Technological and print-capitalism advances enabled imagining parallel lives across oceans

Evidence

This new synchronic novelty could arise historically only when substantial groups of people were in a position to think of themselves as living lives parallel to those of other substantial groups of people – if never meeting, yet certainly proceeding along the same trajectory. Between 1500 and 1800 an accumulation of technological innovations in the fields of shipbuilding, navigation, horology and cartography, mediated through print-capitalism, was making this type of imagining possible. It became conceivable to dwell on the Peruvian altiplano, on the pampas of Argentina, or by the harbours of ‘New’ England, and yet feel connected to certain regions or communities, thousands of miles away, in England or the Iberian peninsula. One could be fully aware of sharing a language and a religious faith (to varying degrees), customs and traditions, without any great expectation of ever meeting one’s partners. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 716

Categorization

• XREF: Builds the materialist scaffolding — print-capitalism plus mobility tech — that Anderson later generalizes; relevant to how modern bureaucracies enable diasporic imagining in Islamophobia studies. — connects to: Print-capitalism made the nation imaginable through production, technology, and linguistic diversity — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 184; Print-capitalism emerged to re-link fraternity, power and time after cosmology split from history — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 114; Capitalism’s search for monoglot mass markets drove print vernacularization — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 175 (+5 more)

Related

• Print-capitalism, not colonial administration, made nations imaginable (similarity 0.88)
• Print-capitalism emerged to re-link fraternity, power and time after cosmology split from history (similarity 0.88)
• Print-capitalism made the nation imaginable through production, technology, and linguistic diversity (similarity 0.87)
• Print alone is not revolutionary; capitalism is the decisive factor. (similarity 0.81)
• Nationalism emerged from printed shared narratives, not shared acquaintance (similarity 0.79)
• Novels and newspapers supplied the technical means to imagine the nation (similarity 0.79)
• Even apolitical market newspapers manufacture shared imagined community (similarity 0.79)
• Print capitalism’s sacral-vernacular split enabled nationalist imagination (similarity 0.79)
• Print’s fixity of language produced the image of deep national antiquity (similarity 0.79)
• Capitalism’s search for monoglot mass markets drove print vernacularization (similarity 0.78)
• The local resists globalization from within, with no fixed political content (similarity 0.78)
• Print created unified language-fields where unrelated speakers understood each other (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Print-capitalism made the nation imaginable through production, technology, and linguistic diversity #expands (0.92) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 184
• Print-capitalism emerged to re-link fraternity, power and time after cosmology split from history #corroborates (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 114
• National consciousness developed before mass literacy and print capitalism #contradicts (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 217
• Capitalism’s search for monoglot mass markets drove print vernacularization #expands (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 175
• Industrialism’s communication technologies shaped humanity’s global self-awareness #expands (0.78) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 190