Colonial subjects imagined nations before most of Europe did

Evidence

Here then is the riddle: why was it precisely creole communities that developed so early conceptions of their nation-ness – well before most of Europe? Why did such colonial provinces, usually containing large, oppressed, non-Spanish-speaking populations, produce creoles who consciously redefined these populations as fellow-nationals? And Spain, to whom they were, in so many ways, attached, as an enemy alien? Why did the Spanish-American Empire, which had existed calmly for almost three centuries, quite suddenly fragment into eighteen separate states? — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 218

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial nationalists copied and adapted European national models — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 488; Nationalism originated in the New World colonies, not in Europe’s ethnolinguistic movements — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 22; The Americas’ new republics first modeled what modern nations should look like — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 192 (+1 more)

Related

• Colonial nationalists copied and adapted European national models (similarity 0.87)
• Nationalism originated in the New World colonies, not in Europe’s ethnolinguistic movements (similarity 0.87)
• Creole revolutionaries sought to preserve parallelism, not to overthrow the Old World (similarity 0.84)
• Nationalism was invented in colonial Creole societies, not Europe. (similarity 0.84)
• Early American nationalisms did not depend on language difference (similarity 0.83)
• Later European nationalisms differed from American ones in print-language centrality and visible models. (similarity 0.83)
• The Americas’ new republics first modeled what modern nations should look like (similarity 0.83)
• Early USA was just another creole-led revolutionary state, sometimes more reactionary. (similarity 0.80)
• Nationalism could be consciously modeled and pirated once visible predecessors existed. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial subjects discovered their collective identity only in the imperial center. (similarity 0.79)
• Post-colonial nations blend popular and official nationalism as ongoing projects (similarity 0.78)
• Bilingualism gave colonial intelligentsias access to modular models of nationalism (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial domination is undone first in the colonized subject’s inner life #expands (0.75) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 178