped,' pp. 105-10, 286.
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CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM
Thongchai notes that the vectoral convergence of print-capitalism
with the new conception of spatial reality presented by these maps
had an immediate impact on the vocabulary of Thai politics. Between
1900 and 1915, the traditional words krung and muang largely
disappeared, because they imaged dominion in terms of sacred capitals
15
and visible, discontinuous population centres. In their place came
prathet, 'country,' which imaged it in the invisible terms of bounded
territorial space.
Like censuses, European-style maps worked on the basis of a
totalizing classification, and led their bureaucratic producers and consumers
towards policies with revolutionary consequences. Ever since
John Harrison's 1761 invention of the chronometer, which made
possible the precise calculation of longitudes, the entire planet's curved
surface had been subjected to a geometrical grid which squared off
empty seas and unexplored regions in measured boxes.17
The task of, as
it were, 'filling in' the boxes was to be accomplished by explorers,
surveyors, and military forces. In Southeast Asia, the second half of the
nineteenth century was the golden age of military surveyors — colonial
and, a little later, Thai. They were on the march to put space under the
same surveillance which the census-makers were trying to impose on
persons. Triangulation by triangulation, war by war, treaty by treaty, the
alignment of map and power proceeded. In the apt words of Thong-
chai:18
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 was 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
15. For a full discussion of old conceptions of power in Java (which, with minor
differences, corresponded to that existing in Old Siam), see my Language and Power,
chapter 1.
16. Thongchai, 'Siam Mapped,'p. 110.
17. David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World,
chapter 9.
18. 'Siam Mapped,'p. 310.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
real instrument to concretize 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.
By the turn of the century, with Prince Damrong's reforms at the
Ministry of the Interior (a fine mapping name), the administration of the
realm was finally put on a wholly territorial-cartographic basis, following
earlier practice in the neighbouring colonies.
It would be unwise to overlook the crucial intersection between map
and census. For the new map served firmly to break off the infinite series
of 'Hakkas,' 'Non-Tamil Sri Lankans,' and 'Javanese' that the formal
apparatus of the census conjured up, by delimiting territorially where,
for political purposes, they ended. Conversely, by a sort of demographic
triangulation, the census filled in politically the formal topography of the
map.
Out of these changes emerged two final avatars of the map (both
instituted by the late colonial state) which directly prefigure the
official nationalisms of twentieth century Southeast Asia. Fully aware
of their interloper status in the distant tropics, but arriving from a
civilization in which the legal inheritance and the legal transferability
19
of geographic space had long been established, the Europeans
frequently attempted to legitimize the spread of their power by
quasi-legal methods. Among the more popular of these was their
'inheritance' of the putative sovereignties of native rulers whom the
Europeans had eliminated or subjected. Either way, the usurpers
were in the business, especially vis-a-vis other Europeans, of reconstructing
the property-history of their new possessions. Hence the
appearance, late in the nineteenth century especially, of 'historical
maps,' designed to demonstrate, in the new cartographic discourse,
19. I do not mean merely the inheritance and sale of private property in land in the
usual sense. More important was the European practice of political transfers of lands,
with their populations, via dynastic marriages. Princesses, on marriage, brought their
husbands duchies and petty principalities, and these transfers were formally negotiated
and 'signed.' The tag Bella gerant alii, tu, felix Austria, nube! would have been
inconceivable for any state in precolonial Asia.
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CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM
the antiquity of specific, tightly bounded territorial units. Through
chronologically arranged sequences of such maps, a sort of politicalbiographical
narrative of the realm came into being, sometimes with
vast historical depth.20
In turn, this narrative was adopted, if often
adapted, by the nation-states which, in the twentieth century,
21
became the colonial states' legatees.
The second avatar was the map-as-logo. Its origins were reasonably
innocent - the practice of the imperial states of colouring their colonies
on maps with an imperial dye. In London's imperial maps, British
colonies were usually pink-red, French purple-blue, Dutch yellowbrown,
and so on. Dyed this way, each colony appeared like a
detachable piece of a jigsaw puzzle. As this jigsaw' effect became
normal, each 'piece' could be wholly detached from its geographic
context. In its final form all explanatory glosses could be summarily
removed: lines of longitude and latitude, place names, signs for rivers,
seas, and mountains, neighbours. Pure sign, no longer compass to the
world. In this shape, the map entered an infinitely reproducible series,
available for transfer to posters, official seals, letterheads, magazine and
textbook covers, tablecloths, and hotel walls. Instantly recognizable,
everywhere visible, the logo-map penetrated deep into the popular
imagination, forming a powerful emblem for the anticolonial nation-22
alisms being born.
20. See Thongchai, 'Siam Mapped,' p. 387, on Thai ruling class absorption of
this style of imagining. 'According to these historical maps, moreover, the geobody is
not a modern particularity but is pushed back more than a thousand years. Historical
maps thus help reject any suggestion that nationhood emerged only in the recent
past, and the perspective that the present Siam was a result of ruptures is precluded.
So is any idea that intercourse between Siam and the European powers was the
parent of Siam.'
21. This adoption was by no means a Machiavellian ruse. The early nationalists in
all the Southeast Asian colonies had their consciousnesses profoundly shaped by the
'format' of the colonial state and its institutions. See chapter 7 above.
22. In the writings of Nick Joaquin, the contemporary Philippines, preeminent
man of letters - and an indubitable patriot - one can see how powerfully the emblem
works on the most sophisticated intelligence. Of General Antonio Luna, tragic hero of
the anti-American struggle of 1898-99, Joaquin writes that he hurried to 'perform the
role that had been instinctive in the Creole for three centuries: the defense of the form of
the Philippines from a foreign disrupter.' A Question of Heroes, p. 164 (italics added).
Elsewhere he observes, astonishingly, that Spain's 'Filipino allies, converts, mercenaries
175
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Modern Indonesia offers us a fine, painful example of this process.
In 1828 the first fever-ridden Dutch settlement was made on the
island of New Guinea. Although the settlement had to be abandoned
in 1836, the Dutch Crown proclaimed sovereignty over that part of
the island lying west of 141 degrees longitude (an invisible line which
corresponded to nothing on the ground, but boxed in Conrad's
diminishing white spaces), with the exception of some coastal
stretches regarded as under the sovereignty of the Sultan of Tidore.
Only in 1901 did The Hague buy out the Sultan, and incorporate
West New Guinea into the Netherlands Indies — just in time for
logoization. Large parts of the region remained Conrad-white until
after World War II; the handful of Dutchmen there were mostly
missionaries, mineral-prospectors — and wardens of special prisoncamps
for die-hard radical Indonesian nationalists. The swamps north
of Merauke, at the extreme southeastern edge of Dutch New Guinea,
were selected as the site of these facilities precisely because the region
was regarded as utterly remote from the rest of the colony, and the
'stone-age' local population as wholly uncontaminated by nationalist
thinking.23
The internment, and often interment, there of nationalist martyrs
gave West New Guinea a central place in the folklore of the
anticolonial struggle, and made it a sacred site in the national
imagining: Indonesia Free, from Sabang (at the northwestern tip
of Sumatra) to — where else but? — Merauke. It made no difference at
all that, aside from the few hundred internees, no nationalists ever
saw New Guinea with their own eyes until the 1960s. But Dutch
colonial logo-maps sped across in the colony, showing a West New
Guinea with nothing to its East, unconsciously reinforced the developing
imagined ties. When, in the aftermath of the bitter anticolonial
wars of 1945-49, the Dutch were forced to cede sovereignty of the
archipelago to a United States of Indonesia, they attempted (for
reasons that need not detain us here) to separate West New Guinea
sent against the Filipino rebel may have kept the archipelago Spanish and Christian, but
they also kept it from falling apart;' and that they 'were fighting (whatever the Spaniards
may have intended) to keep the Filipino one.' Ibid., p. 58.
23. See Robin Osborne, Indonesia's Secret War, The Guerrilla Struggle in IrianJaya,
pp. 8-9.
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CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM
once again, keep it temporarily under colonial rule, and prepare it for
independent nationhood. Not until 1963 was this enterprise abandoned,
as a result of heavy American diplomatic pressure and
Indonesian military raids. Only then did President Sukarno visit
for the first time, at the age of sixty-two, a region about which
he had tirelessly orated for four decades. The subsequent painful
relations between the populations of West New Guinea and the
emissaries of the independent Indonesian state can be attributed to
the fact that Indonesians more or less sincerely regard these populations
as 'brothers and sisters,' while the populations themselves, for
the most part, see things very differently.24
This difference owes much to census and map. New Guinea's
remoteness and rugged terrain created over the millennia an extraordinary
linguistic fragmentation. When the Dutch left the region in
1963 they estimated that within the 700,000 population there existed
25
well over 200 mostly mutually unintelligible languages. Many of
the remoter 'tribal' groups were not even aware of one another's
existence. But, especially after 1950, Dutch missionaries and Dutch
officials for the first time made serious efforts to 'unify' them by
taking censuses, expanding communications networks, establishing
schools, and erecting supra-'tribal' governmental structures. This
effort was launched by a colonial state which, as we noted earlier,
was unique in that it had governed the Indies, not primarily via a
European language, but through 'administrative Malay.' Hence
West New Guinea was 'brought up' in the same language in which
Indonesia had earlier been raised (and which became the national
language in due course). The irony is that bahasa Indonesia thus
24. Since 1963 there have been many bloody episodes in West New Guinea (now
called Irian Jaya — Great Irian), partly as a result of the militarization of the Indonesian
state since 1965, partly because of the intermittently effective guerrilla activities of the
so-called OPM (Organization for a Free Papua). But these brutalities pale by comparison
with Jakarta's savagery in ex-Portuguese East Timor, where in the first three years
after the 1976 invasion an estimated one-third of the population of 600,000 died from
war, famine, disease and 'resettlement'. I do not think it a mistake to suggest that the
difference derives in part from East Timor's absence from the logos of the Netherlands
East Indies and, until 1976, of Indonesia's.
25. Osborne, Indonesia's Secret War, p. 2.
26. See above, p. 110.
ill
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
became the lingua franca of a burgeoning West New Guinean, West
27
Papuan nationalism.
But what brought the often quarrelling young West Papuan nationalists
together, especially after 1963, was the map. Though the Indonesian
state changed the region's name from West Nieuw Guinea,
first to Irian Barat (West Irian) and then to Irian Jaya, it read its local
reality from the colonial-era bird's-eye atlas. A scattering of anthropologists,
missionaries and local officials might know and think about
the Ndanis, the Asmats, and the Baudis. But the state itself, and through
it the Indonesian population as a whole, saw only a phantom 'Irianese'
{orang Irian) named after the map; because phantom, to be imagined in
quasi-logo form: 'negroid' features, penis-sheaths, and so on. In a way
that reminds us how Indonesia came first to be imagined within the
racist structures of the early-twentieth-century Netherlands East Indies,
an embryo 'Irianese' national community, bounded by Meridian 141
and the neighbouring provinces of North and South Moluccas,
emerged. At the time when its most prominent and attractive spokesman,
Arnold Ap, was murdered by the state in 1984, he was curator of a
state-built museum devoted to 'Irianese' (provincial) culture.
THE M U S E U M
The link between Ap's occupation and assassination is not at all
accidental. For museums, and the museumizing imagination, are both
profoundly political. That his museum was instituted by a distant Jakarta
shows us how the new nation-state of Indonesia learned from its
immediate ancestor, the colonial Netherlands East Indies. The present
proliferation of museums around Southeast Asia suggests a general
process of political inheriting at work. Any understanding of this
process requires a consideration of the novel nineteenth-century colonial
archaeology that made such museums possible.
27. The best sign for this is that the anti-Indonesian nationalist guerrilla
organization's name, Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM), is composed of Indonesian
words.
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CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM
Up until the early nineteenth century the colonial rulers in Southeast
Asia exhibited very little interest in the antique monuments of the
civilizations they had subjected. Thomas Stamford Raffles, ominous
emissary from William Jones's Calcutta, was the first prominent colonial
official not merely to amass a large personal collection of local objets d'art,
28
but systematically to study their history. Thereafter, with increasing
speed, the grandeurs of the Borobudur, of Angkor, of Pagan, and of
other ancient sites were successively disinterred, unjungled, measured,29
photographed, reconstructed, fenced off, analysed, and displayed.
Colonial Archaeological Services became powerful and prestigious
institutions, calling on the services of some exceptionally capable
scholar-officials.30
28. In 1811, the East India Company's forces seized all the Dutch possessions in the
Indies (Napoleon had absorbed the Netherlands into France the previous year). Raffles
ruled in Java till 1815. His monumental History of Java appeared in 1817, two years prior
to his founding of Singapore.
29. The museumizing of the Borobudur, the largest Buddhist stupa in the world,
exemplifies this process. In 1814, the Raffles regime 'discovered' it, and had it
unjungled. In 1845, the self-promoting German artist-adventurer Schaefer persuaded
the Dutch authorities in Batavia to pay him to make the first daguerrotypes. In 1851,
Batavia sent a team of state employees, led by civil engineer F.C. Wilsen, to make a
systematic survey of the bas-reliefs and to produce a complete, 'scientific' set of
lithographs. In 1874, Dr. C. Leemans, Director of the Museum of Antiquities in
Leiden, published, at the behest of the Minister of Colonies, the first major scholarly
monograph; he relied heavily on Wilsen's lithographs, never having visited the site
himself. In the 1880s, the professional photographer Cephas produced a thorough
modern-style photographic survey. In 1901, the colonial regime established an
Oudheidkundige Commissie (Commission on Antiquities). Between 1907 and
1911, the Commission oversaw the complete restoration of the stupa, carried out at
state expense by a team under the civil engineer Van Erp. Doubtless in recognition of
this success, the Commission was promoted, in 1913, to an Oudheidkundigen Dienst
(Antiquities Service), which kept the monument spick and span until the end of the
colonial period. See C. Leemans, Boro-Boudour, pp. ii-lv; and N.J. Krom, Inleiding tot de
Hindoe-Javaansche Kunst, I, chapter 1.
30. Viceroy Curzon (1899-1905), an antiquities buff who, writes Groslier,
'energized' the Archaeological Survey of India, put things very nicely: 'It is . . .
equally our duty to dig and discover, to classify, reproduce and describe, to copy and
decipher/and to cherish and conserve.' (Foucault could not have said it better). In
1899, the Archaeological Department of Burma - then part of British India - was
founded, and soon began the restoration of Pagan. The previous year, the Ecole
Fran<paise d'Extreme-Orient was established in Saigon, followed almost at once by a
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
To explore fully why this happened, when it happened, would take
us too far afield. It may be enough here to suggest that the change was
associated with the eclipse of the commercial—colonial regimes of the
two great East India Companies, and the rise of the true modern colony,
31
directly attached to the metropole. The prestige of the colonial state
was accordingly now intimately linked to that of its homeland superior.
It is noticeable how heavily concentrated archaeological efforts were on
the restoration of imposing monuments (and how these monuments
began to be plotted on maps for public distribution and edification: a
kind of necrological census was under way). No doubt this emphasis
reflected general Orientalist fashions. But the substantial funds invested
allow us to suspect that the state had its own, non-scientific reasons.
Three immediately suggest themselves, of which the last is surely the
most important.
In the first place, the timing of the archaeological push coincided
with the first political struggle over the state's educational policies.
Directorate of Museums and Historical Monuments of Indochina. Immediately after
the French seizure of Siemreap and Battambang from Siam in 1907, an Angkor
Conservancy was established to Curzonize Southeast Asia's most awe-inspiring
ancient monuments. See Bernard Philippe Groslier, Indochina, pp. 155-7, 174-7.
As noted above, the Dutch colonial Antiquities Commission was founded in 1901.
The coincidence in dates - 1899, 1898, 1901 - shows not only the keenness with
which the rival colonial powers observed one another, but sea-changes in imperialism
under way by the turn of the century. As was to be expected, independent
Siam ambled along more slowly. Its Archaeological Service was only set up in 1924,
its National Museum in 1926. See Charles Higham, The Archaeology of Mainland
Southeast Asia, p. 25.
31. The VOC was liquidated, in bankruptcy, in 1799. The colony of the
Netherlands Indies, however, dates from 1815, when the independence of The
Netherlands was restored by the Holy Alliance, and Willem I of Orange put on a
Dutch throne first invented in 1806 by Napoleon and his kindly brother Louis. The
British East India Company survived till the great Indian Mutiny of 1857.
32. The Oudheidkundige Commissie was established by the same government
that (in 1901) inaugurated the new 'Ethical Policy' for the Indies, a policy that for the
first time aimed to establish a Western-style system of education for substantial numbers
of the colonized. Governor-General Paul Doumer (1897-1902) created both the
Directorate of Museums and Historical Monuments of Indochina and the colony's
modern educational apparatus. In Burma, the huge expansion of higher education —
which between 1900 and 1940 increased the number of secondary-school students
eightfold, from 27,401 to 233,543, and of college students twentyfold, from 115 to
2,365 - began just as the Archaeological Department of Burma swung into action. See
Robert H. Taylor, The State in Burma, p. 114.
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CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM
'Progressives' — colonials as well as natives — were urging major
investments in modern schooling. Against them were arrayed conservatives
who feared the long-term consequences of such schooling,
and preferred the natives to stay native. In this light,
archaeological restorations — soon followed by state-sponsored
printed editions of traditional literary texts - can be seen as a sort
of conservative educational program, which also served as a pretext
for resisting the pressure of the progressives. Second, the formal
ideological programme of the reconstructions always placed the
builders of the monuments and the colonial natives in a certain
hierarchy. In some cases, as in the Dutch East Indies up until the
1930s, the idea was entertained that the builders were actually not
of the same 'race' as the natives (they were 'really' Indian im-
33
migrants). In other cases, as in Burma, what was imagined was a
secular decadence, such that contemporary natives were no longer
capable of their putative ancestors' achievements. Seen in this light,
the reconstructed monuments, juxtaposed with the surrounding
rural poverty, said to the natives: Our very presence shows that
you have always been, or have long become, incapable of either
greatness or self-rule.
The third reason takes us deeper, and closer to the map. We have
seen earlier, in our discussion of the 'historical map,' how colonial
regimes began attaching themself to antiquity as much as conquest,
originally for quite straightforward Machiavellian-legalistic reasons.
As time 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 Southeast 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 generalized, 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
33. Influenced in part by this kind of thinking, conservative Thai intellectuals,
archaeologists, and officials persist to this day in attributing Angkor to the mysterious
Khom, who vanished without a trace, and certainly have no connection with today's
despised Cambodians.
181
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
disappeared, as it often had, the state would attempt to revive) draped
around the mappers. This paradoxical situation is nicely illustrated by
the fact that the reconstructed monuments often had smartly laid-out
lawns around them, and always explanatory tablets, complete with
datings, planted here and there. Moreover, they were to be kept
empty of people, except for perambulatory tourists (no religious
ceremonies or pilgrimages, so far as possible). Museumized this way,
they were repositioned as regalia for a secular colonial state.
But, as noted above, a characteristic feature of the instrumentalities
of this profane state was infinite reproducibility, a reproducibility
made technically possible by print and photography, but politicoculturally
by the disbelief of the rulers themselves in the real
sacredness of local sites. A sort of progression is detectable everywhere:
(1) massive, technically sophisticated archaeological reports,
complete with dozens of photographs, recording the process of
reconstruction of particular, distinct ruins; (2) Lavishly illustrated
books for public consumption, including exemplary plates of all
the major sites reconstructed unthin the colony (so much the better
if, as in the Netherlands Indies, Hindu-Buddhist shrines could be
juxtaposed to restored Islamic mosques).34
Thanks to print-capitalism,
a sort of pictorial census of the state's patrimony becomes available,
even if at high cost, to the state's subjects; (3) A general logoization,
made possible by the profaning processes outlined above. Postage
stamps, with their characteristic series - tropical birds, fruits, fauna,
why not monuments as well? — are exemplary of this stage. But
postcards and schoolroom textbooks follow the same logic. From
there it is only a step into the market: Hotel Pagan, Borobudur Fried
Chicken, and so on.
While this kind of archaeology, maturing in the age of mechanical
34. A fine late-blooming example is Ancient Indonesian Art, by the Dutch scholar,
A.J. Bernet Kempers, self-described as 'former Director of Archaeology in Indonesia
[sic].' On pages 24-5 one finds maps showing the location of the ancient sites. The first
is especially instructive, since its rectangular shape (framed on the east by the 141st
Meridian) willy-nilly includes Philippine Mindanao as well as British-Malaysian north
Borneo, peninsular Malaya, and Singapore. All are blank of sites, indeed of any naming
whatsoever, except for a single, inexplicable 'Kedah.' The switch from HinduBuddhism
to Islam occurs after Plate 340.
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CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM
reproduction, was profoundly political, it was political at such a deep
level that almost everyone, including the personnel of the colonial state
(who, by the 1930s, were in most of Southeast Asia 90 per cent native)
was unconscious of the fact. It had all become normal and everyday. It
was precisely the infinite quotidian reproducibility of its regalia that
revealed the real power of the state.
It is probably not too surprising that post-independence states,
which exhibited marked continuities with their colonial predecessors,
inherited this form of political museumizing. For example, on 9
November 1968, as part of the celebrations commemorating the 15th
anniversary of Cambodia's independence, Norodom Sihanouk had a
large wood and papier-mache replica of the great Bayon temple of
35
Angkor displayed in the national sports stadium in Phnom Penh.
The replica was exceptionally coarse and crude, but it served its
purpose — instant recognizability via a history of colonial-era logoization.
'Ah, our Bayon' — but with the memory of French colonial
restorers wholly banished. French-reconstructed Angkor Wat, again
in jigsaw' form, became, as noted in Chapter 9, the central symbol of
the successive flags of Sihanouk's royalist, Lon Nol's militarist, and
Pol Pot's Jacobin regimes.
More striking still is evidence of inheritance at a more popular
level. One revealing example is a series of paintings of episodes in the
national history commissioned by Indonesia's Ministry of Education
in the 1950s. The paintings were to be mass-produced and distributed
throughout the primary-school system; young Indonesians were to
have on the walls of their classrooms - everywhere — visual representations
of their country's past. Most of the backgrounds were done
in the predictable sentimental-naturalist style of early-twentiethcentury
commercial art, and the human figures taken either from
colonial-era museum dioramas or from the popular wayang orang
pseudohistorical folk-drama. The most interesting of the series,
however, offered children a representation of the Borobudur. In
reality, this colossal monument, with its 504 Buddha images, 1,460
pictorial and 1,212 decorative stone panels, is a fantastic storehouse of
ancient Javanese sculpture. But the well-regarded artist imagines the
35. See Kambuja, 45 (15 December 1968), for some curious photographs.
183
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
marvel in its ninth century A.D. heyday with instructive perversity.
The Borobudur is painted completely white, with not a trace of
sculpture visible. Surrounded by well-trimmed lawns and tidy tree-
36
lined avenues, not a single human being is in sight. One might argue
that this emptiness reflects the unease of a contemporary Muslim
painter in the face of an ancient Buddhist reality. But I suspect that
what we are really seeing is an unselfconscious lineal descendant of
colonial archaeology: the Borobudur as state regalia, and as 'of course,
that's it' logo. A Borobudur all the more powerful as a sign for
national identity because of everyone's awareness of its location in an
infinite series of identical Borobudurs.
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 totalizing 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 comic classificatory
and sub classificatory census boxes entitled 'Other' concealed all reallife
anomalies by a splendid bureaucratic trompe I'oeil). The 'weft' was
what one could call serialization: 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 before the appearance of any
nationalists.
No one has found a better metaphor for this frame of mind than the
great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who entitled the
final volume of his tetralogy on the colonial period Rumah Kaca - the
Glass House. It is an image, as powerful as Bentham's Panopticon, of
total surveyability. For the colonial state did not merely aspire to create,
36. The discussion here draws on material analysed more fully in Language and
Power, chapter 5.
184
CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM
under its control, a human landscape of perfect visibility; the condition
of this Visibility' was that everyone, everything, had (as it were) a serial
37
number. This style of imagining did not come out of thin air. It was
the product of the technologies of navigation, astronomy, horology,
surveying, photography and print, to say nothing of the deep driving
power of capitalism.
Map and census thus shaped the grammar which would in due course
make possible 'Burma' and 'Burmese,' 'Indonesia' and 'Indonesians.'
But the concretization of these possibilities - concretizations 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. Archaeology was an unimaginable enterprise in precolonial
Southeast Asia; it was adopted in uncolonized Siam late in the game, and
after the colonial state's manner. It created the series 'ancient monuments,'
segmented within the classificatory, geographic-demographic
box 'Netherlands Indies,' and 'British Burma.' Conceived within this
profane series, each ruin became available for surveillance and infinite
replication. As the colonial state's archaeological service made it
technically possible to assemble the series in mapped and photographed
form, the state itself could regard the series, up historical time, as an
album of its ancestors. The key thing was never the specific Borobudur,
nor the specific Pagan, in which the state had no substantial interest and
with which it had only archaeological connections. The replicable series,
however, created a historical depth of field which was easily inherited by
the state's postcolonial successor. The final logical outcome was the logo
- of'Pagan' or 'The Philippines,' it made little difference - which by its
emptiness, contextlessness, visual memorableness, and infinite reproducibility
in every direction brought census and map, warp and woof, into
an inerasable embrace.
37. An exemplary policy-outcome of Glass House imaginings - an outcome of
which ex-political prisoner Pramoedya is painfully aware - is the classificatory ID card
that all adult Indonesians must now carry at all times. This ID is isomorphic with the
census - it represents a sort of political census, with special punchings for those in the
sub-series 'subversives' and 'traitors.' It is notable that this style of census was only
perfected after the achievement of national independence.
185
Memory and Forgetting
SPACE NEW AND OLD
New York, Nueva Leon, Nouvelle Orleans, Nova Lisboa, Nieuw
Amsterdam. Already in the sixteenth century Europeans had begun the
strange habit of naming remote places, first in the Americas and Africa,
later in Asia, Australia, and Oceania, as 'new' versions of (thereby) 'old'
toponyms in their lands of origin. Moreover, they retained the tradition
even when such places passed to different imperial masters, so the
Nouvelle Orleans calmly became New Orleans, and Nieuw Zeeland
New Zealand.
It was not that, in general, the naming of political or religious sites as
'new' was in itself so new. In Southeast Asia, for example, one finds
towns of reasonable antiquity whose names also include a term for
novelty: Chiangmai (New City), Kota Bahru (New Town), Pekanbaru
(New Market). But in these names 'new' invariably has the meaning of
'successor' to, or 'inheritor' of, something vanished. 'New' and 'old' are
aligned diachronically, and the former appears always to invoke an
ambiguous blessing from the dead. What is startling in the American
namings of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is that 'new' and 'old'
were understood synchronically, coexisting within homogeneous,
empty time. Vizcaya is there alongside Nueva Vizcaya, New London
alongside London: an idiom of sibling competition rather than of
inheritance.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
This new synchronic novelty 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 - if
never meeting, yet certainly proceeding along the same trajectory.
Between 1500 and 1800 an accumulation of technological innovations
in the fields of shipbuilding, navigation, horology and cartography,
mediated through print-capitalism, was making this type of imagining
possible. It became conceivable to dwell on the Peruvian altiplano, on
the pampas of Argentina, or by the harbours of'New' England, and yet
feel connected to certain regions or communities, thousands of miles
away, in England or the Iberian peninsula. One could be fully aware of
sharing a language and a religious faith (to varying degrees), customs
and traditions, without any great expectation of ever meeting one's
2
partners.
For this sense of parallelism or simultaneity not merely to arise, but
also to have vast political consequences, it was necessary that the
distance between the parallel groups be large, and that the newer of
them be substantial in size and permanently settled, as well as firmly
subordinated to the older. These conditions were met in the
Americas as they had never been before. In the first place, the vast
expanse of the Atlantic Ocean and the utterly different geographical
conditions existing on each side of it, made impossible the sort of
gradual absorption of populations into larger politico-cultural units
that transformed Las Espanas into Espana and submerged Scotland
into the United Kingdom. Secondly, as noted in Chapter 4, European
migration to the Americas took place on an astonishing scale.
1. The accumulation reached a frantic zenith in the 'international' (i.e., European)
search for an accurate measure of longitude, amusingly recounted in Landes, Revolution
in Time, chapter 9. In 1776, as the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence, the
Gentleman's Magazine included this brief obituary for John Harrison: 'He was a most
ingenious mechanic, and received the 20,000 pounds reward [from Westminster] for
the discovery of the longitude [sic].'
2. The late spreading of this consciousness to Asia is deftly alluded to in the
opening pages of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's great historical novel Bumi Manusia [Earth
of Mankind]. The young nationalist hero muses that he was born on the same date as the
future Queen Wilhelmina - 31 August 1880. 'But while my island was wrapped in the
darkness of night, her country was bathed in sun; and if her country was embraced by
night's blackness, my island glittered in the equatorial noon.' p. 4.
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MEMORY A N D FORGETTING
By the end of the eighteenth century there were no less than
3,200,000 'whites' (including no more than 150,000 peninsulares)
within the 16,900,000 population of the Western empire of the
Spanish Bourbons. The sheer size of this immigrant community, no
less than its overwhelming military, economic and technological
power vis-a-vis the indigenous populations, ensured that it maintained
its own cultural coherence and local political ascendancy.
Thirdly, the imperial metropole disposed of formidable bureaucratic
and ideological apparatuses, which permitted them for many centuries
to impose their will on the Creoles. (When one thinks of the sheer
logistical problems involved, the ability of London and Madrid to
carry on long counter-revolutionary wars against rebel American
colonists is quite impressive.)
The novelty of all these conditions is suggested by the contrast
they afford with the great (and roughly contemporaneous) Chinese
and Arab migrations into Southeast Asia and East Africa. These
migrations were rarely 'planned' by any metropole, and even more
rarely produced stable relations of subordination. In the Chinese
case, the only dim parallel is the extraordinary series of voyages far
across the Indian ocean which were led, early in the fifteenth
century, by the brilliant eunuch admiral Cheng-ho. These daring
enterprises, carried out at the orders of the Yung-lo Emperor, were
intended to enforce a court monopoly of external trade with
3. Needless to say, 'whiteness' was a legal category which had a distinctly
tangential relationship to complex social realities. As the Liberator himself put it, ' We
are the vile offspring of the predatory Spaniards who came to America to bleed her
white and to breed with their victims. Later the illegitimate offspring of these unions
joined with the offspring of slaves transported from Africa.' Italics added. Lynch, The
Spanish-American Revolutions, p. 249. One should beware of assuming anything
'eternally European' in this criollismo. Remembering all those devoutly BuddhistSinghalese
Da Souzas, those piously Catholic-Florinese Da Silvas, and those cynically
Catholic-Manileno Sorianos who play unproblematic social, economic, and political
roles in contemporary Ceylon, Indonesia, and the Philippines, helps one to recognize
that, under the right circumstances, Europeans could be gently absorbed into nonEuropean
cultures.
4. Compare the fate of the huge African immigrant population. The brutal
mechanisms of slavery ensured not merely its political-cultural fragmentation, but also
very rapidly removed the possibility of imagining black communities in Venezuela and
West Africa moving in parallel trajectory.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Southeast Asia and the regions further west, against the depredations
of private Chinese merchants.5
By mid-century the failure of the
policy was clear; whereupon the Ming abandoned overseas adventures
and did everything they could to prevent emigration from the
Middle Kingdom. The fall of southern China to the Manchus in
1645 produced a substantial wave of refugees into Southeast Asia for
whom any political ties with the new dynasty were unthinkable.
Subsequent Ch'ing policy did not differ substantially from that of the
later Ming. In 1712, for example, an edict of the K'ang-hsi Emperor
prohibited all trade with Southeast Asia and declared that his
government would 'request foreign governments to have those
Chinese who have been abroad repatriated so that they may be
executed.'6
The last great wave of overseas migration took place in
the nineteenth century as the dynasty disintegrated and a huge
demand for unskilled Chinese labour opened up in colonial Southeast
Asia and Siam. Since virtually all migrants were politically cut off
from Peking, and were also illiterate people speaking mutually
unintelligible languages, they were either more or less absorbed
into local cultures or were decisively subordinated to the advancing
Europeans.7
As for the Arabs, most of their migrations originated from the
Hadramaut, never a real metropole in the era of the Ottoman and
Mughal empires. Enterprising individuals might find ways to establish
local principalities, such as the merchant who founded the kingdom
of Pontianak in western Borneo in 1772; but he married locally,
soon lost his 'Arabness' if not his Islam, and remained subordinated
to the rising Dutch and English empires in Southeast Asia, not to any
power in the Near East. In 1832 Sayyid Sa'id, lord of Muscat,
established a powerful base on the East African coast and settled on
the island of Zanzibar, which he made the centre of a flourishing
clove-growing economy. But the British used military means to
5. See O.W. Wolters, The Fall of Srivijaya in Malay History, Appendix C.
6. Cited in G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand, pp. 15-16.
7. Overseas Chinese communities loomed large enough to stimulate deep European
paranoia up to the mid eighteenth century, when vicious anti-Chinese pogroms
by Westerners finally ceased. Thereafter, this unlovely tradition was passed on to
indigenous populations.
190
MEMORY A N D FORGETTING
8
compel him to sever his ties with Muscat. Thus neither Arabs nor
Chinese, though they ventured overseas in very large numbers
during more or less the same centuries as the Western Europeans,
successfully established coherent, wealthy, selfconsciously Creole
communities subordinated to a great metropolitan core. Hence,
the world never saw the rise of New Basras or New Wuhans.
The doubleness of the Americas and the reasons for it, sketched
out above, help to explain why nationalism emerged first in the New
World, not the Old.9
They also illuminate two peculiar features of
the revolutionary wars that raged in the New World between 1776
and 1825. On the one hand, none of the Creole revolutionaries
dreamed of keeping the empire intact but rearranging its internal
distribution of power, reversing the previous relationship of subjectionio
by transferring the metropole from a European 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. (How new this style of thought was can be
inferred from the history of earlier empires in decline, where there
was often a dream of replacing the old centre.) On the other hand,
although these wars caused a great deal of suffering and were marked
by much barbarity, in an odd way the stakes were rather low. Neither
in North nor in South America did the Creoles have to fear physical
extermination or reduction to servitude, as did so many other peoples
who got in the way of the juggernaut of European imperialism. They
were after all 'whites,' Christians, and Spanish- or English-speakers;
they were also the intermediaries necessary to the metropoles if the
economic wealth of the Western empires was to continue under
Europe's control. Hence, they were the one significant extra-
8. See Marshall G. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam; Vol. 3, pp. 233-5.
9. 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.
10. But note the ironic case of Brazil. In 1808, Kingjoao VI fled to Rio de Janeiro
to escape Napoleon's armies. Though Wellington had expelled the French by 1811, the
emigrant monarch, fearing republican unrest at home, stayed on in South America until
1822, so that between 1808 and 1822 Rio was the centre of a world empire stretching to
Angola, Mozambique, Macao, and East Timor. But this empire was ruled by a
European, not an American.
191
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
European group, subjected to Europe, that at the same time had no
need to be desperately afraid of Europe. The revolutionary wars,
bitter as they were, were still reassuring in that they were wars
between kinsmen. This family link ensured that, after a certain
period of acrimony had passed, close cultural, and sometimes political
and economic, ties could be reknit between the former metropoles
and the new nations.
TIME N E W AND OLD
If for the Creoles of the New World the strange toponyms discussed
above represented figuratively their emerging capacity to imagine
themselves as communities parallel and comparable to those in Europe,
extraordinary events in the last quarter of the eighteenth century gave
this novelty, quite suddenly, a completely new meaning. The first of
these events was certainly the Declaration of (the Thirteen Colonies')
Independence in 1776, and the successful military defence of that
declaration in the years following. This independence, and the fact
that it was a republican independence, was felt to be something
absolutely unprecedented, yet at the same time, once in existence,
absolutely reasonable. Hence, when history made it possible, in 1811,
for Venezuelan revolutionaries to draw up a constitution for the First
Venezuelan Republic, they saw nothing slavish in borrowing verba-
12
tim from the Constitution of the United States of America. For
what the men in Philadelphia had written was in the Venezuelans'
eyes not something North American, but rather something of
universal truth and value. Shortly thereafter, in 1789, the explosion
in the New World was paralleled in the Old by the volcanic outbreak13
of the French Revolution.
11. Doubtless this was what permitted the Liberator to exclaim at one point that a
Negro, i.e. slave, revolt would be 'a thousand times worse than a Spanish invasion.' (See
above, p. 49). A slave jacquerie, if successful, might mean the physical extermination of
the Creoles.
12. See Masur, Bolivar, p. 131.
13. The French Revolution was in turn paralleled in the New World by the
outbreak of Toussaint L'Ouverture's insurrection in 1791, which by 1806 had resulted
192
MEMORY A N D FORGETTING
It is difficult today to recreate in the imagination a condition of life in
which the nation was felt to be something utterly new. But so it was in
that epoch. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 makes absolutely
no reference to Christopher Columbus, Roanoke, or the Pilgrim
Fathers, nor are the grounds put forward to justify independence in
any way 'historical,' in the sense of highlighting the antiquity of the
American people. Indeed, marvellously, the American nation is not
even mentioned. A profound feeling that a radical break with the past
was occurring — a 'blasting open of the continuum of history'? — spread
rapidly. Nothing exemplifies this intuition better than the decision,
taken by the Convention Nationale on 5 October 1793, to scrap the
centuries-old Christian calendar and to inaugurate a new world-era
with the Year One, starting from the abolition of the ancien regime and
the proclamation of the Republic on 22 September 1792.14
(No
subsequent revolution has had quite this sublime confidence of novelty,
not least because the French Revolution has always been seen as an
ancestor.)
Out of this profound sense of newness came also nuestra santa
revolution, the beautiful neologism created by Jose Maria Morelos y
Pavon (proclaimer in 1813 of the Republic of Mexico), not long before
his execution by the Spaniards.15
Out of it too came San Martin's 1821
decree that 6
in the future the aborigines shall not be called Indians or
natives; they are children and citizens of Peru and they shall be known as
• 16 i
Peruvians.' This sentence does for 'Indians' and/or 'natives' what the
Convention in Paris had done for the Christian calendar - it abolished
the old time-dishonoured naming and inaugurated a completely new
epoch. 'Peruvians' and 'Year One' thus mark rhetorically a profound
rupture with the existing world.
in Haiti's former slaves creating the second independent republic of the Western
hemisphere.
14. The young Wordsworth was in France in 1791-1792, and later, in The Prelude,
wrote these famous reminiscent lines:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Italics added.
15. Lynch, The Spanish-American Revolutions, pp. 314-15.
16. As cited above in chapter 4.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Yet things could not long remain this way — for precisely the same
reasons that had precipitated the sense of rupture in the first place. In
the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Britain alone was manufacturing
between 150,000 and 200,000 watches a year, many of
them for export. Total European manufacture is likely to have then
17
been close to 500,000 items annually. Serially published newspapers
were by then a familiar part of urban civilization. So was the novel,
with its spectacular possibilities for the representation of simultaneous
actions in homogeneous empty time.18
The cosmic clocking which
had made intelligible our synchronic transoceanic pairings was increasingly
felt to entail a wholly intramundane, serial view of social
causality; and this sense of the world was now speedily deepening its
grip on Western imaginations. It is thus understandable that less than
two decades after the Proclamation of Year One came the establishment
of the first academic chairs in History — in 1810 at the
University of Berlin, and in 1812 at Napoleon's Sorbonne. By the
second quarter of the nineteenth century History had become
formally constituted as a 'discipline,' with its own elaborate array
of professional journals.19
Very quickly the Year One made way for
1792 A.D., and the revolutionary ruptures of 1776 and 1789 came to
be figured as embedded in the historical series and thus as historical
precedents and models.20
Hence, for the members of what we might call 'secondgeneration'
nationalist movements, those which developed in Europe
17. Landes, Revolution in Time, pp. 230-31, 442-43.
18. See above, Chapter 2.
19. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe, pp. 135-43, for a sophisticated discussion of this transformation.
20. But it was an A.D. with a difference. Before the rupture it still retained,
however fragilely in enlightened quarters, a theological aura glowing from within its
medieval Latin. Anno Domini recalled that irruption of eternity into mundane time
which took place in Bethlehem. After the rupture, reduced mono grammatically to
A.D., it joined an (English) vernacular B.C., Before Christ, that encompassed a serial
cosmological history (to which the new science of geology was making signal
contributions). We may judge how deep an abyss yawned between Anno Domini
and A.D./B.C. by noting that neither the Buddhist nor the Islamic world, even today,
imagines any epoch marked as 'Before the Gautama Buddha' or 'Before the Hegira.'
Both make uneasy do with the alien monogram B.C.
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MEMORY A N D FORGETTING
between about 1815 to 1850, and also for the generation that
inherited the independent national states of the Americas, it was
no longer possible to 'recapture/The first fine careless rapture' of
their revolutionary predecessors. For different reasons and with
different consequences, the two groups thus began the process of
reading nationalism genealogically - as the expression of an historical
tradition of serial continuity.
In Europe, the new nationalisms almost immediately began to
imagine themselves as 'awakening from sleep,' a trope wholly foreign
to the Americas. Already in 1803 (as we have seen in Chapter 5) the
young Greek nationalist Adamantios Koraes was telling a sympathetic
Parisian audience: 4
For the first time the [Greek] nation surveys the
hideous spectacle of its ignorance and trembles in measuring with the eye
the distance separating it from its ancestors' glory.' Here is perfectly
exemplified the transition from New Time to Old. Tor the first time'
still echoes the ruptures of 1776 and 1789, but Koraes's sweet eyes are
turned, not ahead to San Martin's future, but back, in trembling, to
ancestral glories. It would not take long for this exhilarating doubleness
to fade, replaced by a modular, 'continuous' awakening from a
chronologically gauged, A.D.-style slumber: a guaranteed return to
an aboriginal essence.
Undoubtedly, many different elements contributed to the astonishing
21
popularity of this trope. For present purposes, I would mention only
two. In the first place, the trope took into account the sense of
parallelism out of which the American nationalisms had been born
and which the success of the American nationalist revolutions had
greatly reinforced in Europe. It seemed to explain why nationalist
movements had bizarrely cropped up in the civilized Old World so
obviously later than in the barbarous New. Read as late awakening, even
if an awakening stimulated from afar, it opened up an immense antiquity
21. As late as 1951, the intelligent Indonesian socialist Lintong Mulia Sitorus
could still write that: 'Till the end of the nineteenth century, the coloured peoples
still slept soundly, while the whites were busily at work in every field.' Sedjarah
Pergerakan Kebangsaan Indonesia [History of the Indonesian Nationalist Movement], p.
5.
22. One could perhaps say that these revolutions were, in European eyes, the first
really important political events that had ever occurred across the Atlantic.
195
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
behind the epochal sleep. In the second place, the trope provided a
crucial metaphorical link between the new European nationalisms and
language. As observed earlier, the major states of nineteenth-century
Europe were vast polyglot polities, of which the boundaries almost
never coincided with language-communities. Most of their literate
members had inherited from mediaeval times the habit of thinking of
certain languages - if no longer Latin, then French, English, Spanish or
German - as languages of civilization. Rich eighteenth-century Dutch
burghers were proud to speak only French at home; German was the
language of cultivation in much of the western Czarist empire, no less
than in 'Czech' Bohemia. Until late in the eighteenth century no one
thought of these languages as belonging to any territorially defined
group. But soon thereafter, for reasons sketched out in Chapter 3,
'uncivilized' vernaculars began to function politically in the same way as
the Atlantic Ocean had earlier done: i.e. to 'separate' subjected national
communities off from ancient dynastic realms. And since in the
vanguard of most European popular nationalist movements were literate
people often unaccustomed to using these vernaculars, this anomaly
needed explanation. None seemed better than 'sleep,' for it permitted
those intelligentsias and bourgeoisies who were becoming conscious of
themselves as Czechs, Hungarians, or Finns to figure their study of
Czech, Magyar, or Finnish languages, folklores, and musics as 'rediscovering'
something deep-down always known. (Furthermore, once
one starts thinking about nationality in terms of continuity, few things
seem as historically deep-rooted as languages, for which no dated origins
• \23can ever be given.)
In the Americas the problem was differently posed. On the one
hand, national independence had almost everywhere been internationally
acknowledged by the 1830s. It had thus become an inheritance,
and, as an inheritance, it was compelled to enter a
genealogical series. Yet the developing European instrumentalities
were not readily available. Language had never been an issue in the
23. Still, historical depth is not infinite. At some point English vanishes into
Norman French and Anglo-Saxon; French into Latin and 'German' Frankish; and so
on. We shall see below how additional depth of field came to be achieved.
196
MEMORY A N D FORGETTING
American nationalist movements. As we have seen, it was precisely
the sharing with the metropole of a common language (and common
religion and common culture) that had made the first national
imaginings possible. To be sure, there are some interesting cases
where one detects a sort of 'European' thinking early at work. For
example, Noah Webster's 1828 (i.e., 'second-generation') American
Dictionary of the English Language was intended to give an official
imprimatur to an American language whose lineage was distinct from
that of English. In Paraguay, the eighteenth-century Jesuit tradition of
using Guarani made it possible for a radically non-Spanish 'native'
language to become a national language, under the long, xenophobic
dictatorship of Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia (1814—1840). But,
on the whole, any attempt to give historical depth to nationality via
linguistic means faced insuperable obstacles. Virtually all the Creoles
were institutionally committed (via schools, print media, administrative
habits, and so on) to European rather than indigenous
American tongues. Any excessive emphasis on linguistic lineages
threatened to blur precisely that 'memory of independence' which
it was essential to retain.
The solution, eventually applicable in both New and Old Worlds,
was found in History, or rather History emplotted in particular ways.
We have observed the speed with which Chairs in History succeeded
the Year One. As Hayden White remarks, it is no less striking that
the five presiding geniuses of European historiography were all born
within the quarter century following the Convention's rupturing of
time: Ranke in 1795, Michelet in 1798, Tocqueville in 1805, and
24
Marx and Burckhardt in 1818. Of the five. it is perhaps natural that
Michelet, self-appointed historian of the Revolution, most clearly
exemplifies the national imagining being born, for he was the first25
selfconsciously to write on behalf of the dead. The following passage
is characteristic:
24. Metahistory, p. 140. Hegel, born in 1770, was already in his late teens when the
Revolution broke out, but his Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte were only
published in 1837, six years after his death.
25. White, Metahistory, p. 159.
19 7
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
Oui, chaque mort laisse un petit bien, sa memoire, et demande qu'on
la soigne. Pour celui qui n'a pas d'amis, il faut que le magistrat y
supplee. Car la loi, la justice, est plus sure que toutes nos tendresses
oublieuses, nos larmes si vite sechees. Cette magistrature, c'est
l'Histoire. Et les morts sont, pour dire comme le Droit romain,
ces miserabiles personae dont le magistrat doit se preoccuper. Jamais
dans ma carriere je n'ai pas perdu de vue ce devoir de l'historien. J'ai
donne a beaucoup de morts trop oublies l'assistance dont moi-meme
j'aurai besoin. Je les ai exhumes pour une seconde vie . . . lis vivent
maintenant avec nous qui nous sen tons leurs parents, leurs amis. Ainsi
s 2 6
se fait une famille, une cite commune entre les vivants et les morts.
Here and elsewhere Michelet made it clear that those whom he was
exhuming were by no means a random assemblage of forgotten,
anonymous dead. They were those whose sacrifices, throughout History,
made possible the rupture of 1789 and the selfconscious appearance
of the French nation, even when these sacrifices were not understood as
such by the victims. In 1842, he noted of these dead: 'II leur faut un
Oedipe qui leur explique leur propre enigme dont ils n'ont pas eu le
sens, qui leur apprenne ce que voulaient dire leurs paroles, leurs actes,
j • • 27
qu'ils n'ont pas compris.'
This formulation is probably unprecedented. Michelet not only
claimed to speak on behalf of large numbers of anonymous dead
people, but insisted, with poignant authority, that he could say what
they 'really' meant and 'really' wanted, since they themselves 'did not
understand.' From then on, the silence of the dead was no obstacle to
the exhumation of their deepest desires.
In this vein, more and more 'second-generation' nationalists, in the
Americas and elsewhere, learned to speak 'for' dead people with
whom it was impossible or undesirable to establish a linguistic
connection. This reversed ventriloquism helped to open the way
for a selfconscious indigenismo, especially in the southern Americas. At
26. Jules Michelet, Oeuvres Completes, XXI, p. 268, in the preface to volume 2
('Jusqu'au 18e Brumaire') of his uncompleted Histoire du XIXe Siecle. I owe the reference
to Metahistory, but the translation White uses is unsatisfactory.
27. Cited in Roland Barthes, ed., Michelet par lui-meme, p. 92. The volume of the
Oeuvres Completes containing this quotation has not yet been published.
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MEMORY A N D FORGETTING
the edge: Mexicans speaking in Spanish 'for' pre-Columbian 'Indian'
28
civilizations whose languages they do not understand. How revolutionary
this kind of exhumation was appears most clearly if we
contrast it with the formulation of Fermin de Vargas, cited in chapter
2. For where Fermin still thought cheerfully of 'extinguishing' living
Indians, many of his political grandchildren became obsessed with
'remembering,' indeed 'speaking for' them, perhaps precisely because
they had, by then, so often been extinguished.
THE REASSURANCE OF F R A T R I C I D E
It is striking that in Michelet's 'second generation' formulations the
focus of attention is always the exhumation of people and events which
29 c
stand in danger of oblivion. He sees no need to think about 'forgetting.'
But when, in 1882 - more than a century after the Declaration
of Independence in Philadelphia, and eight years after the death of
Michelet himself - Renan published his Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?, it was
precisely the need for forgetting that preoccupied him. Reconsider, for30
example, the formulation cited earlier in chapter \:
Or, l'essence d'une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup
de choses en commun et aussi que tous aient oublie bien des choses.
. . . Tout citoyen frangais doit avoir oublie la Saint-Barthelemy, les
massacres du Midi au XHIe siecle.
28. Conversely, in all Mexico there is only one statue of Hernan Cortes. This
monument, tucked discreetly away in a niche of Mexico City, was only put up at the
end of the 1970s, by the odious regime of Jose Lopez Portillo.
29. Doutbless because for much of his life he suffered under restored or ersatz
legitimacies. His commitment to 1789 and to France is movingly shown by his
refusal to swear an oath of loyalty to Louis Napoleon. Abruptly dismissed from his
post as National Archivist, he lived in near-poverty till his death in 1874 — long
enough, however, to witness the mountebank's fall and the restoration of republican
institutions.
30. Renan was born in 1823, a quarter of a century after Michelet, and passed
much of his youth under the cynically official-nationalist regime of Michelet's
persecutor.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
31
At first sight these two sentences may seem straightforward. Yet a few
moments reflection reveals how bizarre they actually are. One notices,
for example, that Renan saw no reason to explain for his readers what
either Ta Saint-Barthelemy' or 'les massacres du Midi au XHIe siecle'
meant. Yet who but 'Frenchmen,' as it were, would have at once
understood that 'la Saint-Barthelemy' referred to the ferocious antiHuguenot
pogrom launched on 24 August 1572 by the Valois dynast
Charles IX and his Florentine mother; or that 'les massacres du Midi'
alluded to the extermination of the Albigensians across the broad zone
between the Pyrenees and the Southern Alps, instigated by Innocent III,
one of the guiltier in a long line of guilty popes? Nor did Renan find
anything queer about assuming 'memories' in his readers' minds even
though the events themselves occurred 300 and 600 years previously.
One is also struck by the peremptory syntax of doit avoir oublie (not doit
oublier) - 'obliged already to have forgotten' - which suggests, in the
ominous tone of revenue-codes and military conscription laws, that
'already having forgotten' ancient tragedies is a prime contemporary
civic duty. In effect, Renan's readers were being told to 'have already
forgotten' what Renan's own words assumed that they naturally
remembered!
How are we to make sense of this paradox? We may start by
observing that the singular French noun 'la Saint-Barthelemy' occludes
killers and killed - i.e., those Catholics and Protestants who played
one local part in the vast unholy Holy War that raged across central
and northern Europe in the sixteenth century, and who certainly did
not think of themselves cosily together as 'Frenchmen.' Similarly,
'thirteenth-century massacres of the Midi' blurs unnamed victims and
assassins behind the pure Frenchness of'Midi.' No need to remind his
readers that most of the murdered Albigensians spoke Provencal or
Catalan, and that their murderers came from many parts of Western
Europe. The effect of this tropology is to figure episodes in the
colossal religious conflicts of mediaeval and early modern Europe as
reassuringly fratricidal wars between - who else? — fellow Frenchmen.
Since we can be confident that, left to themselves, the overwhelming
majority of Renan's French contemporaries would never have heard
31. I understood them so in 1983, alas.
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MEMORY AND FORGETTING
of 'la Saint-Barthelemy' or 'les massacres du Midi,' we become aware
of a systematic historiographical campaign, deployed by the state
mainly through the state's school system, to 'remind' every young
Frenchwoman and Frenchman of a series of antique slaughters which
are now inscribed as 'family history.' Having to 'have already
forgotten' tragedies of which one needs unceasingly to be 'reminded'
turns out to be a characteristic device in the later construction of
national genealogies. (It is instructive that Renan does not say that
each French citizen is obliged to 'have already forgotten' the Paris
Commune. In 1882 its memory was still real rather than mythic, and
sufficiently painful to make it difficult to read under the sign of
'reassuring fratricide.')
Needless to say, in all this there was, and is, nothing especially
French. A vast pedagogical industry works ceaselessly to oblige young
Americans to remember/forget the hostilities of 1861-65 as a great
'civil' war between 'brothers' rather than between - as they briefly
were — two sovereign nation-states. (We can be sure, however, that if
the Confederacy had succeeded in maintaining its independence, this
'civil war' would have been replaced in memory by something quite
unbrotherly.) 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, indeed could not have done so, since the English
language did not exist in his epoch; nor is he or she told 'Conqueror
of what?'. For the only intelligible modern answer would have to be
'Conqueror of the English,' which would turn the old Norman
predator into a more successful precursor of Napoleon and Hitler.
Hence 'the Conqueror' operates as the same kind of ellipsis as 'la
Saint-Barthelemy,' to remind one of something which it is immediately
obligatory to forget. Norman William and Saxon Harold thus
meet on the battlefield of Hastings, if not as dancing partners, at least
as brothers.
But it is surely too easy to attribute these reassuring ancient
fratricides simply to the icy calculations of state functionaries. At
another level they reflect a deep reshaping of the imagination of
which the state was barely conscious, and over which it had, and still
has, only exiguous control. In the 1930s people of many nationalities
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went to fight in the Iberian peninsula because they viewed it as the
arena in which global historical forces and causes were at stake. When
the long-lived Franco regime constructed the Valley of the Fallen, it
restricted membership in the gloomy necropolis to those who, in its
eyes, had died in the world-struggle against Bolshevism and atheism.
But, at the state's margins, a 'memory' was already emerging of a
'Spanish' Civil War. Only after the crafty tyrant's death, and the
subsequent, startlingly smooth transition to bourgeois democracy - in
which it played a crucial role — did this 'memory' become official. In
much the same way, the colossal class war that, from 1918 to 1920,
raged between the Pamirs and the Vistula came to be remembered/
forgotten in Soviet film and fiction as 'our' civil war, while the Soviet
state, on the whole, held to an orthodox Marxist reading of the
struggle.
In this regard the Creole nationalisms of the Americas are especially
instructive. For on the one hand, the American states were for many
decades weak, effectively decentralized, and rather modest in their
educational ambitions. On the other hand, the American societies, in
which 'white' settlers were counterposed to 'black' slaves and halfexterminated
'natives,' were internally riven to a degree quite unmatched
in Europe. Yet the imagining of that fraternity, without which
the reassurance of fratricide can not be born, shows up remarkably early,
and not without a curious authentic popularity. In the United States of
America this paradox is particularly well exemplified.
In 1840, in the midst of a brutal eight-year war against the Seminoles
of Florida (and as Michelet was summoning his Oedipus), James
Fenimore Cooper published The Pathfinder, the fourth of his five,
hugely popular, Leatherstoeking Tales. Central to this novel (and to
all but the first of its companions) is what Leslie Fiedler called the
'austere, almost inarticulate, but unquestioned love' binding the 'white'
woodsman Natty Bumppo and the noble Delaware chieftain
32
Chingachgook ('Chicago'!). Yet the Renanesque setting for their
32. See his Love and Death in the American Novel, p. 192. Fiedler read this
relationship psychologically, and ahistorically, as an instance of American fiction's
failure to deal with adult heterosexual love and its obsession with death, incest, and
innocent homoeroticism. Rather than a national eroticism, it is, I suspect, an
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bloodbrotherhood is not the murderous 1830s but the last forgotten/
remembered years of British imperial rule. Both men are figured as
'Americans,' fighting for survival - against the French, their 'native'
allies (the 'devilish Mingos'), and treacherous agents of George III.
When, in 1851, Herman Melville depicted Ishmael and Queequeg
cosily in bed together at the Spouter Inn ('there, then, in our hearts'
honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg'), the noble Polynesian savage was
33sardonically Americanized as follows:
. . . . certain it was that his head was phrenologically an excellent
one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of George
Washington's head, as seen in popular busts of him. It had the same
long regularly graded retreating slope above the brows, which were
likewise very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded
on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically devel-
oped.
It remained for Mark Twain to create in 1881, well after the 'Civil War'
and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, the first indelible image of
black and white as American 'brothers': Jim and Huck companionably
adrift on the wide Mississippi.34
But the setting is a remembered/
forgotten antebellum in which the black is still a slave.
These striking nineteenth-century imaginings of fraternity, emerging
'naturally' in a society fractured by the most violent racial, class
and regional antagonisms, show as clearly as anything else that
nationalism in the age of Michelet and Renan represented a new
form of consciousness — a consciousness that arose when it was no
longer possible to experience the nation as new, at the wave-top
moment of rupture.
eroticized nationalism that is at work. Male-male bondings in a Protestant society
which from the start rigidly prohibited miscegenation are paralleled by male-female
'holy loves' in the nationalist fiction of Latin America, where Catholicism permitted
the growth of a large mestizo population. (It is telling that English has had to borrow
'mestizo' from Spanish.)
33. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, p. 71. How the author must have savoured the
malignant final phrase!
34. It is agreeable to note that the publication of Huckleberry Finn preceded by only
a few months Renan's evocation of 'la Saint-Barthelemy.'
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
T H E B I O G R A P H Y O F N A T I O N S
All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with
them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical
circumstances, spring narratives. After experiencing the physiological
and emotional changes produced by puberty, it is impossible to
'remember' the consciousness of childhood. How many thousands
of days passed between infancy and early adulthood vanish beyond
direct recall! How strange it is to need another's help to learn that this
naked baby in the yellowed photograph, sprawled happily on rug or cot,
is you. The photograph, fine child of the age of mechanical reproduction,
is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of
documentary evidence (birth certificates, diaries, report cards, letters,
medical records, and the like) which simultaneously records a certain
apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory . Out of this
estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity (yes, you and
that naked baby are identical) which, because it can not be 'remembered,'
must be narrated. Against biology's demonstration that every
single cell in a human body is replaced over seven years, the narratives of
autobiography and biography flood print-capitalism's markets year by
year.
These narratives, like the novels and newspapers discussed in
Chapter 2, are set in homogeneous, empty time. Hence their
frame is historical and their setting sociological. This is why so
many autobiographies begin with the circumstances of parents and
grandparents, for which the autobiographer can have only circumstantial,
textual evidence; and why the biographer is at pains to
record the calendrical, A.D. dates of two biographical events which
his or her subject can never remember: birth-day and death-day.
Nothing affords a sharper reminder of this narrative's modernity
than the opening of the Gospel according to St. Matthew. For the
Evangelist gives us an austere list of thirty males successively
begetting one another, from the Patriarch Abraham down to Jesus
Christ. (Only once is a woman mentioned, not because she is a
begetter, but because she is a non-Jewish Moabite). No dates are
given for any of Jesus's forebears, let alone sociological, cultural,
physiological or political information about them. This narrative
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style (which also reflects the rupture-in-Bethlehem become memory)
was entirely reasonable to the sainted genealogist because he
did not conceive of Christ as an historical 'personality,' but only as
the true Son of God.
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.' The task is set for Michelet's magistrate. Yet
between narratives of person and nation there is a central difference of
emplotment. In the secular story of the 'person' there is a beginning and
an end. She emerges from parental genes and social circumstances onto a
brief historical stage, there to play a role until her death. After that,
nothing but the penumbra of lingering fame or influence. (Imagine how
strange it would be, today, to end a life of Hitler by observing that on 30
April 1945 he proceeded straight to Hell). Nations, however, have no
clearly identifiable births, and their deaths, if they ever happen, are
35
never natural. Because there is no Originator, the nation's biography
can not be written evangelically, 'down time,' through a long procreative
chain of begettings. The only alternative is to fashion it 'up
time' - towards Peking Man, Java Man, King Arthur, wherever the
lamp of archaeology casts its fitful gleam. This fashioning, however, is
marked by deaths, which, in a curious inversion of conventional
genealogy, start from an originary present. World War II begets World
War I; out of Sedan comes Austerlitz; the ancestor of the Warsaw
Uprising is the state of Israel.
Yet the deaths that structure the nation's biography are of a special
kind. In all the 1,200 pages of his awesome Mediterranee et le
Monde Mediterraneen a VEpoque de Philippe II Fernand Braudel mentions
Renan's 'la Saint-Barthelemy' only in passing, though it
occurred exactly nel mezzo del camino of the Habsburg dynast's reign.
'Les evenements,' writes the Master (vol. 2, p. 223) 'sont poussiere;
ils traversent l'histoire comme des lueurs breves; a peine naissent-ils
qu'ils retournent deja a la nuit et souvent a l'oubli.' For Braudel, the
deaths that matter are those myriad anonymous events, which,
35. For such apocalypses the neologism 'genocide' was quite recently coined.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
aggregated and averaged into secular mortality rates, permit him to
chart the slow-changing conditions of life for millions of anonymous
human beings of whom the last question asked is their nationality.
From Braudel's remorselessly accumulating cemeteries, however, the
nation's biography snatches, against the going mortality rate, exemplary
suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars, and
holocausts. But, to serve the narrative purpose, these violent deaths must
be remembered/forgotten as 'our own.'
206
Travel and Traffic: On the Geobiography
of Imagined Communities*
Now that almost a quarter of a century has passed since the first publication
of Imagined Communities, it seems possible to sketch out its subsequent
travel-history in the light of some of the book's own central themes: printcapitalism,
piracy in the positive, metaphorical sense, vernacularization,
and nationalism's undivorcible marriage to internationalism.
More generally, studies on the transnational diffusion of books are still
fairly rare, except in the field of literary history where Franco Moretti
has set an extraordinary example. The material for some preliminary
comparative reflections is to hand. By the end of 2007, the book
(henceforward to be referred to as IC) will have been published in
1>
thirty-three countries and in twenty-nine languages. This spread has
much less to do with its qualities than with its original publication in
London, in the English language, which now serves as a kind of globalhegemonic,
post-clerical Latin. (Had IC originally appeared in Tirana,
in Albanian, or in Ho Chi Minh City, in Vietnamese, or even in
Melbourne, in Australian, it is unlikely to have travelled very far). On
* Writing this Afterword would not have been possible without the selfless help
of, above all, my brother Perry, but in addition, Choi Sung-eun, Yana Genova, Pothiti
Hantzaroula, Joel Kuortti, Antonis Liakos, Silva Meznaric, Goran Therborn, and Tony
Wood, to all of whom I would like to express my deepest thanks.
1. Aside from the advantages of brevity, IC restfully occludes a pair of words from
which the vampires of banality have by now sucked almost all the blood.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
the other hand, this proliferation of translations suggests that the force of
vernacularization, which, in alliance with print-capitalism, eventually
destroyed the hegemony of Church Latin and was midwife to the birth
of nationalism, remains strong half a millennium later.
What I propose to do is to recount what I have been able to discover,
thanks to the generous help of many colleagues, comrades, and friends,
about these translations: what publishers were involved, with what
motivations and strategies, and in what political contexts, both domestic
and international. At the end I will try to draw a few tentative conclusions.
But it is necessary to start by saying something about my own
original, assuredly polemical, intentions, since these have affected, often
in unanticipated ways, the reception of the book and its translations.
First of all, for reasons too complicated to get into here, the UK was the
one country in the world, during the 1960s and 1970s, where high-level
work was undertaken, in separate channels, on the nature and origins of
nationalism in a general sense, by four influential Jewish intellectuals —
the conservative historian Elie Kedourie, the Enlightenment-liberal
philosopher and sociologist Ernest Gellner, the then Marxist historian
Eric Hobsbawm, and the traditionalist historian Anthony Smith. But
there was no real public debate until 1977, when the Scottish nationalistcum-Marxist
Tom Nairn published his iconoclastic The Breakup of
2 (
Britain. The Scottish nationalist described the United Kingdom — to
which Gellner, Hobsbawm, and Smith were strongly attached — as the
decrepit relic of a pre-national, pre-republican age and thus doomed to
share the fate of Austro-Hungary. The revisionist Marxist turned his guns
on what he saw as classical Marxism's shallow or evasive treatment of the
historical-political importance of nationalism in the widest sense. In the
debate that followed my sympathies were very much with Nairn.
Hence one important polemical intent behind IC was to support
2. Kedourie came from Baghdad, Gellner from Prague, while Hobsbawm's
mother came from Vienna. Perhaps because of his origins, Kedourie was interested
in the Near East, and beyond. His book on nationalism in Asia and Africa came out in
1970. Gellner's first essay on questions of nationalism was partly a rejoinder to Kedourie.
Hobsbawm's big book on nationalism did not come out until 1990, but he had attacked
Nairn's theses in New Left Review in the autumn of 1977, and played a major role in
making the magisterial comparative work of Miroslav Hroch on Central and East
European nationalist movements known in the Anglo-Saxon world.
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TRAVEL A N D TRAFFIC
('critically,' of course) Nairn's position on both accounts. The traces are
obvious enough in the quite disproportionate amount of space devoted
to the UK, the British Empire, and even Scotland (perhaps because I
had been living and working in the US since 1958): in a plethora of
quotations from and allusions to 'English' literature likely to be opaque
to many readers not educated in the UK; provincial provocations in a
republican spirit (all UK rulers named as if they were next-door
neighbours [Anne Stuart], while foreign rulers were titled in the
traditional manner [Louis XIV]); and some regrettably disobliging
references to Nairn's debate-opponent Eric Hobsbawm.
A second polemical intent was to widen the scope of Nairn's theoretical
criticisms, which were aimed almost exclusively at classical Marxism. It
seemed to me that Marxism's 'failure' to grapple with nationalism in any
deep way was in no way idiosyncratic. Exactly the same criticism could,
and should, be levelled at classical liberalism and, at the margins, classical
conservatism. (This is why IC joked about the implausibility of a Tomb
ofthe Unknown Marxist and of a cenotaph for fallen Liberals). There had to
be a common cause of this general inadequacy, but Marxism (with a
difference) seemed likely to be a better place to look for it than Liberalism.
But framed this way, IC could interest critical Marxists as well as critical
liberals, by suggesting to both that a great deal of really new thinking and
research was needed. So I was not at all downhearted when a generally
favourable reviewer still rather irritably described the book as being too
Marxist for a liberal, and too liberal for a Marxist.
A third polemical intent was to de-Europeanize the theoretical study of
nationalism. This impulse had nothing to do with Nairn, but derived from
long immersion in the societies, cultures, and languages ofthe then utterly
remote Indonesia and Thailand/Siam. Despite the wonderfully broad
stretch ofthe polyglot work of Gellner, Hobsbawm, and Smith, from the
standpoint of Jakarta and Bangkok, they seemed irremediably Eurocentric.
Gellner had indeed done research in the Maghreb, but Edward
Said was probably right in attacking him for ignorance of Arabic - though
• • 3
the general acrimony of their exchange was far from elevating. The
problem was how to sail between the Scylla of nineteenth-century
3. Kedourie surely was familiar with Arabic, but his work does not show it very
prominently. His 1970 book is mainly an anthology of texts by nationalist intellectuals in
Asia and Africa, with an extensive, acerbic introduction of his own.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
European-derived romantic fantasies about umpteen thousand years of
Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, etc. nationhood, and the Charybdis of
Partha Chatteijee's splendidly indignant later indictment of all anticolonial
nationalisms outside Europe as 'derivative discourses.' Facing this quandary,
the multiple national states created in South and Central America over
the period 1810-1838 came to my rescue (even if, in 1983,1 could read
neither Spanish nor Portuguese). The multiplicity was as crucial as the
world-historical early dates. The US and Haitian 'revolutions' preceded
the nationalist movements in Spanish America, and national Brazil
emerged much later, but each of these had the apparent advantage of
idiosyncrasy. (A few days ago, my local newspaper in Bangkok sarcastically
referred to the USA as the Land of the Free[ly Self-Centred]). But Spanish
America was eminently comparable and, just as important, fought over
many bloody years for multiple republican independences, while sharing
language and religion with imperial Spain - long before Magyars, Czechs,
Norwegians, Scots, and Italians got into the act.
Spanish America offered perfect arguments against both national
incomparability and Eurocentrism. It allowed me to think about the
early USA, in the Pan-American context, as just another creole-led
revolutionary state, and furthermore in some respects more reactionary
than its Southern sisters. (Unlike Washington, the Liberator put a stepby-step
end to slavery, and unlike Jefferson, San Martin did not speak of
the original inhabitants of his country as savages, but invited them to
become Peruvians). My impression is that this de-Europeanization did
not in fact leave much impression in Europe itself, but may have made
IC more attractive to readers in the Global South.
A final polemical target was the United States. It was not simply a matter
of hostility to bloody American imperialist interventions in Latin America,
Asia and Africa. Nor was it primarily a reaction to the weird fact that
when Imagined Communities was about to be published there were virtually
no courses taught on nationalism in American universities — let alone on
American nationalism, which was taken as a late nineteenth-century
'Manifest Destiny' aberration. Rather it was the remarkable solipsism, still
highly visible today even in the liberal New York Times, and the 'big
country' bias plain to readers of the New York Review of Books. (Later on, I
found the same provincialism in the other 'big countries' — India, China,
Russia, Indonesia, and Brazil). Karl Deutsch's cynical aphorism 'Power is
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not having to listen,' rang in my ears. Hence IC's polemical strategy of
foregrounding 'small countries' - Hungary, Thailand, Switzerland,
Vietnam, Scotland, and the Philippines.
For the reasons indicated above, as well as others, the original version,
published simultaneously in London and New York, had completely
different receptions in the two countries. In those distant days, the UK
still had a 'quality press,' and IC was almost immediately reviewed by
Edmund Leach, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Neal Ascherson, and the
Jamaican Marxist Winston James. In the US, which has never had a
'quality press,' it was scarcely noticed. The academic journals were no
different. It was only in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, and the rapid rise of identity
politics on the domestic front, that this situation changed.
The first foreign version of IC appeared in Tokyo, in 1987, as Sozo no
kyodotai. The translation was the work of two gifted former students of
mine, Takashi and Saya Shirashi, who believed it could help in the
enduring paedagogical struggle against Japanese insularity, and the
conservative doxa that the country's history and culture made comparisons
with other countries impossible or irrelevant. The translation was
itself novel, in that it kept to the polemical thrust of the London version
rather than to its letter. Many of the original's references to, or quotations
from, English literature, were ingeniously replaced by Japanese 'counterparts.'
For example, the lengthy quotation from Urne-Buriall gave way to
one from The Tale ofHeike. As for the Tokyo publisher, Libroport, which
was a bit left of centre, Takashi recently wrote to me: 'The company's
owner, Tsutsumi, was the son of a tycoon, who rebelled against his father,
and chose a career as a poet and writer, only to find himself inheriting part
of his father's business when the father died. So he told his editors to
publish good books without worrying about profit... This is why the
firm went bankrupt in the 1990s.' But it survived long enough to see
Imagined Communities become a standard textbook for advanced courses
on nationalism in most of Japan's better universities.
During the four years remaining before a revised and substantially enlarged
edition of IC was issued by Verso, translations appeared in German,
Portuguese, and Serbo-Croat. The excellent German version (Die Erfindung
der Nation) was published in 1988 in Frankfurt, with a striking cover featuring
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
the Black Forest's colossal, kitschy Hermannsdenkmai, a nineteenth-century
monument celebrating Arminius, 'Germanic' military tormentor of Roman
emperors Augustus and Tiberius. The independent publisher, Campus
Verlag, founded in 1975, had quickly developed a fine reputation for its
serious books on history and politics. It is likely that one reason that a German
translation appeared so early is that the 'quality' Frankfurter Zeitung kept a close
watch on the book reviews in the 'quality press' of the UK.4
As for the 1989
Portuguese translation (Nagao y consiencia nacionat), it was published not in•
Lisbon, but in Sao Paulo, by Atica. This institution has an unusually
interesting history. According to its current website, it had its origins in
1956, when the Curso de Madureza [Adult Education] Santa Ines was
established at the initiative of a group ofprogressive intellectuals and scholars,
among them Anderson Fernandes Dias, Vasco Fernandes Dias Filho and
Antonio Narvaes Filho. This was a time of great optimism and creativity in
Brazilian political and cultural life—the era ofbossa nova, the Cinema Novo,
and the first Bienniale in Brasilia. By 1962, massive increases in enrolments at
the Curso and the wide intellectual influence of its professors led to the
creation of the Sociedade Editora do Santa Ines. Two years later, close to the
time of the military coup against President Goulart, it was decided, at the
initiative of Anderson Fernandes Dias, to create a professionally managed,
critical publishing house, named after Attica, the cradle of ancient Greek/
civilization. In 1965, Atica published its first books, and somehow managed
to survive two decades of repressive military dictatorship. In 1999, it was
bought jointly by the twin-souled Brazilian conglomerate Editora Abril and
the French conglomerate Vivendi; five years later, after a lengthy struggle,
Abril - original importer ofDisney comics, now publisher ofBrazil's versions
of Time and Playboy — became the majority shareholder. But Atica still seems
to have a certain autonomy.
In the summer of19891 was invited by Ivo Banac ofYale University to
serve as a 'comparativist' commentator for a conference in Dubrovnik on
the subject of nationalism in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. There I
4. In 1998, Campusverlag issued a new edition, which replaced the Hermannsdenkmai
with a lurid print of a popular riot: houses in flames, panicked people,
incendiaries. In 2005, the publisher decided to reissue the book in its 'Classics' series,
with a suitably severe, featureless cover. This edition has a lengthy Nachwort by
Thomas Mergel, part of which is devoted to reflections on the reception of IC, and
includes some alarming material on its afterlife in cyberspace.
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met, and had animated discussions with, Silva Meznaric, who subsequently
was primarily responsible for the Serbo-Croat translation of 1990
(Nacija: Zamisljena zajednica), for which she wrote a special introduction.
Educated at the Law School of Zagreb University, and at the University
of Chicago, she obtained her doctorate in sociology in 1984 at the
University of Ljubljana; she had also been a Woodrow Wilson Center
fellow that same year, where she may have come across IC for the first
time. She recently wrote to me that she then believed that a translation of
the book would be helpful in fighting the rising tide of Croatian and
Serbian jingoism and mythomania - and thus in keeping Yugoslavia
together. Alas, this hope disappeared in the spring ofthe following year.
V
The publisher Skolska knjiga was then a large state-owned publisher of
textbooks. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, it was privatized and quite
recently ,horribile dictu, it bought the largest Serbian textbook publisher.5
Although the enlarged edition of IC was published in 1991, the
following year the Korean publisher Naman put out a pirated translation
(Sang Sang Ui Kongdong Che) based on the original 1983 text. Naman
was established in 1979 by Cho Sangho, who, if not an activist himself,
came from the 'dissident' province of Kwangju, which has produced
many Leftist intellectuals. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Naman
prospered as a publisher ofthe more 'popular' left-leaning social-science
texts; thereafter, following market trends, it shifted to neoliberal and
conservative books. IC seems to have survived the new tide, since the
company issued in 2002 (i.e. ten years later) an unpirated version, based
on the enlarged edition of 1991. (Characteristically, perhaps, the cover
for this version is a colourful photograph of a mass of flag-waving young
people, probably supporters of the astonishingly successful Korean
football team in the World Cup competition held in June 2002).
For many serious writers and publishers, Naman has a reputation for
mass production and rapid output, sometimes-poor editing and clumsy
translation jobs. It is also notorious for not paying many of its authors.6
5. Meznaric went on to found and manage, between 1992 and 1996, the
Humanitarian Expert Group Project on Forced Migration; today she is on the faculty
ofthe University of Ljubljana and serves as Senior Counselor to Zagreb's Institute for
Migration and Ethnicity Research.
6. My thanks to Choi Sung-eun for the above information. Her father had the
unlucky experience of having two of his books put out by Naman.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
That the now-conservative Naman produced its new version can
probably be explained by awareness of the commercial success of
the Shiraishis' Japanese translation. By chance, during a brief visit to
Seoul in 2005, I met the charming and modest Professor Yun Hyungsook
who was the translator. She apologized profusely for the quality of
the pirated edition, saying she had had to work against brutal deadlines.
If the pattern of translations up to 1992 seems geographically random Tokyo,
Frankfurt, Sao Paulo, Zagreb, and Seoul — this is not at all the
case for the rest of the decade. Of the fifteen translations involved,
eleven were produced in Europe between 1995 and 1999. But first
came Ciudad Mexico (Comunidades imaginadas) and Istanbul (.Hayali
Cemaatler), in 1993.
The Fondo de Cultura Economica was established in 1934 by the
economist and diplomat Daniel Cosio Villegas, initially to provide
Spanish-language texts for the recently founded National School of
Economics, but soon broadening out to cover history, culture, literature,
and so on. State-run from the outset, it remained a part of the
official cultural bureaucracy (in the 1990s it was headed by ex-president
Miguel de la Madrid). After World War II, it expanded its 'empire' to
Argentina (1945), Chile (1954), Mother Spain (1963), and later to
Brazil, Colombia, the US (San Diego), Guatemala, Peru, and Venezuela.
Its production was also vast in the 1990s: 2,300 new titles and
5,000 reprints. It seems likely that the stimulus for this translation came
from among the large number of Mexican scholars and intellectuals who
studied or taught at American universities, in which IC was by this time
widely used as a sort of textbook in departments of history, anthropology,
sociology, and comparative literature. In 1986, I was invited to
a huge conference on Mexican nationalism in Zamora, and was startled
that the only other obviously foreign attendee was David Brading, the
magisterial historian of Mexico and Peru, and, later, Spanish America in
general. Although very embarrassed to be the only participant who
could speak no Spanish, I was taken under the kindly wing of Enrique
Krauze, the young, virtually bilingual, right-hand man of Octavio Paz,
who had long been the dominant intellectual influence at the Fondo.
Nothing could be more different than Istanbul's Metis Yayinlari.
What would become Metis was originally set up in 1983 by Miige
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Giirsoy Sdkmen, Verso's 'agent' in Turkey, together with a few Leftist
friends. In order to avoid the risk of having the whole staff arrested,
Metis was registered legally under the name of a single individual, who
would serve any prison time meted out by the regime. From this
uncertain start, the company became very successful in the more open
1990s, publishing Turkish and translated fiction (from Tolkien to
Perec), philosophy (Adorno, Benjamin, Lukacs), political and feminist
theory (Badiou, Arrighi, MacKinnon), current affairs (Oliver Roy), and
most recently texts on the anti-globalization and anti-Iraq war movements.
The success of Metis seems to have derived from three independent
factors; the country's young, increasingly well-educated
population, many of them supporters of Ankara's drive for EC membership;
the company's long-standing friendly relations with the Islamicists;
and the cultural policies of the major banks, who judge the performance
of publishers whom they support by the reviews their books receive
rather than by their profit margins, and are content if the cost of running
the companies is less than what advertising would demand.7
Perhaps it is
worth adding that during the later 1990s I would occasionally run into
students from the ex-Soviet Turkic-speaking republics, who reported
that they read IC first in Metis's translation.
Then Europe proper. Sweden (1993); The Netherlands (1995);
Norway, France and Italy (1996); Greece and Poland (1997); Bulgaria,
Slovenia, Macedonia and Serbia (1998). The Swedish translation (Den
forestallda gemen-skapen) was published in Goteborg by Daidalos.
Founded in 1982, Daidalos is a rather small, but well-respected,
independent left publisher, emerging originally from the student movement;
it is a serious house, which also publishes dissertations (with state
funding). It has a strong philosophical profile - from the classics to
Arendt, Gadamer, Habermas, Heidegger, Rawls, and Taylor. On
history and social analysis it has published Marx, Bauman, Bourdieu,
Castells, and Giddens.8
The Dutch translation (Verbeelde gemeenschappen) is interesting for two
quite different reasons. Until 1995, the covers of the translations were
generally plain, not to say nondescript. (Only the Japanese translation
7. My thanks to Tony Wood for this history of Metis.
8. My thanks to Goran Therborn for this description.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
used the colonial-era Indonesian trick-photograph that I imposed upon
Verso.) The solitary exception was Campusverlag's Hermannsdenkmal,
which was surely intended ironically. But from then on the trend was to
create 'nationalist' covers - the later Dutch cover, for example, being a
fine reproduction of a woodcut showing the interior of an early Dutch
printery. The second curiosity is the way the translation came into
being. At some point in the 1970s I began a regular correspondence
with Soeijono, a tough, witty, and eccentric old Indonesian Communist
then resident in Moscow. He had been active during his country's
Revolution (1945—49), and after independence was achieved, worked
for the Party's newspaper, Harian Rakjat [People's Daily]. Perhaps
because of his strong individualism, perhaps on account of some sexual
peccadillo, he was gradually sidelined. But he was lucky enough to be
on a visit to China when the 'attempted coup' of October 1, 1965
occurred, after which the Party was destroyed, with hundreds of
thousands of its members either massacred or imprisoned for many
years without trial. Disliking what he saw of Mao's Cultural Revolution,
and annoyed by the factional infighting among the Indonesian
communist exiles, he found a way to move to Moscow, where for years
he was employed as a translator. Eventually he fell foul of a clique of
exiles sponsored and managed by the KGB, had a massive stroke from
which he never fully recovered, and spent a long time in gloomy
veterans' hospitals outside Moscow. Eventually, he was rescued by a
small group of Dutch Leftists with connections in the Soviet capital, and
brought to Amsterdam. He lodged in an old people's home near the city
limits, where I visited him on a number of occasions. I met the
independent publisher Jan Mets, also a regular visitor, because of
our common friendship with the invalid, who toughed it out with
an unbroken spirit till he died. The decision to translate IC was not,
however, a sentimental gesture. Mets was quite aware of the book's
relative commercial success in London. The Dutch translation was my
first experience of direct involvement in the translation process. Because
I read Dutch pretty well, I had insisted that I inspect the translation
before it went to press. Grudgingly the publisher agreed, while warning
me that the translator's English was far better than my Dutch. On the
first page, I found that in the sentence 'But, having traced the nationalist
explosions that destroyed the vast polyglot and polyethnic realms which
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were ruled from Vienna, London, Constantinople, Paris, and Madrid, I
could not see that the train was laid at least far as Moscow' - 'train' (i.e.
'fuse') was unintelligibly translated as 'railway-line.' Some, if not all, of
my corrections were eventually, unenthusiastically, accepted.
The Norwegian translation (.Forestilte fellesskap) may have come out of
my friendship with Professor Harald Bockman, a distinguished Sinologist
specializing on the CPR's minorities along the border with Southeast
Asia, who spent a couple of years as a visiting fellow at Cornell University.
He is a man with a great sense of humour, and an admirably calm,
unsentimental attitude towards the Maoist regime and its successors. In
any event, the book was published by Spartacus Vorlag, a small (20-30
titles a year) company founded in 1989, with which Bockman had good
personal relations. The cover design showed the new trend: a pretty and
colourful representation of Norway's national holiday parade featuring
cute small children in national costumes. When I asked Bockman why a
Norse edition was needed — in a country with a small population, most of
whom would have no trouble reading the Swedish translation — he
laughed and said: 'You know how we feel about the Swedes and
Swedish. We'd rather read the English original than the Swedish version.
But best of all would be one in our own national language.'
As for the Italian translation (Comunita immaginate), it is probable that
it emerged from a chance meeting with Marco d'Eramo in Chicago,
where I had been invited to give a series of lectures. A distinguished
Roman intellectual and journalist with II Manifesto, Italy's quality
radical-left newspaper (the last in Europe?), he was on leave at the
University of Chicago to write a history of the city, which Verso
published in 2002. We became good friends in a very short time. Hence
the Italian IC was published in Rome by Manifestolibri, founded by the
Feltrinelli-associated newspaper in 1991. The company puts out only
about 40 titles a year, but its emphasis on quality and support for talented
young writers has ensured that its books are widely used for university
teaching. The cheerful cover looks as if it was taken from a late Fellini
film. It could be taken as 'nationalist,' but I prefer to think of it as
ironical in the spirit of the Hermannsdenkmal cover.
The French translation (.L'imaginaire national) was put out by La
Decouverte, directed by Francois Geze, a medium-sized 'independent
Left' publisher (80-100 titles annually) with a serious interest in transla-
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
tions. La Decouverte came out of the famous Editions Francois Maspero,
established in 1959. When Maspero handed the reins over to Geze in
1983, he asked that the enterprise's name be changed as well. In 1996, just/
as the French IC appeared, the company merged with Editions Syros,
founded in 1974 and an active player in the struggle for the political and
social renovation of the French Left. The cover for the book is a severe
picture of a fragment of a Parisian neo-classical building, looking very
much as if it has just been cleaned by Malraux. Irony? Probably, but
delicate French irony. For the first and only time, I was involved direcdy,
and wholly pleasurably, with the translation as it proceeded. PierreEmmanuel
Dauzat, one of France's best translators, not only produced a
text that in many places is an improvement over the original English, but
checked all the French references, and brought several errors to my
attention. Thanks to him, I made an interesting discovery. When I
expressed my reservations about the title, Uimaginaire nationale, he replied
that the French language has no equivalent to the English 'community,'
with its overtones of social warmth and solidarity. 'Communaute' (as in
Communaute Europeenne) has an unavoidably cold, bureaucratic feel to
it. (Marco d'Eramo later laughingly wrote to me that the Italian
'comunita commonly means a drug-addicts' halfway house.)
Translations into Polish (Wspolotny wyobrazone) and Greek appeared
in 1997. The Polish version was published in Krakow (not Warsaw) by
the Spoleczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak. About this Institute I have
learned little beyond the fact that it is a well-regarded publisher both of
scholarly studies and of fiction.
The Greek version (Phantasiakes Koinotites) is, however, another
matter. The publishing house Nepheli was set up a few years after
the fall of the Papadopoulos-Ioannides military regime, i.e. after 1974,
by the late Yannis Douvitsas, an intellectual of the liberal Left. A small
but distinguished publisher, it has specialized mainly in fiction and
carefully done translations of works in the humanities and social
sciences. Besides books, it also publishes three journals, Poiesis (Poetry),
Cogito (Philosophy) and Historein (History, A Review of the Past and Other
Stories! — printed in English). The guiding spirit of Historein has been
Professor Antonis Liakos of the University of Athens, who was trained
in Salonika, then in Rome (where he did research on Italian reunification)
and finally in Birmingham circa 1989, where he joined the
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Historical Materialism Group. By this time, the study of nationalism was
on the Group's agenda because of the successes of Thatcherism. Nepheli
also published Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis, and others. The
main target of these books has been students and young scholars in the
humanities and social sciences. But Historein, as its sardonic subtitle
suggests, had a clear political objective as well, to 'trouble the wellestablished
ideology of the 3,000 years of the Greek nation.'9
1o •
According to the translator, Pothiti Hantzaroula, the idea of
translating IC came at the time of the nationalist marches in the early
1990s, which claimed the name of Macedonia for Greece. The publication
was meant to establish a dissenting voice and an alternative way
of thinking about the way in which the nation was made. While the
book catered to the general public, it was mainly aimed at students in
universities where the history curriculum was still strongly influencedl1
by nineteenth-century romanticism.
It is instructive that what Historein had in its sights was not the traditional
Greek Right, but the main parties of the Left, which from at least the early
1990s increasingly advertised themselves as defenders of the '3,000-year
old' Greek nation, and even of Orthodoxy. Professor Liakos notes that in
the specific case of IC, Historeinwas accused ofpromoting, publishing, and
teaching a book full of inaccurate information on Greek history, and of
idealist tendencies, not giving enough room to the economic transfor-12
mations that have produced the modern nation.
One might say that with this Greek translation one 'era' closed and a
new one opened. In the mid-1990s George Soros brought together a
panel of scholars and librarians, and asked them to draw up a list of the
100 most significant (fairly recent) books in the humanities and social13sciences. (Fortunately or unfortunately, IC was among the final
9. My thanks to Antonis Liakos for this background.
10. Liakos described her to me as a 'fine scholar, having written a not yet published
book, in English, on The Making of Subordination, Domestic Servants in Greece,
1900-1950.'
11. My thanks to Pothiti Hantzaroula for this account.
12. Paraphrased from a letter recently received from Liakos.
13. I have only a partial list of these titles. What is interesting is that books by
Americans are not at all dominant. German authors are the most numerous, followed by
French and Americans, then a handful of UK-ers, and here and there an Italian, a
Slovenian, a Belgian, and so on.
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
selections.) His plan was to offer partial subsidization of translations of
these works to publishers in the former Communist states of Eastern
Europe, and the republics that came into existence with the collapse of
the Soviet Union. Out of this massively funded transnational effort
came the IC translations into Slovenian (Zamisljene skupnosti), Macedonian
(Zamisleni zayednisti), Serbian (Natsia: zamislenja zayednitsa), and
Bulgarian (Vobrazenije obshchnosti) in 1998, Romanian (Comunitati
imaginate), Russian (Voobrazhayemie soobshchestva), and Ukrainian (Uyavleni
spilnoti) in 2001, and Lithuanian (.Isivaizduojamos bendruomenes) in
2002.
The stretch of this endeavour is such that it warrants a break with the
strictly chronological ordering so far employed.
As luck would have it, the translations project officer for Soros' Open
Society Institute has been Yana Genova, who herself translated IC into
Bulgarian, Recently, she was kind enough to relate to me that:
The OSI's Translation Project. . . started around 1994 with the aim
to make available in the local languages of Eastern Europe at least the
minimum of basic texts in the social sciences needed to renew higher
education and to sustain informed public discussion of social and
political issues. The first grant competitions were held in 1995 in
Romania and Bulgaria, quickly followed by other countries in the
years that followed. OSI has spent approximately $5,000,000 for
nearly 2,000 editions. The list of recommended titles . . . was
intended as a point of reference to publishers, but they could also
offer other titles in the humanities . . . Grants covered from 30 per
cent to 80 per cent of the total publishing costs depending on the
country. The impact of the project has varied from country to
country as the number of titles published varies a lot and it was not
very well managed everywhere. But I can say with full confidence
that the project has had an enormous effect on the way that the
humanities and social sciences have been, and are now being taught
in the region. For example, translations supported by the project form
40 per cent of all titles on the reading lists of eleven disciplines in
major universities in Bulgaria and the Ukraine . . . All the publishers
[of your book] were established in the early 1990s as small (2—10
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employees), independent companies. They publish academic books
and survive mostly on grants by private donors such as Soros, foreign
government agencies such as the French Cultural Institute and —
more recently — EU cultural programs.
On most of these editions I have obtained little information beyond
what Yana Genova has generously furnished. The Slovenian publisher
was Studia Humanitatis, the Macedonian Kultura, the Serbian Biblioteka
Episteme Plato, the Bulgarian Kritika i Humanizm, the Romanian
Integral, the Russian Kanon-Press, the Ukrainian Kritika, and the
Lithuanian Baltos Lankos. About these publishers I have only a little
information. Kritika i Humanizm was established in Sofia in 1991 as an
independent company, which has become the only Bulgarian publisher
specializing in the humanities and social sciences. Its main target is the
publication of many translations (primarily of French authors, it would
seem) in order to support a 'pluralist climate in these sciences.' Since the
Serbian version is clearly an extension, in Cyrillic script, of the 1990
Serbo-Croat translation published in Zagreb, there may be some
financial or other connection between the two publishers. The Russian
translation has a curious history. A very bad, and probably pirated,
version was actually issued by Kanon in 1998, as part of a series called
Conditio Humana set up by the Centre for Fundamental Sociology in
Moscow, which also published texts by Montesquieu, Burke, Marx,
Weber, Bergson, and Schmitt. It was then completely and professionally
retranslated, and legally published in 2001 by Kanon 'with the support
of the Open Society Institute within the framework of the "Pushkin
Library" megaproject.' It is worth adding that the covers of all these
'Soros' translations are plain and simple, without any concessions to
commercial marketing or blatant nationalist imagery.
At the same time, in Western Europe, the early twenty-first century
produced some interesting variations. In 2001, a Danish translation
(Forestillede fcellesskaber) appeared at the hand of the Roskilde Universitetsforlag,
with an engagingly enigmatic, 'post-modern' cover. This was
the first translation of IC published by a university press. When I asked
the translator, the energetic young professor Lars Jensen, why a Danish
version was needed, given the existence of both Norwegian and
Swedish versions, he replied more or less as Harald Bockman had
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
done earlier. In effect, 'Yes, we can read these translations, but we
should have our national own.' In 2003, Miroslav Hroch included
Czech translations of ICs first two chapters in his textbook compendium
Pohledy na narod a nacionalismus [Views of Nation and Nationalism],
published in Prague by the 'sociological' house of Plon. In 2005,
a Catalan version appeared (Comunitats imaginades), published by Editorial
Afers in collaboration with the University of Valencia. The same
year, in Lisbon, Edi^oes 70 published an excellent translation, sixteen
years after the first, not very good, Portuguese version produced in Sao
Paulo. But Brazil's mindless tariff policy on 'foreign' books makes this
new edition available to Brazilians only at an enormously inflated price.
Most recently, in 2007, Joel Kuortti's Finnish translation, Kuvitellut
Yhteisot, was issued by the independent intellectual publishing house
Vastapaino.
It remains only to discuss briefly the story of seven translations
published east of Europe after 1998. In 1999, editions appeared in Taipei,
Tel Aviv and Cairo. The translator of the Taipei version (.Hsiang-hsiang ti
kung-tung ti) was Wu Rwei-ren, a young hero of the struggle against the
Kuomintang dictatorship, a strong, but open-minded Taiwanese nationalist,
and the author of a brilliant, iconoclastic University of Chicago
dissertation on the complex origins and development of Taiwanese
nationalism. The translator followed in the footsteps of the Shiraishis
in transforming the original 'UK polemic' into something relevant for
young Taiwanese today, by adding numerous explanatory footnotes and a
lengthy academic introduction. The publisher, China Times, is the largest
commercial publisher in Taiwan, but alas, as we shall see, without a shred
of Rwei-ren's integrity and political commitment.
The Hebrew translation (Qehiliot madumaynot) came out under the
auspices of the Open University of Israel, and was intended as a critical
intervention against prevailing Zionist-Likudist orthodoxy. It included
an introduction by Azmi Bishara, the foremost Palestinian Israeli
politician, and a scholar of Marx and Hegel who completed his PhD
at the University of Jena when the DDR state still existed. Curiously
enough, the cover design looks like a scene in snowy Vermont at
Christmas time. The Arabic version (AlJama'at Al Khayaliah), however,
had a completely different origin and intent. In 1995, perhaps in
response to UN reports that the 'Arab World' produced far fewer
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translations of foreign language works than any other major region on
the planet, the Majlis al-'Ala lil-Thaqafah (Supreme Council of Culture),
an adjunct of Egypt's Ministry of Education, launched a massive
Translation Project under the direction of Dr Gaber Asfour. Over the
following decade the Project published no less than one thousand
translations (usually in runs of 1,000 copies), including works by, or on,
Neruda, Rousseau, Trotsky, Pessoa, Kafka, Eliot, Hegel, Sartre, Woolf,
Foucault, Cavafy, Chomsky, and Freud. Most ofthe early titles were
pirated, including IC (No. 81). The books are sold at low, subsidized
prices, and are distributed almost entirely in Egypt. The Project has been
successful enough that it is likely soon to become a permanent
subsection of the Supreme Council of Culture.
After the fall of the interminable Suharto regime in Indonesia (May
1998), censorship was largely abolished. Dozens of good and bad publishing
houses mushroomed into existence, many devoted to the republication
of books long banned or deliberately allowed to go out of print. Soon
after I was allowed back into Indonesia for the first time in twenty-seven
years, I discovered that a pirated translation of IC had been rushed out by
Pustaka Pelajar, a notoriously unscrupulous publisher in Jogjakarta preying
on the curiosity, and ignorance, of students in this university city. I was
able to force the withdrawal ofthe book, not for monetary reasons, but
because of the truly terrible quality ofthe translation. With the help of
various former students of mine, and a subsidy from the Ford Foundation
office in Jakarta, a substantially new edition (.Komunitas-KomunitasTerbayang)
was finally published in 2001. Taking a cue from Wu Rwei-ren, I
added many supplementary footnotes in colloquial Indonesian to help
students understand the book's many allusions and references that English
readers took entirely in their stride. The publisher this time was INSIST, a
progressive NGO specializing on freedom of information - today, alas,
moribund on account of internal factional conflicts.
It is indicative that when I offered to do the same thing for the cheap
English-language edition put out in the Philippines in 2003 by Anvil,
Manila's best popular imprint, the offer was indignantly rejected. Ofcourse,
the Filipino students, schooled in English, would get all the references!
Finally two very idiosyncratic versions, one published in Shanghai in
2003, and the other due out in Bangkok in late 2006. The publisher in the
CPR was The Shanghai People's Publishing House, a huge state-owned
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IMAGINED COMMUNITIES
conglomerate. It turned out that this edition of ICwas the result of a secret
deal with Taipei's China Times, which not only colluded with what was
essentially negative piracy, but also permitted its Shanghai confederate to
censor Wu Rwei-ren's text as it saw fit. One notable result was the
deletion of the entirety of Chapter 9, which included some ironical
remarks about the Great Helmsman and the Party's recent investment in a
Machiavellian 'official nationalism.' 'You should take it as a compliment,'
said a Chinese friend with a mischievous smile, 'they almost never delete
whole chapters of a book they intend to publish. Look at Hillary Clinton's
book, for example - the deletions are only sentences here and there!'
Rwei-ren's introduction too was deleted without his knowledge or
consent, even though it was a careful and scholarly account of my personal
background, the political and intellectual context in which IC was
written, its main features compared with the books of Gellner and Smith,
and the criticisms of Sinologist Prasenjit Duara and of Partha Chatteijee.
Perhaps its conclusion, an invocation of Taiwan as 'the beautiful but
vulgar, passionate but anti-intellectual' island whose future remains so
uncertain, doomed it with Peking's censors.14
The Thai version now close to completion in manuscript form has
been prepared by a team of progressive, critical professors, several
among them former students of mine. Going over the draft chapters
I was very surprised by one thing. The aura of the Thai monarchy is such
that I expected the translators to use the special 'feudal' vocabulary
required when describing any activity by Thai kings present and past.
What I did not expect was that the same special vocabulary was applied to
all foreign monarchs as well, including such unlovely figures as London's
William the Conqueror, Paris's Francois I, Vienna's Franz II, Berlin's
Wilhelm II, and so on. When I objected that the entire spirit of IC is
republican, and almost all monarchs are handled with irony or hostility, the
objection was quickly brushed aside. 'You don't understand our traditions
and our situation.' With a mixture of laughter and apprehension I look
forward to what may be taken as ICs first 'royalist' translation!
On the basis of this rather fragmentary evidence, what kinds of
preliminary conclusions seem warranted?
14. My thanks to Wang Chao-hua for this account of the introduction.
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Geographical distribution. With the exception of the OSI's coordinated
translation programmes for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union, launched in the second half of the 1990s, there is little evidence
for a graded time-hierarchy originating in 'The West,' and ending, later
on, in the ci-devant Third World. In the first decade after ICs original
publication, one finds two Western European versions (German and
Swedish), one Eastern European (Yugoslav), two Latin American
(Brazilian and Mexican), two Asian (Japanese and Korean), and one
Near Eastern (Turkish). The big surge in European language translations
only began in the second half of the 1990s. So far as I can tell, all the
translations have been based on the original English, not on previous
translations in the languages of regional or colonial hegemons, showing
English's extraordinary global ascendancy.
At the same time, there are conspicuous absences, if one thinks of
languages with large numbers of speakers and, to a varying, lesser extent,
readers. The most obvious example is the 'Subcontinent,' which
contains millions of people reading in Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil,
and so on. The reason for this lacuna must be the British colonial
heritage, which, perhaps surprisingly, helped make English even today
the dominant language of 'national level' education and intellectual
discourse. The second is Africa (if one cares to locate Egypt in the Near
East). No translations exist into, say, Swahili, Amharic, Wolof, or
Hausa. One might try to explain this by adducing the status of the
former colonial languages (French, English, and Portuguese) as languages
of state and higher education in much of Africa. But this
dominance requires its own explanation in the troubled economic,
social, and political conditions of the continent after the achievement of
national independences. The absence of a Vietnamese edition may be a
temporary matter, as the rapidly developing country emerges from the
relative intellectual isolation imposed by three decades of terrible
warfare. The strangest case is Mother Spain, which has yet to emulate
Portugal's decision to catch up with its gigantic American colony after
waiting fifteen years. On the other hand, Spain is the one country where
a translation into a 'sub-national' language (Catalan) has occurred.
Publishers and readers. The incomplete data available to me reveal some
very striking patterns. In the first place, only one publishing house
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(Mexico's Fondo) has a history beginning before World War II, and the
vast majority were founded during the past three decades or, perhaps
better put, in the aftermath of the world-turbulent 'long 1960s.' In the
second place, a clear majority of these publishing houses have been small
to medium in size, and to various degrees independent in character.
This independence has to be seen from three angles. Only in the cases of
Mexico, Yugoslavia, Egypt, and the CPR (all authoritarian one-party
states at the time of IC's local publication) have the publishers been state
institutions. On the other hand, only in the case of Taiwan does one see
a very large private commercial publisher involved, and there are no
cases of intervention by giant transnational conglomerates. Perhaps
more surprisingly, given the nature of IC's readership (on which more
below), is the relative absence of university presses: those that are visible
are only the Open University of Israel, Roskilde University, the
University of Valencia, and perhaps Krakow's Znak. In the third place,
the political orientations of the publishers, where identifiable, stretch
primarily from liberal (in the political sense) to varying types of
independent Left. One could say that, given Verso's political stance
and my own political sympathies, this pattern is not surprising.
In its original form, as indicated earlier, IC was aimed at a general, welleducated
public, primarily in the UK, and secondarily in the United States.
It was not written out of, or on behalf of, my own academic discipline
('political science,' shall one say) or any other. I also tried hard to make sure
it was free of academic jargon. The last thing that would then have occurred
to me was that it would become a university-level textbook. But, on the
whole, this has been its fate, in English and in translation. Yet this destiny
should not be understood in too Anglo-Saxon a manner. In many parts of
the world, students and their teachers have a much more significant political
and social role than do their counterparts in the UK and the US, and it is
characteristically oppositionist to some degree. But this role is of quite
recent (early twentieth-century) origin — one reason why 'students' loom
up only sporadically in IC itself.
In attempting to grasp why IC ended up being so widely, and fairly
rapidly, translated in 'textbook' form, the likeliest answers are as follows.
In the first place, its polemical thrusts turned out to have an
unexpectedly wide appeal. In the 1980s it was the only comparative
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study of nationalism's history intended to combat Eurocentrism, and
making use of non-European language sources. It was also the only one
with a marked prejudice in favour of 'small countries' (in terms of
geography, population, or world-political influence). In many parts of
the world, faculty members and students, if they have political commitments
at all, are Left, or liberal-left in their sympathies and are open to
ICs agenda. That the book, though written in English, was also partly
aimed at British and American imperialism, may also have been a factor.
In the second place, however, by proposing the concept of'imagined
community' IC juxtaposed paradoxically a kind ofgemeinschaft attractive
to all nationalists with something unsettling, neither 'imaginary' as in
'unicorn,' nor matter-of-factly 'real' as in 'TV set,' but rather something
analogous to Madame Bovary and Queequeg, whose existence
stemmed only from the moment Flaubert and Melville imagined them
for us. This formulation opened the door wide for critical assessment of
the kind of 'age-old' nationalism propagated in most contemporary
states through the means of mass communications and state-controlled
educational institutions. In the same paradoxical manner, IC was both
visibly sympathetic to many forms of nationalism and yet deliberately
interested less in the particular nationalist mythologies dear to nationalists'
hearts, than in the general morphology of nationalist consciousness.
Finally, the book attempted to combine a kind of historical
materialism with what later on came to be called discourse analysis;
Marxist modernism married to post-modernism avant la lettre. I think
that this helps to explain the nationalist iconography on the covers of
various translations of IC after 1995, which can usually be read as either
naive or ironical (Norway versus Italy?).
A further paedagogical advantage in IC for teachers eager to develop
students' civic consciousness in a progressive, critical manner, was simply
the unusual style of the comparisons it drew: the US juxtaposed to
Venezuela rather than Britain, Japan played off not against
Confucian-Asian neighbours such as China, but to Tsarist Russia and
Imperial Ukania, Indonesia rubbing noses with Switzerland rather than
with Malaysia. Such comparisons were useful for teachers concerned to
break down naive national exceptionalism, as well as mendacious 'culturalregional'
cliches such as the notorious 'Asian Values.'
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Stimuli. In a substantial number of cases, the original stimulus for translation
is not easy to trace. What is clear is that Verso made no special effort to
encourage translations, and that those done by former students of mine
(Japanese, Indonesian, and Thai) were done on their initiative, not mine.
This pattern seems, in a small way, to be an endorsement of ZCs
metaphorical use of 'piracy,' emphasizing local initiative, rather than
external coercion or slavish imitation, to describe the processes of nationalism's
rapid diffusion in different forms around the planet. But in cases
where a clear stimulus can be detected, the Open Society Institute's broad
campaign to transform the political cultures ofEastern Europe and the states
ofthe former Soviet Union in a liberal and pluralist direction, is easily the
most conspicuous. Teachers and students who spent time in the United
States or the United Kingdom, where IC had been normalized as a
textbook from the early 1990s, surely played a role. Yet the most instructive
cases are those where translators and publishers had motives beyond the
immediately paedagogic. The Serbo-Croat version of1990 came from the
hope of Silva Meznaric and her associates that it might help the struggle to
save 'Yugoslavia' from bloody self-destruction. Wu Rwei-ren's version
was meant to bolster the nerve of Taiwanese nationalism by explaining
comparatively its late emergence, and by undermining Peking's claim to
the island on the basis, not only of Chinese nationalism, but also 'ancestral
tradition' inherited from Manchu dynasts. The Greek translation, as we
have seen, was part of an endeavour to check mindless local chauvinism
over 'Macedonia,' and to criticize the parties of the Left for craven or
unscrupulous adoption of essentially right-wing nationalist positions.
Similarly, The Open University of Israel's Hebrew translation, with an
introduction by a well-known Palestinian Israeli, was part of an attempt to
resist the long slide towards apartheid in the Likud-ruled state. Doubtless
the Catalan version was also intended to help Catalonia achieve the
maximum autonomy possible in what was once nicely called Las Espanas.
Transformation. Proverbially, a writer loses his/her book at the moment that
it is published and enters the public sphere. But to feel the full melancholy
force ofthe adage, there is nothing like facing a translation of a book into a
language the author does not understand. He, or she, can have little idea of
what has happened to it: misunderstandings, distortions, word-by-word
literalisms, additions, deletions, or: creative adaptations, seductive reread-
228
TRAVEL A N D TRAFFIC
ings, changed emphases, and more beautiful prose than in the original.
Hence, initially, I was miffed that neither the German nor the Mexican
translator communicated with me at all, and that the Dutch translation was
sent to me only at the last minute. I believed that the book was still 'mine/
and forgot the sardonic maxim traduttori traditori: translation is necessarily a
useful treason. I learned a lesson in the course of a long and warm
correspondence with Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat. Despite the fact that
England and France are very close neighbours, the difficulties of rendering
French into English and vice versa are notorious. The French version
contained elegancies of which I had not dreamed with reorderings which
allowed me to see what I 'really' meant, but could not properly express. The
correspondence was an education in itself, symbolized by the discovery that
the Latinism of'community' thinly concealed a filiation with the Germanic
gemeinschaft, and that imagine cannot convey the sombre possibilities of
'imagined.' The final lesson came with the pilfered initial translation into
Indonesian, the one language other than English in which I am completely
at home. Quickly finding that there were many passages of which I could
make neither head nor tail, I put in two or three months of intensive work
'correcting' it line by line. The outcome was a version that is, I think, much
easier for Indonesian students to understand conceptually; but it remains
rather lifeless, because I was insufficiendy treacherous towards the original.
English's elaborate and nuanced conjugational system for verbs, and its
typical insistence on the active, 'imperial' voice, are foreign to elegant
Indonesian, which prefers the passive voice, and is gifted with the
untranslatable ter- verb-prefix, by which the agent versus object axis
disappears in a connotational cloud whose silver lining is Chance. Fine
Indonesian prose is still infused with an orality long vanished from formal
English - which is why Anglicized Indonesian academic writing is, if
possible, even more ugly than its UK or US counterparts. Hence, initially
the pleasure of adding new explanatory footnotes in a quotidian idiom that
engages, rather than annoying, befuddling, or terrorizing readers. Still, at
the end I realized that I was impersonating an Indonesian, fighting off major
'piracy' with small-scale self-piracy, to no great avail. 'I shouldn't be doing
this,' I said to myself, 'it'sjust political ventriloquism, and a non-commercial
defence of the ludicrous American insistence on "intellectual" (!) property
rights.' This is why, while inspecting the 'royalist' Thai translation of IC, I
have decided to be a translational traitor. IC is not my book any more.
229
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Index
Aargau, 136
Aasen, Ivar Andreas, 75
Abidjan, 130
Abraham, 149, 204
Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, 120
Acapulco, 52
Accra, 114, 124
Addison, Joseph, 21
Adler, Viktor, 106
Adrian IV see Brakespear, Nicholas
Afghanistan, 1
Africa, 46, 52, 59, 93, 98, 116, 123-4, 139,
163-4, 187, 189-90
Afrifa, Akwasi A., 120
Aladin, 28-9
Albania, 2, 28, 156
Albigensians, 200
Alcuin, 89
Aldus, 34
Alexander III (Romanov), 87-8
Alexandre de Rhodes, 126
Algeria, 111, 152
Algiers, 149
Amboina (Ambon), 119
Amsterdam, 121, 166
Andrassy, Gyula, 104
Angkor, 159-60, 179, 181, 183
Angola, 118, 191
Annam, 125-6, 129, 157
Anne (Stuart), 21
Antwerp, 34, 69
Ap, Arnold, 178
Arabia, 91
Argentina, 14, 53, 57, 64, 188 see also Rio de la
Plata
Armstrong, John Alexander, xii
Arthur, 12, 205
Ascyltus, 25
Atatiirk, Kemal see Kemal Atatiirk
Athens, 28-9
Auerbach, Erich, 23, 68-9
Augustine, St, 23
Aurangzeb, 69
Auschwitz, 20
Austerlitz, 205
Australia, 93, 98, 134, 187
Austria, 20, 76, 106-9
Austro-Hungary, 76, 78, 84, 98-9
Babylon, 154
Bach, Alexander, 104
Bacon, Francis, 37, 69
Baden, 106
Balagtas (Baltazar), Francisco, 28-9
Balzac, Honore de, 25
Bandung, 121, 127
Bangkok, 101, 125, 131, 172
Barnett, Anthony, 116
Bartok, Bela, 75
Batavia Qakarta), 100, 116, 121-2, 127, 132,
166, 170, 177-9
Battambang, 127, 131, 180
Bauer, Otto, xiii, 107-9
Bavaria, 84
Bayon, 183
Bede, 89
Beirut, 75
Belgium, 33, 76, 118
Benares, 53
Bengal, 70, 90-91
Benjamin, Walter, ix, 24, 37, 161
Bentham, Jeremy, 184
Berlin, 21, 86, 95, 98, 113, 194
Bernadotte (House of), 108
234
I N D E X
Bessenyei, Gyorgy, 73
Bethlehem, 194
Biafra, 120
Binondo, 27-8
Bloch, Marc, 18, 23, 42, 89
Blois, 130
Blora, 147
Blucher, Gebhard Leberecht von, 95
Boadicea, 12
Bogota, 62, 69, 147
Bohemia, 20, 33, 73, 79, 196
Bolivar, Simon, 49, 53, 57, 81, 189
Bolivia, 53
Bonaparte see Napoleon; Louis Napoleon
Bonifacio, Andres, 143
Bordeaux, 123, 131
Borneo, 165, 182, 190
Borobudur, 179, 183-5
Boston, 64
Botha, Pieter, 150
Bourbon see Carlos III; Louis XIV; Louis XV;
Louis XVI
Boven Digul, 31
Boxer, Charles R., 60
Brakespear, Nicholas (Adrian IV), 15
Braudel, Fernand, 205-6
Brazil, xiii, 14, 46-7, 51, 60, 134, 191
Bregenz, 20
Breuilly, John, xii
Brezhnev, Leonid Ilyich, 150
Brizen (Brienz), 20
Browne, Thomas, 147
Broz, Josip (Tito), 160
Budapest, 73
Buddha (Gautama), 194
Buenos Aires, 52, 62-3
Bukovina, 20
Bulgaria, 79
Bumppo, Natty, 202
Burckhardt, Jakob, 197
Burma, 93, 99, 119, 151, 172, 179-81, 185
Cairo, 170
Calais, 123
Calcutta, 179
California, 64
Calvin, John, 40
Cambodia (Cambodge, Kampuchea), 1, 125,
128-31, 155, 157-61, 169, 183
Canada, 64, 93
Canberra, 94
Cape Coast, 124
Capetown, 93
Caracas, 49, 62, 147, 171
Carinthia, 20
Carlos III (Bourbon), 51
Carniola, 20
Cartagena, 52, 57
Carter, James Earl, 18
Cattaro (Kotor), 20
Celebes, 16
Cephas, Kasihan, 179
Ceylon, 189 see also Sri Lanka
Chambas, Mohamed, 124
Champollion, Jean Francois, 70
Charles I (Stuart), 21
Charles V (Habsburg), 147
Charles IX (Valois), 200
Chatteijee, Partha, xii
Cheng-ho, 189
Chiang Kai-shek, 160
Chiangmai, 187
Ch'in Shi Huang-ti, 160
Chile, 51, 57
China, 1-2, 41-2, 44, 69-70, 96, 100, 125-6,
155-6, 158-61, 168
Chingachgook, 202
Choshu, 94-5
Chou En-lai, 156, 172
Chulalongkorn (Rama V), 21, 99-100, 172
Cirebon, 167
Clausewitz, Karl von, 22, 87, 152
Cochin China, 125-6, 128-9, 131
Coimbra, 51
Colombia, 53
Colombo, 114
Columbus, Christopher, 193
Congo, Belgian, 110
Congo, French, 152
Conrad, Joseph, 55, 176
Constant, Benjamin, 136
Constantinople (Istanbul), xi, 75, 79
Cooper, James Fenimore, 202-3
Corneille, Pierre, 40
Cortes, Hernan, 199
Coruna, 146
Cotonou, 130
Cracow, 20
Croatia, 20
Cromwell, Oliver, 166
Cuba, 156
Curzon, George Nathaniel, 179
Czechoslovakia, 1
Dakar, 123-4, 130
Dalmatia, 20
Damrong Rajanuphab, 172, 174
Darwin, Charles Robert, 10
De Castries, Christian Marie Ferdinand de la
Croix, 152
De Lattre de Tassigny, Jean, 152
De Stael-Holstein, Anne, 136
Debray, Regis, 10, 118, 149
Defoe, Daniel, 25
Denmark, 21
Descartes, Rene, 18
Deshima, 94
Dickens, Charles, 35
Diderot, Denis, 34
Diponegoro, 11
235
I M A G I N E D C O M M U N I T I E S
Djugashvili, Yosif Vissarionovich (Stalin), 46, 160
Dobrovsky, Josef, 73, 75
Dorpat, 87
Doumer, Paul, 180
Douwes Dekker, Eduard, 117
Dryden, John, 69
Dublin, 93
Dunbar, William, 89
Dvorak Anton, 75
East India Company, 110, 179-80
East Timor, 120, 177, 191
Ebert, Friedrich, 19
Ecuador, 49, 53, 64
Edinburgh, 89
Edo, 94, 96 See also Tokyo
Egypt, 79, 147
Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 44
Elias, 147
Encolpius, 25
England, xv, 21, 33, 41, 50, 55, 76, 88-89, 92,
100, 105, 123, 137, 147, 188 see also United
Kingdom
Estoril, 110
Faidherbe, Louis Leon Cesar, 152
Febvre, Lucien, 18, 37, 42-4, 61
Federated Malay States, 164—5, 170 see also Malaya
Feldkirch, 20
Felipe II (Habsburg), 166, 205
Fermi'n de Vargas, Pedro, 14, 58, 91, 199
Fiedler, Leslie, 202
Fielding, Henry, 25
Finland, 74, 79
Finn, Huckleberry, 203
Florante, 28-9
Florida, 166, 202
Forst, Otto, 20
Foucault, Michel, 179
France, xv, 6, 12, 21, 33, 40-41, 71, 75-6, 78,
81, 83, 100, 127, 129-30, 149, 152, 156,
159, 164, 179, 193, 199
Francia, Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de, 197
Franco, Francisco, 202
Francois I (Valois-Orleans), 40, 42
Franklin, Benjamin, 61, 69
Franz II (Habsburg), 102, 107
Franz Ferdinand (Habsburg), 21
Franz Joseph (Habsburg), 21
Frederick the Great (Hohenzollern), 22
Freising, 23, 147
Friaul (Friuli), 20
Friedrich Wilhelm III
(Hohenzollern), 22
Fuseli, Henry (Johann Heinrich Fiissli), 136
Fust, Johann, 34
Galicia, 20, 74
Gallieni, Joseph Simon, 152
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 86, 159
Gellner, Ernest, xii, 21
Geneva, 40, 136, 159
George I (Hanover), 109
George III (Hanover) 203
Georgetown, 114
Georgia, 17
Germany, 1, 33, 85, 95, 99, 107, 118, 138, 149
Gia-long (Nguyen Anh), 157
Gito, 25
Gneisenau, August Neithardt von, 22, 87
Goa, 60
Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de, 149
Gold Coast (Ghana) 93, 124
Goree, 123
Gorz (Gorizia), 20
Gradiska (Gradisca), 20
Gran Colombia, 49, 53, 64
Greece, 21, 70, 72, 84, 147
Grieg, Edvard Hagerup, 75
Grisons, 136
Groslier, Bernard Philippe, 179
Grotius, Hugo (Huig de Groot), 97
Griinwald, Bela, 102
Guastella (Guastalla), 20
Guerrero, Leon Maria, xii-xiii
Guinea, 123
Gutenberg, Johann, 33
Guyenne, 41, 123
Habsburg (place), 21
Habsburg see Charles V; Felipe II; Franz II;
Franz Ferdinand; Franz Joseph; Joseph II;
Leopold II; Maria Theresa
Hadramaut, 190
Haiti, 48-9, 193
Hanoi, 125, 127-31, 152
Hanover see George I; George III; Victoria
Harold, 201
Harrison, John, 173, 188
Hastings, 201
Hayes, Carleton, 4
Hector, 147
Heder, Stephen, 130-31
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 35, 48, 197
Henryson, Robert, 89
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 60, 67
Herrin, Judith, 9, 14
Hindenburg, Paul von, 156
Hirschman, Charles, 164-5
Hitler, Adolf, 201, 205
Hoadley, Mason, 167
Hobbes, Thomas, 18
Hobsbawm, Eric, xii, 2, 70-71, 80, 88, 141, 156
Hohenembs, 20
Hohenzollern see Frederick the Great; Friedrich
Wilhelm III; Wilhelm II
Holland (The Netherlands), xv, 33, 76, 117-18,
122, 132-3, 151, 164, 179-80
Homer, 29
Hong Kong, 93
236
I N D E X
Honshu, 96, 99
Horthy, Miklos, 106
Hroch, Miroslav, xii
Hue, 125, 131, 136, 138
Hughes, Christopher, 136, 138-9
Hume, David, 89
Hungary, 1, 20, 78^9, 82, 84-5, 99, 104-6,
108-9, 139
Hutcheson, Francis, 89
Huy Kanthoul, 130
leu Koeus, 131
Ignotus, Paul, 73, 103
Illyria, 20
India, 88, 90-93, 100, 116, 134, 165, 179-80
Indochina (Indochine), xi, 1-2, 99, 123-31,
152, 161
Indonesia (Netherlands Indies), 10-11, 99, 110,
115-16, 119-23, 132-3, 145, 151, 161, 165,
170, 176-85, 189
Innocent III, 200
Intramuros, 27
Iran, 45, 86 See also Persia
Iraq, 33, 45
Ireland, 41, 78, 80, 90, 119
Iremetia, 17
Isaac, 24
Ishmael, 203
Israel, 149, 205
Istanbul see Constantinople
Istria, 20
Italy, 33, 119, 138
Ivan Groznii, 160
Ivory Coast, 123
Jakarta see Batavia
Janacek, Leos, 75
Japan, 12, 21, 69, 94-8, 110, 134, 158-9
Jaszi, Oscar, xiii, 20, 105-6, 108
Java, 11, 32, 119, 165, 167, 173
Jayavarman VII, 160
Jefferson, Thomas, 49, 89
Jerusalem, 20
Jesus Christ, 16, 24, 204
Jiddah, 170
Jim ('Nigger'), 203
Joao VI (Bragan^a), 191
Joaquin, Nick, 175
Jogjakarta, 121
John (Plantagenet), 118
John the Baptist, 30
Johnson, W.G., 172
Jones, William, 70, 179
Joseph II (Habsburg), 73, 84, 102
Judaea, 70, 147
Jungmann, Josef, 73
Kaduna, 120
Kagoshima, 95
Kanbalu, 16
K'ang-hsi, 190
K'ang Yu-wei, 125
Kauffinann, Angelica, 136
Kaysone Phoumvihan, 127
Kazinczy, Ferenc, 73, 75
Kedah, 182
Kemal Atatiirk, 12, 45-6
Kharkov, 74
Khomeini, Ruhollah, 17
Kiev, 74
Kissinger, Henry, 150
Kita Ikki, 98
Koniggratz, 104
Kohn, Hans, 4
Koraes, Adamantios, 72, 79, 195
Korea, 12, 96
Kossuth, Lajos, 103, 105
Kota Bahru, 187
Kotlarevsky, Ivan, 74
Kuala Kangsar, 91
Kublai Khan, 17-18
Kwangsi, 157
Kwangtung, 157
Kyburg, 20
Kyoto, 96
Kyushu, 95
La Fontaine, Jean de, 40
Laos, 125, 127-30
Laura, 28
Lausitz, 20
Leemans, Conradus, 179
Leiden, 121, 179
Leopold II (Habsburg), 73
Leopold II (Saxe-Coburg), 55
Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, 125
Liechtenstein, 137
Lille, 77
Lima, 48, 57, 61
Lincoln, Abraham, 203
Lisbon, 60
Lizardi, Jose Joaquin Fernandez de, 29-30
Locke, John, 89
Lodomeria (Vladimir), 20
Lon Nol, 160, 183
London, xi, 21, 41-2, 51, 56, 86, 88, 90, 92,
94, 124, 166, 175, 187, 189, 191
Los Angeles, 25
Lotharingia (Lorraine), 202
Louis (Bonaparte), 180
Louis XIV (Bourbon), 68, 86
Louis XV (Bourbon), 21
Louis XVI (Bourbon), 21
Louis Napoleon (Bonaparte), 81, 149, 199
Liibeck, 25
Lumbera, Bienvenido, 28-9
Luna, Antonio, 175
Lushan, 159
Lusi (R.), 147
Luther, Martin, 34, 39-40
237
I M A G I N E D C O M M U N I T I E S
Lyautey, Louis-Hubert-Gonzalve, 152
Lyon, 77
Macao, 191
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 90-93, 98, 159
MacMahon, Marie Edme Patrice Maurice de, 149
Macondo, 63
Madagascar, 152
Madrid, xi, 48-52, 56-7, 62, 86, 189
Mahomet (Mohamad), 16
Malaka, Straits of, 120
Malaya, 93, 99-100, 122, 164, 182
Malaysia, 165-6 see also Malaya
Mali, 33, 123
Manchester, 93
Manila, 27, 121, 166, 168, 171
Manuel I (Aviz), 59
Mao Tse-tung, 157, 160
Marco Kartodikromo, 30-32
Maria Theresa (Habsburg), 73
Marie Louise (Parma), 57
Marlowe, Christopher, 69
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 63
Marr, David, 134, 158
Marta Ningrat, Ki Aria, 167
Martin, Henri-Jean, 18, 37, 42-4, 61
Maruyama Masao, 97
Marx, Karl, 3, 139, 197
Masurian Lakes, 156
Matthew, St, 204
Mauritius, 86
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 114
Mecca, 12, 53-4, 170
Meiji, 95, 99, 123
Mekong (R.), 129-30
Mello, Manuel, 57
Melville, Herman, 203
Merauke, 176
Mergui, Gulf of, 167
Methuselah, 147
Metternich, Clemens Wenzel Lothar von, 107
Mexico, 29-30, 48, 51, 57, 63, 69, 193, 199
Mexico City, 61-2, 199
Michelet, Jules, 197-9, 202-3, 205
Mindanao, 182
Mississippi (R.), 166, 203
Mitterrand, Francois, 33
Mocsary, Lajos, 105
Modena, 20
Moliere (Jean Baptiste Poquelin), 40
Moluccas, 132, 178
Mongkut (Rama IV), 171
Monte Carlo, 110
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de, 69
Moore, John, 146
Moravia, 20
More, Thomas, 69
Morelos y Pavon, Jose Maria, 193
Morocco, 12
Moscow, 159-60, 171
Moses, 16
Moulmein, 151
Mozambique, 118, 134-5, 138, 191
Muir, John, 172
Muscat, 190-91
My Tho, 127
Nagasaki, 94
Nairn, Tom, 3, 5, 19, 35, 47, 80, 88-90, 148,
155-6
Nanking, 160
Napoleon (Bonaparte), 51, 57, 70, 80-81, 87,
94, 179-80, 191, 194, 201
Netherlands, The see Holland
Netherlands East Indies, The see Indonesia
Neuchatel, 136
New Granada, 49
New Guinea, 31, 176-8 see also West Irian
New London, 187, 191
New Orleans, 187
New York, 64, 144, 187
New Zealand, 93, 187
Nguyen Anh see Gia-long
Nidwalden, 135
Nieuw Amsterdam, 187
Nigeria, 120
Norodom Sihanouk, 128, 161, 183
Northumbria, 89
Norway, 75
Nzeogwu, Chukuma, 120
Oakland, 5
Obwalden, 135
Odessa, 72
Omura Masujiro, 94
Osaka, 94, 96
Ottawa, 93
Otto of Freising, 23, 147
Pagan, 179, 185
Pahlavi, Mohammad-Reza, 85-6
Pahlavi, Reza, 86
Pakistan, 135
Pal, Bipin Chandra, 92-3, 119
Paraguay, 12, 53, 64, 197
Paris, xi, 17-18, 34, 42, 56, 71-2, 86, 102,
127, 130, 171
Parma, 20
Pascal, Blaise, 18
Paul, St, 23
Pedro I (Braganca), 51
Pekanbaru, 187
Peking, 101, 125, 157, 190
Pericles, 72
Perrault, Charles, 68
Perry, Matthew Calbraith, 94
Persia, 79 see also Iran
Peru, 48, 50, 64, 69, 193
Pest, 102
Peter, St, 17
238
I N D E X
Petion, Alexandre Sabes, 49
Petofi, Sandor, 103
Petronius Arbiter, Gaius, 25
Phetsarath Ratanavongsa, 127
Philadelphia, 64, 192, 199
Philippines, The, 28, 89, 115, 118, 122, 143,
153-4, 166-8, 175, 182, 185, 189
Phnom Penh, 125, 129-31
Piacenza, 20
Plaek Phibunsongkhram, 125
Plantin, Christophe, 34
Plato, 69
Pol Pot, 159, 183
Poland, 33
Polo, Marco, 16-17, 37
Pombal, Sebastian Joseph de Carvalho e Mello,
Marquis of, 60
Pontianak, 190
Ponty, William (William Merlaud-Ponty), 123-4
Pope, Alexander, 21
Portillo, Jose Lopez, 199
Portugal, xv, 51, 59-60, 118, 164
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, 147, 184-5, 188
Priangan, 121
Prussia, 22, 84, 95, 105, 107, 120, 159
Queequeg, 203
Quito, 49
Raffles, Thomas Stamford, 179
Ragusa (Dubrovnik), 20
Rama IV see Mongkut
Rama V see Chulalongkorn
Rama VI see Wachirawut
Rangoon, 114, 119, 121
Ranke, Leopold von, 197
Red River, 157
Renan, Ernest, xiv, 6, 158, 199-201, 203
Renner, Karl, 107
Riau, 133
Richardson, Samuel, 25
Rio de Janeiro, 191
Rio de la Plata, Republic of, 53, 63-4 see also
Argentina
Rizal, Jose, xii, 26-7, 29-30, 115, 142-3
Roanoke, 193
Rome, 39, 53-4, 121-2
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 60, 69, 125, 144
Rumania, 85
Russia, 21, 71, 75-76, 98, 154, 157 see also
USSR
Sabang, 176
Saigon, 127, 129-31, 179
Saint-Barthelemy, La, 199-201, 205
Saint Gallen, 136
Saint-Louis, 123
Saint Petersburg, 21, 86, 88, 92
Sakay, Mario, 143-54
Salome, 30
Salzburg, 20
San Martin, Jose de, 49, 52, 57, 63, 81, 144,
159, 193, 195
Sandhurst, 120
Santiago, 52
Santos, Santiago de los, 26-7
Sardauna of Sokoto, the, 120
Sarraut, Albert, 126-8
Sator (Satoraljaujhely), 20
Satsuma, 94-5
Saudi Arabia, 100
Sayyid Sa'id, 190-91
Schaefer, Adolph, 179
Scharnhorst, Gerhard Johann David von, 22, 87
Schoeffer, Peter, 34
Schonbrunn, 83
Schwyz, 135
Scotland, 19, 41, 89-90, 188
Scott, William, Henry, 166-7
Sedan, 205
Seine (R.), 41, 102
Semarang, 30-32
Senegal, 123
Servia (Serbia), 20
Seton-Watson, Hugh, 3, 71, 74, 86-9, 109,
135
Shakespeare, William, 18
Shevchenko, Taras, 74
Shimonoseki, 95
Siam, 21, 55, 76, 100-101, 110, 125, 139, 164,
171-5, 180-1
Siberia, 74, 98
Siemreap, 180
Sihanouk see Norodom Sihanouk
Silesia, 20
Sinasi, Ibrahim, 75
Singapore, 93, 100, 121, 133, 166, 179, 182
Sismondi, Jean Charles Leonard Simonde de,
136
Sisowath Youtevong, 130
Sitorus, Lintong Mulia, 195
Slavonia, 20
Slovakia, 79
Smetana, Bedrich, 75
Smith, Adam, 4, 89
Smith, Anthony, xii
Socrates, 72
Sokoto, 120
Son Ngoc Thanh, 130
Sonn Voeunnsai, 130
Sonnenberg, 20
Souphanouvong, 127
South Africa, 93
Spain, xv, 33, 47, 50, 57-8, 76, 84, 115, 164,
166, 175, 188-9, 202
Sri Lanka, 12 see also Ceylon
Stalin see Djugashvili
Stein, Gertrude, 5
Steinberg, Sigfrid Henry, 43-4
Stephen, St, 109
239
I M A G I N E D C O M M U N I T I E S
Straits Settlements, 164, 169
Stuart see Anne; Charles I
Styria, 2
Subido, Trinidad, 142
Suharto, 120, 161
Sukarno, 11, 122, 177
Sulu Archipelago, 12
Sumatra, 120, 132, 165, 176
Sun Yat-sen, 125
Surakarta, 121
Suwardi Surjaningrat (Ki Hadjar Dewantoro),
117-18
Sweden, 21
Swift, Jonathan, 69
Switzerland, 33, 135-9, 156
Szechenyi, Istvn, 96
Tahiti, 152
Taiwan, 96
Tamburlaine, 69
Tannenberg, 156
Tanzania, 134
Teschen (Cieszyn), 20
Texas, 64
The Hague, 117, 121, 176
The Netherlands see Holland
Thion, Serge, 123
Thongchai Winichakul, xiv, 171-3
Ticino, 136
Tidore, 176
Tisza, Istvan, 104, 107
Tisza, Kalman, 103-5
Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo, 117
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 197
Toer see Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Tokugawa, 94
Tokyo, 95-96, 99 see also Edo
Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel, 12
Tonkin, 125-6, 129, 152
Toussaint L'Ouverture 48, 192
Transylvania, 20
Trient, 20
Trieste, 20
Trnava, 73
Trotsky, Leon (Lev Bronstein), 160
Tupac Amaru, 48, 154
Turkey, 45
Turner, Victor, 53
Tuscany, 20
Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 203
Tyrol, 20
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, xi, 1-2,
45, 108, 150, 159-61, 202 see also Russia
United Kingdom, 2, 19, 21, 56, 75, 78, 81, 95,
99, 102, 108, 123, 155-6 see also England
United States of America, xv, 14, 47, 51, 58,
64, 76, 81, 108, 118, 153, 156, 164, 188,
192-3, 202-3
Uruguay, 53, 64
Uvarov, Sergei, 87, 91, 101, 114, 159
Uwajima, 94
Valais, 136
Valignano, Alexandre de, 59
Van Dyke, J.W., 132
Van Erp, Theodoor, 179
Van Mook, Hubertus, 132
Venezuela, 48-9, 51.-3, 57, 64, 189, 192
Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC),
166-8, 180
Versailles, 83
Vespucci, Amerigo, 69
Vico, Giovanni Battista, 69
Victoria (Saxe-Coburg-Gotha), 88, 90
Vienna, xi, 72-3, 90, 103-4, 106
Vientiane, 127, 129-30
Vietnam, 1-2, 125-9, 131, 148, 155, 157-61
Villers-Cotterets, 42
Villon, Francois, 44-5
Vinh, 127
Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet), 18, 69
Vorster, Balthasar, 150
Voyvodina, 20
Wachirawut (Rama VI), 21, 100-101
Wales, 41
Warsaw, 205
Washington, D.C., 86
Washington, George, 203
Webster, Noah, 197
Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 191
Wells, Edwin, 157
Wessex, 25
West Irian, 122, 177-8 see also New Guinea
White, Hayden, 197
Wilhelm II (Hohenzollern), 85
Wilhelmina (Oranje-Nassau), 188
Willem I (Oranje-Nassau), 180
William the Conqueror, 19, 89, 109, 201
Wilsen, Frans Carel, 179
Windsor, 83
Wittenberg, 39
Woodside, Alexander, 157
Wordsworth, Wiliam, 193
Wycliffe, John, 41
Yangtze-kiang (R.), 167
Yorkshire, 89
Yueh, 157
Yugoslavia, 2, 160
Yung-lo, 189
Zambia, 134
Zanzibar, 190
Zara (Zadar), 20
Zaragoza, 57
Zimbabwe, 33
Zurich, 96
240