A nationalism’s territorial scope reflects the technological era of its birth

Evidence

In this sense, the ‘failure’ of the 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 empire. (The world-historical era in which each nationalism is born probably has a significant impact on its scope. Is Indian nationalism not inseparable from colonial administrative-market unification, after the Mutiny, by the most formidable and advanced of the imperial powers?) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 240

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapters on print-capitalism and the newspaper’s imagined simultaneity constraining how far a nationalism can stretch.
• QUESTION: The Indian nationalism parenthetical is a suggestive aside — worth chasing whether Indian nationalism’s all-India scope really traces to post-1857 administrative unification by a ‘formidable’ imperial power.