This "sparkling" and world-famous work examines what
drives people to live, die, and kill in the name of
nations--revealing the surprising origins and development of
nationalism (The Guardian).
The
full magnitude of Benedict Anderson's intellectual achievement is
still being appreciated and debated. Imagined Communities
remains the most influential book on the origins of nationalism,
filling the vacuum that previously existed in the traditions of
Western thought. Cited more often than any other single
English-language work in the human sciences, it is read around the
world in more than thirty translations.
Written
with exemplary clarity, this illuminating study traces the emergence
of community as an idea to South America, rather than to
nineteenth-century Europe. Later, this sense of belonging was formed
and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular
culture, through print, literature, maps and museums. Following the
rise and conflict of nations and the decline of empires, Anderson
draws on examples from South East Asia, Latin America and Europe's
recent past to show how nationalism shaped the modern world.