Imperial expansion revived nationalism by relocating it abroad beyond class divides.

Evidence

The truth was that only far from home could a citizen of England, Germany, or France be nothing but an Englishman or German or Frenchman. In his own country he was so entangled in economic interests or social loyalties that he felt closer to a member of his class in a foreign country than to a man of another class in his own. Expansion gave nationalism a new lease on life and therefore was accepted as an instrument of national politics. … This shows the desperate state of the European nations before imperialism, how fragile their institutions had become, how outdated their social system proved in the face of man’s growing capacity to produce. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 420

Categorization

• XREF: Core scaffold for the module: the imagined community of the nation only coheres when projected onto colonized Others — the domestic displacement that Orientalism/imperial discourse later exploits.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that national identity is most unified at a distance from the nation itself — class entanglements at home versus pure national selfhood abroad — is a dense inversion worth sitting with.