Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

The world-famous work on the origins and development of nationalism

The full magnitude of Benedict Anderson’s intellectual achievement is still being appreciated and debated. Imagined Communities remains the most influential book on the origins of nationalism, filling the vacuum that previously existed in the traditions of Western thought. Cited more often than any other single English-language work in the human sciences, it is read around the world in more than thirty translations.

Written with exemplary clarity, this illuminating study traces the emergence of community as an idea to South America, rather than to nineteenth-century Europe. Later, this sense of belonging was formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, through print, literature, maps and museums. Following the rise and conflict of nations and the decline of empires, Anderson draws on examples from South East Asia, Latin America and Europe’s recent past to show how nationalism shaped the modern world.

• Nations and Nationalism (New Perspectives on the Past)
• Orientalism
• Digital Community, Digital Citizen
• Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Second Edition: Programme, Myth, Reality (Canto Classics)
• Political Order in Changing Societies (The Henry L. Stimson Lectures Series)
• Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence & Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley
• The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations
• Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach
• Culture and Imperialism
• Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914