The concept of sovereignty refers to a state’s absolute and exclusive power to govern what happens within (and crosses over) its borders. Following a long tradition in political philosophy, Anderson deems sovereignty an important characteristic of a state.
Sovereignty Quotes in Imagined Communities
The Imagined Communities quotes below are all either spoken by Sovereignty or refer to Sovereignty. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1
Quotes
In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.
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Sovereignty Term Timeline in Imagined Communities
The timeline below shows where the term Sovereignty appears in Imagined Communities. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: Introduction
...of the nation: it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” The community “is imagined because the members […] will never know most of their fellow-members,”...
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...everyone, and so all nations are limited and recognize their borders. Moreover, nations consider themselves sovereign because, historically, they arose when political power replaced the imagined power of God. And finally,...
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Chapter 5: Old Languages, New Models
...century. An important facet of this piracy was the notion that “the ultimate locus of sovereignty” would be the people themselves—all of them—which helped account for “the ‘populist’ character of the...
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Chapter 7: The Last Wave
In Indochina—a territory that now comprises the sovereign states of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam—the ruling French remodeled the education system to distance Laos...
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Chapter 10: Census, Map, Museum
...borders were not considered as falling on “a continuous map-line” that separated one zone of sovereignty from another. Around the turn of the 20th century, a massive investment in geography education...
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...Europeans used maps to justify their rule, claiming to have legally taken over “the putative sovereignties of [defeated] native rulers.” They in turn began reconstructing historical maps of their empires, and...
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Chapter 11: Memory and Forgetting
...remember/forget” the Civil War as a conflict “between ‘brothers’ rather than between—as they briefly were—two sovereign nation-states.” And Brits learn to see a Frenchman who spoke no English—William the Conqueror—as their...
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