American colonial toponyms made ‘new’ and ‘old’ coexist synchronically, unlike older inheritance namings

Evidence

New York, Nueva Leon, Nouvelle Orléans, Nova Lisboa, Nieuw Amsterdam. Already in the sixteenth century Europeans had begun the strange habit of naming remote places, first in the Americas and Africa, later in Asia, Australia, and Oceania, as ‘new’ versions of (thereby) ‘old’ toponyms in their lands of origin. Moreover, they retained the tradition even when such places passed to different imperial masters, so the Nouvelle Orléans calmly became New Orleans, and Nieuw Zeeland New Zealand. … It was not that, in general, the naming of political or religious sites as ‘new’ was in itself so new. In Southeast Asia, for example, one finds towns of reasonable antiquity whose names also include a term for novelty: Chiangmai (New City), Kota Bahru (New Town), Pekanbaru (New Market). But in these names ‘new’ invariably has the meaning of ‘successor’ to, or ‘inheritor’ of, something vanished. ‘New’ and ‘old’ are aligned diachronically, and the former appears always to invoke an ambiguous blessing from the dead. What is startling in the American namings of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is that ‘new’ and ‘old’ were understood synchronically, coexisting within homogeneous, empty time. Vizcaya is there alongside Nueva Vizcaya, New London alongside London: an idiom of sibling competition rather than of inheritance. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 715

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes diachronic (successor/inheritance) naming from synchronic (parallel/sibling) naming, a key analytic distinction.
• XREF: Connects to Anderson’s own ‘homogeneous, empty time’ thesis that scaffolds the nation-as-imagined-community argument, and to the Islamophobia readings on how ‘the West’ imagines its parallel colonial offshoots. — connects to: the MOC “The Great Derivative: How the Athens-to-Washington Story Fabricates the Inheritance It Pretends to Record”

Related

• Old World colonial place-naming treated new sites as siblings, not successors (similarity 0.90)