Nationalism originated in the New World colonies, not in Europe’s ethnolinguistic movements

Evidence

It had been part of my original plan to stress the New World origins of nationalism. My feeling had been that an unselfconscious provincialism had long skewed and distorted theorizing on the subject. European scholars, accustomed to the conceit that everything important in the modern world originated in Europe, too easily took ‘second generation’ ethnolinguistic nationalisms (Hungarian, Czech, Greek, Polish, etc.) as the starting point in their modelling, no matter whether they were ‘for’ or ‘against’ nationalism. I was startled to discover, in many of the notices of Imagined Communities, that this Eurocentric provincialism remained quite undisturbed, and that the crucial chapter on the originating Americas was largely ignored. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 22

Categorization

• XREF: The Eurocentric-provincialism critique anticipates how the Islamophobia field corrects for European-model bias when reading colonial contexts. — connects to: European nationalisms imagined themselves as waking from sleep toward ancestral glory — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 726; Early American nationalisms did not depend on language difference — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 212; Colonial subjects imagined nations before most of Europe did — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 218 (+4 more)

Related

• Later European nationalisms differed from American ones in print-language centrality and visible models. (similarity 0.88)
• Colonial subjects imagined nations before most of Europe did (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial nationalists copied and adapted European national models (similarity 0.86)
• Early American nationalisms did not depend on language difference (similarity 0.84)
• Nationalism was invented in colonial Creole societies, not Europe. (similarity 0.82)
• Nationalism could be consciously modeled and pirated once visible predecessors existed. (similarity 0.82)
• The Americas’ new republics first modeled what modern nations should look like (similarity 0.81)
• European scholars ignored the American origins of nationalism (similarity 0.81)
• Nationalism must be read against prior cultural systems, not political ideologies (similarity 0.80)
• Assimilationist colonial policies generate nationalist independence movements (similarity 0.80)
• Bilingualism gave colonial intelligentsias access to modular models of nationalism (similarity 0.80)
• Material interests and Enlightenment ideas alone could not shape nationalist imagined communities. (similarity 0.80)
• Post-colonial nations blend popular and official nationalism as ongoing projects (similarity 0.79)
• Open access to the imperial center preempted colonial nationalist movements (similarity 0.79)
• Creole revolutionaries sought to preserve parallelism, not to overthrow the Old World (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Early American nationalisms did not depend on language difference #expands (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 212
• Colonial subjects imagined nations before most of Europe did #expands (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 218