Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Series Editor's Preface. Introduction by John Breuilly. Acknowledgements. 1. Definitions. State and nation. The nation. 2. Culture in Agrarian Society. Power and culture in the agro-literature society. The varieties of agrarian rulers. 3. Industrial Society. The society of perpetual growth. Social genetics. The age of universal high culture. 4. The Transition to an Age of Nationalism. A note on the weakness of nationalism. Wild and garden culture. 5. What is a Nation. The course of true nationalism never did run smooth. 6. Social Entropy and Equality in Industrial Society. Obstacles to entropy. Fissures and barriers. A diversity of focus. 7. A Typology of Nationalisms. The varieties of nationalist experience. Diaspora nationalism. 8. The Future of Nationalism. Industrial culture - one or many?. 9. Nationalism and Ideology. Who is for Nuremberg?. One nation, one state. 10. Conclusion. What is not being said. Summary. Select bibliography. Bilbliography of Ernest Gellner's writing: Ian Jarvie. Index

Nations and Nationalism

A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, "culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions"

Land questions have invigorated agrarian studies and economic history, with particular emphases on its control, since Marx. Words such as ‘exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ describe processes that animate land histories and those of resources, property rights, and territories created, extracted, produced, or protected on land. Primitive and on-going forms of accumulation, frontiers, enclosures, territories, grabs, and racializations have all been associated with mechanisms for land control. Agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, protected area establishment, urbanization, migration, land reform, resettlement, and re-peasantization. Even the classic agrarian question of how agriculture is influenced by capitalism has been reformulated multiple times at transformative conjunctures in the historical trajectories of these processes, reviving and producing new debates around the importance of land control. The authors in this col...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03066150.2011.607692

New frontiers of land control: Introduction

This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow hist...

The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis

Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Vol. 1, The Lands below the Winds

Anthony Reid (*) This article attempts to bring together recent literature about the typology of nationalism, with the ways in which 'Malay' or 'Melayu' have been used as the core of an ethnie or a nationalist project. Different meanings of 'Melayu' were salient at different times in Sumatra, in the Peninsula and in the eastern Archipelago, and the Dutch and British used their respective translations of it very differently Modern ethno-nationalist projects in Malaysia and Brunei made 'Melayu' a contested and often divisive concept, whereas its translation into the hitherto empty term 'Indonesia' might have provided an easier basis for territorial, or even ultimately civic, nationalism in that country. As the world stumbles hesitantly towards post-nationalist ways of understanding identity, it has at last become possible to discern what nationalism is, and the roles it has played in dominating the last century of our common history. (1) It no longer seems as 'natural' and uncontroversial as it did at its height before 1945. Yet the plethora of fine analyses which began to appear in the 1980s (2) has barely begun to be integrated into the study of Southeast or indeed East Asia, where nationalism is still new enough to arouse more excitement and sympathy than concern or serious analysis. The work of Benedict Anderson, global in reach but drawing more heavily than most on anti-colonial examples in the New World, is much the most influential of these theoretical models among writers on Southeast Asia. I wish to draw attention here however to a different strain of analysis well established in the European-focused writing -- the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalisms. Hans Kohn, writing at the depth of Germany's disastrous experiment with extreme nationalism, was the first to point out how differently nationalism developed east of the Rhine. 'French nationalism was born (as English and American had [been] before it) in a wave of generous enthusiasm for the cause of mankind; the opposing nationalisms ... were directed to laudable but narrower goals, self-centred but antagonistic.' (3) He showed how territorial nationalism developed earlier, gradually admitting more and more groups within the borders in question into citizenship in the nation, which was always territorially defined. Anthony Smith makes this disti0nction crucial to his discussion in The Ethnic Origins of Nations. (4) Where in the older territorial model the geographically bounded state eventually created the culturally coherent nation, the ethnic model was the other way around: an ethnic group with unclear borders attempted to acquire appropriate borders and political status. Liah Greenfeld's Nationalism is so far the most careful historical analysis of the relationship between these two models in the context of European history. She sees the concept of nation developing in sixteenth-century England in the sense of a sovereign people, entitled to representation in the body politic. It was thus a concept closely wedded to the emergence of democracy in early modern Europe. As it spread eastwards through Europe in the eighteenth century, however, the unique quality of the nation became more marked than its sovereign or democratic character. The sovereignty of this type of nation was held to lie in its distinctiveness, not its participatory civic character. While in the civic variant 'nationality is at least in principle open and voluntaristic', in the ethnic variant 'it is believed to be inherent - one can neither acquire it if one does not have it, nor change it if one does'. (5) Although the distinction on the ground cannot be as sharp as the one in abstract analysis, her study of 'five roads' shows Germany and Russia more influenced by this ethnic path, while England and the United States (in common with most anti-colonial New World nationalisms) can be characterised more by the civic path, and France by an ambivalent path eventually veering towards the civic. …

Understanding Melayu (Malay) as a source of diverse modern identities.

Acknowledgments Part One. Similarities and Disparities: an Introduction to the Comparison of Entrereneurial Minorities 1. Conflicting Identities and the Dangers of Communalism / Daniel Chirot 2. Entrepreneurial Minorities, Nationalism, and the State / Anthony Reid Part Two. Identity, Choice, and the Reaction to Prejudice among Chinese and Jews 3. Imagined Uncommunity: the Lookjin Middle Class and Thai Official Nationalism / Kasian Tejapira 4. "Pride and Prejudice" or "Sense and Sensibility"? How Reasonable was Anti-Semitism in Vienna, 1880-1939? / Steven Beller 5. Jewish Entrepreneurship and Identity under Capitalism and Socialism in Central Europe: The Unresolved Dilemmas of Hungarian Jewry / Victor Karady 6. Anti-Sinicism and Chinese Identity Options in the Philippines / Edgar Wickberg Part Three. The Modernization of Ethnic Perceptions and Conflicts 7. Anti-Sinicism in Java's New Order / Takashi Shiraishi 8. Middleman Minorities and Blood: Is There a Natural Economy of the Ritual Murder Accusation in Europe? / Hillel J. Kieval Part Four. Chinese Businesses in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Are There Parallels? 9. A Specific Idiom of Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia: Sino-Malaysian Capital Accumulation in the Face of State Hostility / K. S. Jomo 10. Ethnicity and Capitalist Development: The Changing Role of the Chinese in Thailand / Gary G. Hamilton and Tony Waters 11. Strengths and Weaknesses of Minority Status for Southeast Asian Chinese at a TIme of Economic Growth and liberalization / Linda Y. C. Lim and L. A. Peter Gosling List of ContributorsIndex

Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe

Separatist feeling in Aceh, Indonesia's westernmost province, has deep historical roots but it is often dismissed as a reaction to a heavy-handed military presence in the area since 1989. With Indonesia's 1998 democratisation, expressions of regional feelings and resentment of the military increased throughout the country, and Aceh became the next potential candidate to break away from the Indonesia Republic after East Timor. While Indonesia's claims on Aceh seem securely based in the common struggle for independence from the Dutch, Aceh entered the then newly-independent country of Indonesia after 1945 with an unparalleled history of determination to resist outside domination. This determination was directed against the Dutch in the period 1873-1950, but then turned quickly against the new holders of power in Jakarta. Aceh was largely absent from world headlines until the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. As images of the suffering of the Acehnese people beamed across the world, the need for well-informed international aid for its reconstruction became evident. This timely book on the history of Aceh and the Aceh problem contains a balanced coverage from leading authorities in history, political science and journalism. It is the best introduction to Aceh available in English.

Verandah of Violence: The Background to the Aceh Problem

Accounts of the Indonesian nationalist movement customarily begin with the cultural and educational endeavors of westernized Javanese aristocrats in the first decades of this century. The enormous popular response generated by the first interinsular political movement, Sarekat Islam, in 1912–1920 is explained by a series of generalities about the social conditions of the Indonesian people. The importance of religion is acknowledged as a focus for opposition to colonial rule during the phase between the self-defense of traditional, relatively isolated, societies and modern nationalist movements. But information is lacking. As Berg regretted in 1932: “lack of data makes it almost impossible to define how deep this pan-Islamic current went in Indonesia.”

Anthony Reid

Papers

Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Vol. 1, The Lands below the Winds

Understanding Melayu (Malay) as a source of diverse modern identities.

Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe

Verandah of Violence: The Background to the Aceh Problem

Nineteenth Century Pan-Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia