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What makes people love and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their name? While many studies hve been written on nationalist political movements, the sense of nationality — the personal and cultural feeling of belonging to a nation — has not received proportionate attention. In this widely acclaimed work, Benedict Anderson examines the creation and function of the "imagined communities" of nationality and the way these communities were in part created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism and printing and the birth of vernacular languages in early modern Europe.
This revised edition includes new chapters that investigate the origins of official nationalism in Southeast Asia, and the way in which nations imagine their own genealogies.
"Anderson's knowlege of a vast range of relevant historical literature is most impressive; his presentation of the gist of it is both masterly and lucid." -- Edmund Leach, New Statesman
"... sparkling, readable, densely packed..." — Peter Worsley, Guardian
"... a brilliant little book." — Neal Ascherson, The Observer
Benedict Anderson is Associate Director of Government and Asian Studies at Cornell University. He is editor of the journal Indonesia and author of Java in a Time of Revolution. His The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World is also available from Verso.
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