At the heart of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is the insight that one of the most powerful forces in modern history, nationalism, is built on imagination. Published in 1983, this book has become one of the most influential works in the study of nationalism, yet its arguments remain as urgent and contested today as they were four decades ago. This book has fundamentally changed how I think about nations and identity.
Anderson opens with the provocation that nobody really knows what “nation,” “nationality,” or “nationalism” actually means. Despite nationalism’s overwhelming popularity, the fact that every successful revolution since WWII has defined itself in national terms, the UN being our most important IGO, scholars struggle to explain its power. This raises the question of why exactly people die for their nations.
Anderson’s answer is bracingly direct, arguing that they are dying for an idea. A nation, he writes, is “an imagined political community” and “imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” This isn’t to say nations are false, but rather that any community larger than a village must be imagined because most citizens will never meet each other face to face. Thus, what matters is how we imagine these communities.
This seemingly simple idea is Anderson’s “Copernican” moment, a complete reorientation of how we understand nationalism. Just as Copernicus forced humanity to reconsider its place in the cosmos, Anderson forces us to reconsider the nation not as an ancient entity but as a distinctly modern cultural artefact. This insight immediately rang true to me, and thinking about countries where the majority of residents are expats, confirmed this. Despite living out of their ‘nation’, expats still feel national belonging viscerally, carrying these invisible communities and cultural values with them.
However, Anderson’s almost dismissiveness toward religion does trouble me. He positions nationalism as filling the void left by religion’s decline, yet he doesn’t really address how the two can coexist. In much of the Middle East and South Asia, religion hasn’t declined at all, and religious and national identities stay intertwined. Pakistan’s founding ideology fused Islam with territorial nationalism, while Hindu nationalism in India relies on religious identity to define the nation. The Muslim Ummah also hasn’t disappeared, and it remains a powerful imagined community that sometimes reinforces or can conflict with national identity.
Print Capitalism
One of Anderson’s main arguments traces nationalism’s origins to the business of publishing and selling books. When printing technology met capitalism in the 1500s, publishers, seeking profit, initially flooded the Latin-language market. However, because that market was small, they turned to vernacular languages, printing in the languages people actually spoke.
This wasn’t a nationalist project initially, but it had revolutionary consequences. Print capitalism unified scattered dialects into common languages, gave languages a new stability as they didn’t evolve like hand-copied manuscripts, and it created what Anderson calls “languages of power” as certain dialects gained prestige. Perhaps most importantly, newspapers created a new form of community. When thousands of people read about the same events in the same language at roughly the same time, they begin to imagine themselves as connected. People who read the same texts began to identify as part of an invisible community of fellow readers. This argument is extremely compelling as it appreciates the economic base while also showing how it shaped national consciousness. This explains so much about why nationalism took the forms it did and why language became so central to many nations.
However, this raises the question of how nationalism spread to illiterate populations, who made up the majority in many societies. Anderson hints at this but doesn’t fully explore it. In many places, national consciousness came into everyday life through oral transmission and visual images. Newspapers were often read aloud in markets, mosques, gurdwaras or village squares, meaning people who could not read still had a shared sense of community events. During Partition, for instance, many villagers relied on others to read aloud news about boundary decisions or violence in other regions. The spread of printed maps reproduced in newspapers and later on posters also taught people to imagine their village as a place within a clearly defined national territory. These oral and visual channels show that print capitalism influenced even the illiterate, integrating them into the imagined community through participation in a shared narrative, not just reading.
Were Nations Really Born in Europe?
Anderson challenges conventional wisdom, arguing nationalism didn’t begin in Europe but began in the Americas, specifically with the independence movements in North and South America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This matters because these Creole nationalists weren’t distinguished from their colonisers by language, religion, or ethnicity. Spanish-speaking Catholics in Buenos Aires rebelled against Spanish-speaking Catholics in Madrid, revealing that nationalism doesn’t have to be primarily about language or even religion, despite what many later European nationalists claimed. Evidently, nationalism is about imagining a political community within particular territorial boundaries, often determined by colonial administrative divisions. The colonies already existed as distinct units with their own “pilgrimage” systems, which were patterns of movement and communication that bound elites together, and these became the foundations for nationalist imagination.
Anderson traces nationalism through three waves. The first, in the Americas, created the original model. The second, in 19th-century Europe, saw nationalism intertwined with language and print capitalism standardised dialects into national languages, creating linguistic communities. This period also saw “official nationalisms,” where rulers used nationalist rhetoric to legitimise their authority. The third wave came after World War II, as Asian and African colonies fought for independence. Bilingual elites combined populist mobilisation with administrative centralisation to tailor nationalism to their societies’ unique histories and colonial experiences.
Yet, Anderson’s concept of nationalism as “modular” and a model that could be “pirated” and adapted by different groups is powerful but also problematic. While the American and French Revolutions provided examples of nationalist politics, to describe post-colonial movements as “pirating” these models risks stripping them of their agency. Vietnamese, Indian, Indonesian, and Chinese nationalists did not simply copy but innovated in response to their historical and cultural circumstances. This created unprecedented forms of national identity from local conditions, languages, and struggles. This critique highlights a tension in Anderson’s framework between the idea of modularity and the creativity of post-colonial nationalisms.
In the revised edition, Anderson directly engages with this criticism by shifting focus from European models to colonial institutions themselves. He argues that the “shape” of post-colonial nations, such as their boundaries and ethnic categories, was shaped by the legacies of colonial institutions: the census, the map, and the museum. Censuses categorised populations into rigid racial and ethnic groups, maps transformed lived geography into bounded territories and symbols of national identity, and museums codified culture as “national” heritage. Anderson stresses that these institutions were not neutral because they structured how people imagined themselves as part of a nation. This makes the nation both real and imaginable simultaneously. Importantly, he notes that post-colonial elites inherited these tools, but they adapted and reinterpreted them to suit local political and social needs.
This revision/addition adds depth to Anderson’s argument, showing that nationalism operates through both imaginative and structural mechanisms. Anderson is clearly grappling with the limitations of his original argument as in 1983, he claimed post-colonial nationalisms were “modelled directly on that of the dynastic states of nineteenth-century Europe” but by 1991, he recognised this was at least insufficient. His argument now balances the original insights about print, language, and modularity with an understanding of post-colonial realities. While the “piracy” concept risks underplaying agency, the revised analysis shows Anderson’s recognition of how nationalist imagination is shaped by inherited structures while also leaving room for post-colonial adaptation.
The Existential Dimension
Anderson’s attention to nationalism’s existential function also interested me. After the Enlightenment, as religious certainty waned, nationalism helped to fill the void. Religion had promised continuity through an afterlife and set people’s lives within a fated narrative, and nationalism offered something similar. Nationalism offered continuity through the nation’s immortality, allowing people to participate in a project larger than oneself. This helps explain nationalism’s emotional power and why people will die for nations. The nation, like family and religious communities invokes “deep, horizontal comradeship”. Anderson captures this sense of “fatality” as national belonging feels natural, primordial, even though it is a modern and constructed concept.
Yet national attachment is not only emotional but also is material. People sacrifice for nations because they provide protection, welfare, economic opportunities, and legal rights. Anderson’s focus on the cultural dimension is real but incomplete without recognising the nation’s material promises. His comparison to religion also reveals a blind spot. The willingness to sacrifice isn’t unique to nationalism as it’s characteristic of any deeply held commitment that provides existential meaning. What needs explaining isn’t why nationalism inspires sacrifice, but why this particular form of community became so dominant globally. Anderson’s focus on culture sometimes obscures the political economy of nationalism. Leaders like Nehru and Sukarno understood nationalism as fundamentally about development and sovereignty, not just cultural identity.
My thoughts
Imagined Communities changed how we think about one of modernity’s most powerful forces. By revealing nationalism’s constructed, modern origins, Anderson has helped us understand its importance better. Nations are real because people believe in them and pour their hopes, fears, and dreams into them. Understanding them as imagined communities is the first step toward imagining them, and perhaps imagining beyond them. In the end, Anderson leaves us with the idea that nationalism is both universal and specific, both modern and claiming antiquity and both rational and emotional. It’s this complexity that makes it so enduring and so important to resist simple stories about nations and nationalism, instead consistently interrogating what we imagine when we imagine our communities.
What makes Imagined Communities essential despite some of its limitations is that it forced a generation of people to take nationalism seriously as a cultural and political phenomenon rather than dismissing it as false consciousness or a natural given. The revised edition’s addition also shows Anderson’s willingness to revise and deepen his argument in response to criticism, which I really appreciated.
telling tales 