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according to Anderson, the origins of nationalism lay in the process of secularization. 

Nationalism, as Anderson conceives it, displaced religion in a number of critical ways. 

 

[T]he very possibility of imagining the nation only arose historically when, and where, 

three fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lost their axiomatic grip on 

men’s minds . . . the idea that a particular script language offered privileged access to 

ontological truth . . . the belief that society was naturally organized around and under 

high centres . . . [and] a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were 

indistinguishable, the origin of the world and of men [being] essentially identical. (p. 36) 

 

Rather than any political economy of uneven and combined development, ‘print-

capitalism’ and the new secular pilgrimages of the functionaries of the new centralized absolutist 

and colonial states determined the ‘shape’ and ‘kind’ of the new consciousness and community, 

making it national. Print-capitalism denoted ‘a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between 

a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications 

(print), and the fatality of human and linguistic diversity’ (p. 43). Under its impact, while Latin 

itself became ‘more Ciceronian . . . increasingly removed from ecclesiastical and everyday life’, 

vernacular print languages rose to displace Latin both in the religious and political spheres (pp. 

39–41), serving as the basis of new, smaller but much more centralized entities in the latter. The 

new vernacular print languages laid the basis for national consciousness by unifying ‘fields of 

language and communication below Latin and above spoken vernaculars’. They gave ‘a new 

fixity to language’. And they made out of dialects which were closer to the print languages 

privileged ‘languages of power’ (pp. 44–5). The first widened the community as print made 

mutually incomprehensible dialects mutually intelligible, the second laid the basis for the 

antiquity which would so often be claimed for nations and the third marginalized more distant 

dialects in ways which occasionally led to ‘sub-nationalisms’. The rise of modern centralized 

absolutist and colonial states on the other hand gave rise to ‘journeys’ which defined the extent 

and limits of the units which would come to be conceived as national. Just as pilgrims of the past 

marked the ever-expanding limits of the sacred world of religion by undertaking pilgrimages to 

distant sacred centres, so state officials now undertook journeys to and from provincial centres, 

creating the experiential basis on which the extent and limits of the new national community 

would come to be imagined.  

 

Rich as the discussion of print 

capitalism and official pilgrimages is, 

and suggestive of how cultural 

phenomena such as secularization, 

Protestantism, vernacularization, 

literacy and others contributed to the 

nationalisms of Europe, it is hardly 

surprising. One can expect cultural 

phenomena contemporaneous with the 

rise of nationalism in any part of the 

world to have been connected with the 

shaping of the national culture: much 

as, e.g., emerging religious movements 

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in India structured the participation of many communities in the Congress in the 1920s and 

1930s (Hardiman 1977) or, to take another example, radio became a carrier of nationalist 

messages beginning in the 1930s and TV frames new forms of nationalism today – whether in 

Thailand, India or the former Soviet Republics.   

 

 

Although they were originally ‘unselfconscious processes’, Anderson suggested, these 

Euroamerican developments soon crystallized into ‘formal models to be imitated, and, where 

expedient, consciously exploited in a Machiavellian spirit’ (p. 45). American nationalists 

pioneered a model which, by the second decade of the 19th century at the latest (p. 81), was 

available for imitation and ‘piracy’. Later nationalisms were able to work from visible models 

provided by their distant, and after the convulsions of the French Revolution, not too distant, 

predecessors. The ‘nation’ thus became something capable of being consciously aspired to from 

early on, rather than a slowly sharpening frame of vision. Indeed, as we shall see, the ‘nation’ 

proved an invention on which it was impossible to secure a patent. It became available for 

pirating by widely different, and sometimes unexpected, hands. (p. 67)  

 

The ‘last wave’ of decolonized nations which would have been critical to any project of ‘de-

Europeanizing’ theories of nationalism became, in IC ‘incomprehensible except in terms of the 

succession of models we have been considering’. Their retention of European languages of state 

resembled the American model, their populism, the European and their ‘Russifying’ policy 

orientation, the official Model (p. 113). The bilingualism of its elites ‘meant access, through the 

European language-of state, to modern Western culture in the broadest sense, and, in particular, 

to the models of nationalism, nation-ness, and nation-state produced elsewhere in the course of 

the 19th century (p. 116). How Anderson’s largely Eurocentric discussion, not to mention the 

idea that non-European nationalisms were modelled on Western models served to ‘de-

Europeanize’ the study of nationalism is hard to fathom. Rather than de-Europeanising the study 

of nationalism, this was surely adding an extra, hefty, layer of Eurocentrism.   

 

The implication of Anderson’s argument is that while there is 

a sociology of nationalism for Europe, there need not be one for the 

Third World because countries in it were merely imitating, nay 

‘pirating’, pre-fabricated models. This would certainly seem 

insulting if one considered it to be true. Partha Chatterjee, for one, 

decided to take offence at Anderson’s implication that Third World 

nationalism was merely ‘derivative’ (Chatterjee 1986). He needn’t 

have: Anderson’s argument would only work if Third World 

societies were clean slates onto which Westernized nationalist intellectuals could write Western 

stories of nationalism, if they had no sociologies of their own which might resist and complicate 

such attempts.  

 

The second edition seemed to abandon the idea of the imitation and piracy of ‘models’ 

altogether, because, ‘a brilliant doctoral thesis by Thongchai Winichakul, a young Thai 

historian’, stimulated Anderson to think about space, mapping and the role of the colonial state 

in both (p. xiv). The addition of a new chapter on the ‘census, map and museum’ corrected 

Anderson’s ‘short-sighted assumption . . . that official nationalism in the colonized worlds of 

Asia and Africa was modelled directly on that of the dynastic state of nineteenth-century 

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