Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

why was it precisely creole communities that developed so early conceptions of their nation-ness – well before most of Europe?

change in the character of Latin itself.

older Latin was not arcane because of its subject matter or style, but simply because it was written at all, i.e. because of its status as text. Now it became arcane because of what was written, because of the language-in-itself.

These print-languages laid the bases for national consciousnesses in three distinct ways. First and foremost, they created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars.

limited and specific thrust of the argument so far. It is intended less to explain the socio-economic bases of anti-metropolitan resistance in the Western hemisphere between say, 1760 and 1830, than why the resistance was conceived in plural, ‘national’ forms – rather than in others.

almost precisely simultaneous consumption (‘imagining’) of the newspaper-as-fiction.

Indirectly, the Enlightenment also influenced the crystallization of a fatal distinction between metropolitans and creoles.

their concern with man-in-the-cosmos, man as species being, and the contingency of life.

Spanish-American experience to generate a permanent Spanish-America-wide nationalism reflects both the general level of development of capitalism and technology in the late eighteenth century and the ‘local’ backwardness of Spanish capitalism and technology in relation to the administrative stretch of the