Inventing Nations

“Before the nineteenth century, ‘the nation’ was not usually the context or object of Western historical writing.”

“Most of the countries on today’s world maps did not exist a hundred years ago: they secured independence within boundaries initially drawn by Western imperialists whose own nations resulted from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolutionary movements.”

“you knew you were Dutch in the sixteenth century because you loathed the Spaniards, British in the eighteenth century because you despised the French.”

“that state power should represent the collective will of a particular population or ‘citizenry’ that lived within the borders of a large, well-defined territory.”

“leading historians in various parts of the West published classic works of national history built around the premise that their country’s past illustrated the advent of admirable values and ideals embodied in its people.”

“It was natural, if not inevitable, for the first generations of ‘professional’ historians to focus on, and usually celebrate, the history of their respective nations.”

“the author will remain close to the racially kindred nations of either purely Germanic or Latin-Germanic origin whose history forms the heart of all modern history.”

“soldiers marched off in a haze of patriotic fervor, and almost nobody questioned the need to slaughter fellow Europeans or the glory of a battlefield death.”

“Extreme nationalism was tainted in the mid-twentieth century by its association with murderously repressive regimes in Spain, Italy, Japan, and especially Germany. And in subsequent decades, critics of the West began to point out that standard concepts of the nation and nationalism were Euro-American inventions arbitrarily imposed upon colonized peoples.”

“what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices?”

“it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”

“Nationalism might be visceral and idealistic, Anderson argues, but it grew out of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technological and commercial developments such as the ‘print capitalism’ that gave us the daily national newspaper. Readers who consume the same information, the same day, in a language particular to their country, are constantly made aware of the existence of others to whom they are virtually connected by such time- and space-bound rituals.”

“with the decline of religion as a way of explaining broader public and historical forces, membership in a ‘nation,’ with a particular, redemptive destiny, became a way of linking random individual fates to a larger purpose, of ‘creating links between the dead and the yet unborn.’”

“In Europe and America most of the major symbols of national belonging—flags, national capitals, anthems, monuments, and commemorative holidays—date from the last quarter of the nineteenth century”

“Let the national flag float over every schoolhouse in the country and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our youth the patriotic duties of American citizenship.”

“the earliest forms of modern nationalism were forged in North and South America in opposition to British and Spanish metropolitan power, and the latest, in twentieth-century Africa and Southeast Asia as part of a complicated dynamic of imitation and repudiation of foreign colonizers.”

“The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, but also that they have forgotten many things.”

“Since professional historical scholarship came of age in the heyday of European imperialism, that continent’s history from the start served as a yardstick and model not only for Euro-American historians but their counterparts in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.”

“If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?”

“There is a significant price to pay, however, for thinking outside of ‘the nation’ and ‘modernity’: it entails letting go of familiar stories (the ‘rise,’ ‘development,’ or ‘triumph’ of . . .), and possibly of any all-encompassing stories about the past whatsoever.”