Benedict Anderson

Political historian who focused on the roots of south-east Asian nationalism

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) was the most influential book in the wave of writing in the early 1980s that made nationalism an important subject for analysis and teaching. It was provoked by the wars of 1978-79 between communist “brothers”, Vietnam, Cambodia and China, and highlighted the failure of Marxist analyses to explain the nationalism that repeatedly defeated socialist internationalist ideals.

The book challenged earlier European narratives by locating the pioneers of nationalism in 18th-century Latin America. It gave currency to such concepts as “print capitalism” (communities forming around newspapers and journals with a common language) and the official nationalism of states, which Anderson, who has died aged 79, saw as the negative kind.

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