Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Imagined Communities, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Nation as Imagined Community
Language, Publishing, and Identity
Centralization, Technology, and Power
Piracy and the Uses of History
Summary
Analysis
Anderson finds two things distinctive about the states that formed in the Americas during the 18th and 19th centuries: they shared a language with their colonizers and their independence movements were led by wealthy elites, not by the masses. In fact, these elites were worried about violent rebellion from the masses, especially enslaved and indigenous people, rather than sympathetic to their grievances. Many leaders of the independence movements in Venezuela and the United States, for example, were motivated by a desire to preserve slavery, which European powers were beginning to turn against.
Anderson makes these two observations because they both show a difference between most people’s theoretical picture of a nation and the way that the first nations actually formed. While citizens and philosophers might imagine that a nation is supposed to be distinguished by its language and run by its common working people, neither of these was actually true of the first nation-states, which were about an elite class seizing power from another elite that was merely more powerful and more distant. This implies that Anderson is skeptical of so many nations’ claim to be created by and for the people—although this could certainly be the case in some situations and is clearly a valuable goal.
Themes
And yet it is still notable that these colonized elites started thinking in national terms before anyone in Europe. In the Spanish Empire, two well-known reasons were the monarchy’s increasingly strict policies and the “rapid and easy transmission of” European philosophies to the Americas. In part as a result, every Latin American country but Brazil immediately formed a republic upon independence, taking the United States and France as models. But the aforementioned reasons do not sufficiently explain the remarkable formation of so many distinct states in the Americas, nor the fact that due to independence “the upper creole classes […] were financially ruined” in the short term (although independence surely benefited them in the long term).
Although Anderson was merely following chronology, his argument faced significant opposition in late 20th century European and American academia, which were reluctant to admit that something as important as nationalism might have started outside of Europe, or even with nonwhite people. (Anderson’s point implies that, in some sense, the achievements of European nations are derivative of those of the American nations whose revolutions they copied.) Anderson emphasizes that European Enlightenment thinkers had a significant influence on these “New World” movements, but for him it is clear that Europe actually represented the previous political form—empires ruled by monarchs—and was resistant to nationalism until much later.
Themes
Anderson thinks the real explanation for the quick rise of national identity in each newly-independent segment of Spanish territory was that each of these areas was an administratively independent colony. Divided by difficult terrain, long distances, and a prohibition on trading with any territorial entity but Spain—including one another—the various colonies quickly developed senses of their own distinctiveness. But this is not all.
Anderson sees a continuity in the scale of territorial governance between the Spanish empire and the independent states that formed in its wake: in some sense, postcolonial states were able to take advantage of the political apparatuses and identities formed by the colonial process. Especially when combined with the fact that most Latin American revolutions were led by the elite, this means that readers should not assume there was a radical break between colonial and postcolonial political or administrative structures.
Themes
Another important factor in the rise of independent states in Latin America is “the ways in which administrative organizations create meaning.” Anderson looks at esteemed anthropologist Victor Turner’s analysis of the journey, using the pilgrimage as a prototypical kind of journey. Pilgrimages serve to unify religious communities: for example, on a pilgrimage to the holy city Mecca, “Malays, Persians, Indians, Berbers and Turks” meet one another and realize that they are united by all being Muslims. This is just like bureaucrats’ journey from their homes to the capital. When they arrive, they meet fellow bureaucrats from other parts of the country, ask “Why are we … here … together?,” and gain a sense of collective identity as members of the same country, empire, or nation.
Again, Anderson emphasizes the narrative and cultural dimensions of political power and draws an explicit comparison between nationalism and religion. His analysis of the pilgrimage combines the insight that nations are imagined and the historical fact that creole elites led the American revolutions: colonialism forced these creole elites to travel and then imagine themselves as unified because of the fact that they all traveled in the same way, to the same place, for the same reason.
Themes
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Even though they were culturally identical to Spaniards, creole bureaucrats born in Spain’s Latin American colonies were prohibited from rising to posts beyond their own colonies’ capitals. For example, a creole from Peru could get work in the local capital Lima, but never in Madrid. This meant identity formed not on the level of the empire as a whole, but rather on that of individual colonies, with creoles born in the same colony able to collectively lament their shared subjugation to the Spanish. The creoles were an important class because they at once held significant power as their colonies’ ruling classes, helped Spain control and exploit local native populations, and were subjugated to Spain itself. Around the globe, white creoles also intermarried and had children with locals, creating a mixed-race population. This worried European overlords, who responded with an emphatic racism that also conveniently facilitated the global growth of slavery.
Anderson sees this policy of limited bureaucratic mobility as another important factor that determined the scale of postcolonial nations: “creole” (European-descended but colonial-born) elites from different colonies were unlikely to interact, and those from various rural provinces would congregate in the capital, which they came to understand as the center of their area (the territory that would later proclaim independence). The creoles’ indeterminate or liminal status between Europeans and natives contributed to their role in the revolution because they both believed they had a right to rule and exploit natives as did the Spanish and felt they were deprived of this right. In other words, they wanted an equal right to oppress the masses. Again, this allows Anderson to emphasize that, while American nationalisms were certainly not condoned by European monarchies or aristocracies, they were still fundamentally elitist and self-serving movements at first.
Themes
In the Spanish colonies in the Americas, printing presses “remained under the tight control of crown and church” until the end of the 1600s. The next century, however, saw a rapid expansion of independent newspapers, which initially “began essentially as appendages of the market.” Information was newsworthy if it spoke to the economic interests of the elite who participated in “the colonial administration and market-system.” A newspaper thus “created an imagined community among […] fellow-readers.” Moreover, readers in one Latin American city seldom read newspapers from others, and this news from elsewhere took a long time to arrive.
The newspapers both created possibilities for revolution within each Spanish colony and, through their limited regional circulations, divided these colonies from one another, helping each construct a separate identity that eventually became the basis for its claim to independence. In other words, like administrative pilgrimages, newspapers helped fix the scale on which nationalism formed. Again, Anderson shows that the precursors to national imagined communities were imagined communities of bourgeois readers who followed the news because it concerned their personal and collective interests.
Themes
Anderson concludes that this specific configuration of “capitalism and technology”—developed locally, but never integrated across the empire—prevented “a permanent Spanish-America-wide nationalism” from emerging. The British colonies that became the United States offer a contrasting example. Their total area was tiny—“smaller than Venezuela, and one third the size of Argentina”—and their principal cities, full of avid readers and merchants, were “bunched geographically together.” As a result, the thirteen colonies easily developed a collective identity and unified sense of nationalism. To close the chapter, Anderson summarizes his argument: independence movements in the Americas from 1760-1830 took “plural, ‘national’ forms” because capitalism and technology allowed specific imagined communities to develop in each territory. “Economic interest, Liberalism, [and] Enlightenment” were not enough to set the scales and borders of these imagined communities, although they played an important part in convincing the colonies to revolt against empires.
Anderson’s contrasting example of the United States reinforces his theory that nations in former colonies emerged on the scale of existing economic, administrative, and technological integration, because all these tools defined the communities imagined by those living within these territories. He contrasts these factors to “Economic interest, Liberalism, [and] Enlightenment” because those three are based on explicit, rational thought, not on a sense of community with others. Instead, imagined communities exist prior to these rational calculations, in many cases as foundation on which they can function—economic goals, individual rights, and equality became important guiding principles for a group that was already defined from the outset.
Themes
