Imagined communities
1. Royal linage drives their prestige, aside from idea of divinity but intermarriage between races. For such mixtures were signs of super-ordinance status.
2. It would be short sighted however to think of imagined communities of nations as simply growth out of and replacing religion communities and dynastic realm.
3. I have been arguing that the very possibility of imagining the nation only arose historically when and where, three cultural fundamental conceptions, all of great antiquity lost their axiomatic grips on men minds.
4. the first of three was the idea that a particular script language offered privileged access to ontological truth, precisely because it was inseparable part of that truth. It was this idea that called into being the great transcontinental sodalities of Christendom, the Islamic Umma and the rest.
Second the belief that society was naturally organised around and under high centres monarchs who were persons apart from other human being and who ruled by some form of divine privilege. Human loyalties were necessarily hierarchical and towards centre because the ruler, like the scared script was a node of access to being an inbuilt init.
Third was a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable, the origin of the world and of men essentially identical. Combined these idea rooted human lives firmly in the very nature of things, giving certain meaning to the everyday fatalities of existence and offering in various ways redemption from them.
The slow uneven decline of these interlinked certainties, first in Western Europe later elsewhere under impact of economic change, discoveries social and scientific and development of increasingly rapid communications, drove a harsh wedge between cosmology and history.
No surprise then that the research was on, so to speak, for a new way of linking fraternity power and time meaningfully together. The print capitalism has made it possible for rapid growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways.
Anderson