1
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 o f-.;. according to taste - 'so cial imp erialism,'
'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
another,1 China's assault on Vietnam inFebruary 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 C O MM U N ITIES
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
regtmes.
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.2
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 1 971. 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
I N TR O D U C T I O N
that this trend will not continue.
,3 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
t() the scarcely less vast tradition of Marxist ..historiography and social
science, candidly remarks: 'The theory of nationalism represents
Marxism's great historical failure.'s 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 ofBritain" " 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 ofBritain as chapter 9 (pp. 329--
63).
3
IMAGINED C O M M UNITIES
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 KemiHiinen 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
INTRO D U C T I O N
CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS
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)
and largely incurable.'8
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, 1 propose the following
8. The Break-up of Britain, p. 359.
5
IMAGINED C O M M U NITIE S
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 'Or l'essence d'une nation
est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, et
aussi que tous aient oubliebien des choses.do 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
where they do not exist.' 1 1 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. C£ 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 franc;ais doit avoir oublie la Saint-Barthelemy, les massacres du Midi
an XIIle siecle. I1 n'y a pas en France dix families qui puissent fournir la preuve d'une
origine franque . . .'
11. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change, p. 169. Emphasis added.
6
INTR O D U CTI O N
imagined this way only very late.12 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 Duc 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 ofa 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 ofthis
freedom is the sovereign state.
Finally, itis 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 ofpeople, not so muchto 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 0[23,000,000. (See his The Age ofRevolution, p. 78) . Butwould
this statistical picture of the noblesse have been imaginable under the ancien regime?
7
BU-N---K- - l":>A--- -'E- - --- -
-
--
_> .,� lL. (.1i·- -
2
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.1 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 orinsisted
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.2 (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 lowe 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 C O M M U N ITIES
tombs without feeling any need to specify the nationality of their
absent occupants. What else could they be but Germans, Americans,
A
. .
?)rgentlnlans . . . .
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.3 At
He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and his achievements.' Douglas
MacArthur, 'Duty, Honour, Country,' Address to the u.s. Military Academy, West
Point, May 12, 1 962, in his A Soldier Speaks, pp. 354 and 357.
3. C£ 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
1 960s 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
CUL TURAL R O O T S
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 inWestern 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-centuryJavanese 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 ofSoutheast Asia,
p. 158; and Ann Kumar, 'Diponegoro (1778?-1855),' Indonesia, 13 (April 1 972) , p. 103.
1 1
IMAGINED C O MMUNIT IE S
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 bornFrench; 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 RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY
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 Atattirk 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
C U LTURAL R O O T S
central - were imaginable large ly through the medium of a sacred
language and written script. Take only the example of Islam: if
Maguindanao met Berbers in·Mecca, knowing nothing o f each other's
languages, incapable ofcommunicating .orally, they nonetheless understo
od each other's ideographs, because the sacre d texts they shared
e xisted only in class ical Arabic. I n this sense, written Arabic functioned
like Chinese characters to create a community o ut ofsigns, not sounds.
(So to day 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 clas sical communities conceived
of themselves as cosmically central, through the medium of a
sacred language linke d 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 s peec h - the better: in principle everyone has access
to a pure world of signs.)
Yet suc h classical communities linked by sacred Janguages had a
character dis tinct from the imagined communities of modern natio ns.
One crucial difference was the older communities' confidence in the
unique sacredness of their languages, and thus their ideas about
admiss ion to membershi p. Chinese mandarins looked with ap pro val
on barbarians who painfully learned to paint M iddle Kingdom
ideo grams. These barbarians were already halfway to full absorpt ion.5
Half-c ivilized was vastly better than barbarian. Such an attitude was
certainly not peculiar to the Chinese, nor confined to antiquity.
Consider, for example, the follo wing 'policy on b arbarians' formulated
by the early-nineteenth-century Colombian liberal Pedro Fermin 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 C O M M U N ITIES
the whites) declaring themfree oj 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 differentFermin'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.7
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 lowe to Judith Herrin.
14
C U L T URAL R O O T S
nationalism, the impulse towards conversion. By conversion, I mean
not so much the acceptance ofparticular 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
Volaptik, 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 Popes 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.
1o 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 ofa 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 C O MMU NITIE S
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
possible forms of human life.'1 1 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
at the end of the thirteenth century:1 2
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
regardJesus Christ as their divinity; the Saracens, Mahomet; theJews,
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 ifMarco Polo, pp. 158-59. Emphases added. Notice
that, though kissed, the Evangel is not read.
1 6
C U L T U RAL R O O T S
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 greaf
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 so vereign that has heretofore been or that now is in the
world.
,
)13 And in the unselfconsciou s 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 ofa territorialization offaiths
which foreshadows· the language of many nationalists ('our' nation is
'the best' - in a competitive, comparative fielJ) .
What a. re vealing contrast is pro vided 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 ojMarco Polo, p. 152.
14. Henri de Montesquieu, Persian Letters, p. 81. The Lettres Persanes first appeared
in 1721 .
1 7
IMAGINED C O M M U NITIES
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
language in which teaching was done, it was the only language taught. ,1S
(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 1 501 all but 8 were in Latin, after 1575 a
majority were always inFrench.17 Despite a temporary come-back
during the Counter-Refonnation, 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-
1 678) 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.18 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 (1596-1 650) and Pascal (1623-1 662), 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.
1 8
C U LT URAL R O O T S
enterprise.
,20 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 DYNAS T IC REALM
These days it is perhaps difficult to put oneself empathetically into a
world in which the dynastic realm appeared for most me
'
n 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
sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another.21 Hence, paradoxically
enough, the ease with which pre-modern empires and
kingdoms were able to sustain their rule over immensely heterogeneous,
and often not even contiguous, populations for long periods of
. 22tIme.
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 ron edite de moins en moins d'ouvrages en latin, et une proportion
touj ours plus grande de textes en langue nationale, Ie 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. 136£). Still, it is difficult to imagine such a bargain being
19
IMAG INED C O M M U N ITIES
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 aliiJ
tuftlix Austria nube! Here,
in somewhat abbreviated fonn, is the later dynasts' titulature.
23
Emperor of Austria; King of Hungary, of Bohemia, of Dalmatia,
Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria, and Illyria; King ofJerusalem,
etc; Archduke ofAustria [sic]; Grand Duke ofTuscany and Cracow;
Duke of Loth[a]ringia, of Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and
Bukovina; Grand Duke ofTransylvania, Margrave ofMoravia; Duke
of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza, and
Guastella, of Ausschwitz and Sator, of Teschen, Friaul, Ragusa,
and Zara; Princely Count ofHabsburg and Tyrol, ofKyburg, 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 ofdivinity, from, shall we say, miscegenation?24 For such
struck between the aristocracies oftwo republics. The conception ofa 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 AhnentaJel 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
C U L TURAL R O O T S
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 (ifthen); and what 'nationality' are we to assign to the
, , 25
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 ofPope 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
XVI, in EnlightenedFrance till the end ofthe ancien regime.26 But after
1789 the principle ofLegitimacy 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 ofthe worldmodel.
In 1887, he instituted the requisite principle of succession-bylegal-primogeniture,
thus bringing Siam 'into line with the "civilized"
monarchies of Europe.
,27 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
28
Japan!
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, 1 868-1910,'
PhD thesis� Cornell 1 974, p. 270.
28. Stephen Greene, 'Thai Government and Administration in the Reign of
Rama VI (1 910-1925),' PhD thesis, University of London 1 971, p. 92.
2 1
IMA GINED C O MMUNITIE S
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 ofFrederick the Great (r. 1740-1786) were
heavily staffed by 'foreigners', those of his great-nephewFriedrich
Wilhelm III (r. 1797-1840) were, as a result of Scharnhorst's, Gneisenau's
and Clausewitz's spectacular reforms, exclusively 'nationalP
. ,29rUSSIan.
APPREHENSIONS 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 ofthe 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 ofMilitarism, pp. 64 and 85.
22
C U LTURAL R O OTS
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 '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
present.30 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 ofFreising to refer repeatedly to 'we
who have been placed at the end of time.' Bloch concludes that as
soon as mediaeval rnen 'gave themselves up to meditation, nothing
was farther from their thoughts than the prospect of a long future for
d '
. . h . ,31a young an vIgorous uman race.
Auerbach gives an unforgettable sketch of this form of conscious-
32
ness:
30. For us, the idea of 'modern dress,' a metaphorical equivalencing of past with
present, is. a backhanded .recognition of their fatal separation.
3 1 . Bloch, Feudal Society, I, pp. 84-86.
32. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 64. Emphasis added. Compare St. Augustine's description
ofthe Old Testament as 'the shadow of [i.e. cast backwards by] the future.' Cited in
Bloch, Feudal Society, I, p. 90.
23
IMAGINED C O MMUNITIE S
Ifan 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 arelinked 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 ofhistory and supplythe key to
its understanding . .. . the here and now is no longer a mere link in an
earthly chain ofevents, it is simultaneously something which has always
been, and will be fulfilled in the future; and strictly, in the eyes ofGod, it
is something eternal, something omnitemporal, something already
consummated in the realm of fragmentary earthly event.
He rightly stresses that such an idea ofsimultaneity is wholly alien to our
own. It views time as something close to what Benjamin calls Messianic
time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present.
33
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 ofthe 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
CUL TURAL R O O T S
Europe in the eighteenth century: the novel and the newspaper?5
Por
these forms provided the technical means for 're-presenting' 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 oftime-chartfor
this segment as follows:
Time:
Events:
I
A· quarrels with B
C and · D make love
II III
A telephones C D gets drunk in a bar
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
right?6 What then actually links A to D? Two comple,mentary
conceptions: First, that they are embedded in 'societies'< (Wessex,
Lubeck, 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 becoming
acquainted, and still be connected.37 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
modem 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, ll, and IlI on A, B, C and D not
knowing what the others are up to.
37. .This polyphony decisively marks offthe modem novel even from so brilliant a
forerunner as Petronius's Satyricon. Its narrative proceeds single file. IfEncblpius bewails
his young lover's faithlessness, we are not simultaneously shown Gito in bed with
Ascyltus.
25
IMAGINED C O M M'U NITIES
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
down (or up) history.39 An American will never meet, or even know
the names of more than a handful of his 240,OOO,OOO-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 ofFilipino Nationalism',
Jose Rizal, wrote the novel Noli Me Tangere, which today is regarded as
the greatest achievement of modernFilipino literature. It was also
almost the first novel written by an 'Indio.
,4o 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 ['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
C U L TURAL R O O T S
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 ofa 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 multipliesin 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
rightfrom the start the image (wholly newto 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 ofa
particulardecade,immediatelyconjures uptheimagined community� And
inthe phrase 'a houseonAnloagueStreet' which 'weshalldescribe in sucha
way that it may still be recognized,' the would-be recognizers are weFilipino;...readers.
The casual progression of this house from the 'interior'
timeofthenoveltothe 'exterior' time ofthe [Manila] reader' s everyday life
gives a hypnotic confirmalion· of the solidity of a single community,
embracing characters, author and readers, moving onward through
calendrical 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' (multiplica).
27
IMAGINED C O MMUNITIES
idea of his readers' individual identities, hewrites 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 moreFoucauldian 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 Cahari4ng
Albania [The Story ofFlorante and Laura in the Kingdom of Albania],
the first printed edition ofwhich dates from 1 861 , though it may have
been composed as early as 1 838.44For 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 1 880s. 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 ofFlorante'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 1 860s. See Bienvenido L.
Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry 1570-1898, Tradition and Influences in its Development, pp.
35, 93.
44. Ibid. , p. 115.
45. Ibid. , p. 1 20.
28
C U L T URAL R O O T S
Aladin.46 The 'spoken flashback' was for Balagtas the only alternative
to. a straightforward single-file narrative. If we learn ofFlorante's and
Aladin's 'simultaneous' pasts, they are connected by their conversing
voices, not by the structure ofthe 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, asicie 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 EZ 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
content:49
From the first, [the hero, the Itching Parrot] is exposed to bad
influences ·- ignorant ··maids inculcate superstitions, his mother indulges
his whims, histeachers either have no vocation ar 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. r have
slightly altered his Tagalog text to conform to a 1 973 edition of the poern based on
the 186 1 imprint.
48. Jean Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, p. 34.
49. Ibid., pp. 35-36. Emphasis added.
29
IMAGINED C O MM U N ITIES
discipline him. And though his father is an intelligent man who wants
his son to practise a useful trade rather than swell the ranks oflawyers
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 againwe see the 'nationalimagination' atworkin the movement ofa
solitary hero through a sociologicallandscape ofa fixitythatfuses the world
inside the novel with the world outside. This picaresque tour d'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 thanthe succession ofplurals. Fortheyconjureup asocialspace 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 ofthis 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
Marco Kartodikromo,51 published serially in 1924:52
50. This movement of a solitary hero through an adamantine social landscape is
typical of many early (anti-)colonial novels.
5 1 . 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
C U LTURAL R O O T S
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. Becausethe 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 oftraffic, 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 ofhorses' 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 blewfrom 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. . Al1 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
1 890-1 932) ou L'Educatiort Politique,' p. 208, in Litteratures contemporaines de l'Asie du
Sud�Est. A brilliant recent full-length account ofMarco's career can be found in Takashi
Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism inJavaJ 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.
3 1
IMA GINED C O MM U N ITIE S
directed at the social system which gave rise to such poverty, while
making a small group of people wealthy.
Here, as in EI 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 ofus may well have walked those 'sticky'
Semarang roads. Once again, a solitary hero isjuxtaposed 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 'our
young man'. Precisely the clumsiness and literary naivety of the text
confinn the unselfconscious 'sincerity' of this pronominal adjective.
Neither Marco nor his readers have any doubts about the reference. Ifin
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 ofreaders ofIndonesian,
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 ifpolylingual Dutch colonial censors couldjoin
his readership, they are excluded from this 'oumess,' 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
imagines it from the print in a newspaper.53 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 1 924, a close friend and political ally ofMarco 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 ofthe meaning
ofthe word " socialism" : nonetheless he feels a profound malaise in the face ofthe 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
C U L T URAL R O O T S
fiction, for, ifwe now turn to the newspaper as cultural product, we will
be struck by its profound fictiveness. What is the essential literary
convention ofthe newspaper? Ifwe were to look at a sample frontpage
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 ofeach other or ofwhat the
others are up to. The arbitrariness of their inclusion andjuxtaposition (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 ofthe 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 ofthe Book, p. 1 86. 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 1 10 towns, ofwhich 50 were in today's Italy, 30 in Germany, 9 in
France, 8 each in Holland and Spain, S each in Belgium and Switzerland, 4 in England,
2 in Bohemia, and 1 in Poland. 'From that date it may be said ofEurope that the printed
book was in universal use.' (p . 1 82) .
33
IMAGINED CO MMU NITIES
150,000,000 and 200,000,000.56 'From early on . . . 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
printing concerns were operating everywhere in all [sic] Europe.
,57 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 1 00 workers in each shop . Ibid. ,
p. 1 2 5 .
5 8 . This is one point solidly made amidst the vagaries of Marshall McLuhan's
Gutenberg Galaxy (p. 125) . One might add that ifthe book market was dwarfed by the
markets in other commodities, its strategic role in the dissemination ofideas 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 Encyclopedie numbered no more than 4,250. The average eighteenthcentury
run was less than 2,000. Febvre and Martin, The Coming oj the Book, pp.
2 1 8-20. 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?61 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.62 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,
imagined community can be .envisioned?63 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 Hitamshows, the two kinds ofbest-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 anyone 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 C O M M U NITIES
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 ofthe specific origins ofnationalism,
it may be useful to recapitulate the main propositions put forward thus
far. Essentially, I have been arguing that the very possibility ofimagining
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 ofthe 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.
3 6
3
The Origins of
NationalConsciousness
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 bec'ome 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 1500,1 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.
2
If, as
Febvre and Martin believe, possibly as many as 200,000,000 volumes
had been manufactured by 1 600, 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 remainedlargely unknown till its
first printing in 1559. Polo, Travels, p. xiii.
3. Quoted in Eisenstein, 'Some Conjectures,' p. 56.
37