Imagined Communities

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.