Anderson, Benedict - To What Can Late Eighteenth-Century French, British, And American Anxieties Be Compared

8/8/2019 Anderson, Benedict - To What Can Late Eighteenth-Century French, British, And American Anxieties Be Compared

1/10

To What Can Late Eighteenth-Century French, British, and American Anxieties Be Compared?Comment on Three PapersAuthor(s): Benedict AndersonSource: The American Historical Review, Vol. 106, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), pp. 1281-1289Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2692949

Accessed: 21/11/2010 16:01

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aha.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

American Historical Association and The University of Chicago Press are collaborating with JSTOR to

digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpresshttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ahahttp://www.jstor.org/stable/2692949?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ahahttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ahahttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/2692949?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ahahttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress


2/10

AHR ForumTo What Can Late Eighteenth-CenturyFrench, British, andAmerican Anxieties Be Compared?Comment on

Three PapersBENEDICT ANDERSON

THE PECULIARITY OF NATIONS AND NATIONALISMS is that they are never alone, andnever original. They live by comparison and seriality,which is why we think of theUnited Nations as perfectly normal and would find a United Religions, a UnitedRaces, or a United Ethnicities bizarre if not grotesque. Accordingly,specific studiesof any particularnationalism necessarily exist in a complex comparativefield, bothpractical and theoretical. In the comment that follows on three first-class articlesdealing with the discursive politics of "England,""America,"and "France"duringthe last third of the eighteenth century,and the opening of the nineteenth, I will tryto set in a somewhat wider comparative frame some of the questions the authorsraise, in the hope of thereby opening up further discussion. The first sectioncompares the ambiguous identities of "Americans" and "English"in the 1770s, sofinely detailed in Dror Wahrman'sarticle "The English Problem of Identity in theAmerican Revolution," with the no less ambiguous identities of contemporaryTaiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and Singaporeans, within the broad subset of"settler" or "creole" nationalisms. The next section responds to David A. Bell'slucid examinationof the anxieties of French intellectuals about "the French"in theperiod immediately before and during the revolution, by considering the longpositional "world war" between Legitimacy and Nationalism that began in 1776-1789 and ended in 1918, as well as the implications of the shift from the "royalwe"to "We The People." The third section focuses primarilyon Andrew W. Robert-son's engaging inspection of the oscillations between national solidarity andvituperativefactionalism duringthe first decades of America's independence, in his"'Look on This Picture ... And on This!"' An attempt is made to expand ourunderstandingof these oscillations by situating them against the backgroundof theFirst Cold War (1793-1815), in which America appears rather like Australia in theSecond, and by comparing them with the postrevolutionary crises of ex-SpanishAmerica.

Over the past two or three years, people who happen to visit electronicchat-rooms frequented by male students from the Chinese People's Republic havenoted something curious. On the one hand, there are plenty of brutal messages

1281


3/10

1282 BenedictAndersoninsisting that the Taiwanese are not really and truly Chinese. They are said to be theultimate products of sexual relations, violent or consensual, between local womenand Japanese men during the fifty years of Japanese colonization of the island(1895-1945). It is their mongrel (shall we say mestizo?) racial-ethnic identity thatexplains their treasonable demands for Formosan independence and their obsequi-ous dependence on America and Japan. It appears, however, that all may not beentirely lost. Chattershave urged their countrymen to invade Taiwan and violate allTaiwanese women, thereby putting some honest mainland spermatozoa into them,out of which more genuinely Chinese children will be produced. Some even proposethat Taiwanese men be raped, to put some mainland manliness into their effete,westernized, Japanifiedbodies. On the other hand, the chatters also typically insistthat "Taiwan" s Chinese, even if the Taiwanese are only residually so. The Placebelongs to the ci-devant Middle Kingdom and its descendants, even if perhaps thePeople do not.

The ugliness of these conversations need not be taken too seriously, since theyare evidently an expression of the sexual frustrationmany mainland male studentssuffer on American campuses and the jealousy they feel towardtheir suaver, richer,more Americanized, less patriarchalTaiwanese competitors. But the anxiety about"who"the Taiwanese are is palpable and fascinating. This anxietyhas increased tothe degree that the post-1949 hostility between Peking and Taipei can no longer beeasily understood as one between right-wing (Kuomintang) and left-wing (Com-munist) Chinese fighting for control of "China."A bloody civil war was perhapseasier to deal with psychologically than what has succeeded it.

On Taiwan itself, there are also plenty of anxieties about identity. A powerfulminority of mainlanders (and their children) who fled to Taiwan with ChiangKai-shek in 1949, and dominated the "Republic of China" until the end of the1990s, stick to their Chineseness and their "civil war" view of the hostility andsuspicion across the TaiwanStraits.But time and tide are running against them, andmore and more a Taiwanese "national identity" and Taiwanese nationalism aregaining strength. Broadcasts in the Taiwanese language (basically, Hokkien) aregrowing steadily at the expense of Mandarin.The small communities of aborigines(related to the peoples of the Philippines and Indonesia) once regarded as"savages" are being repositioned as Native Taiwanese, along the lines of NativeAmericans, treated more generously in everyday practice and more romanticallyineveryday popular culture. Mixed (mestizo) descent can have its own chic. The earlyEuropean name for the island, Formosa ("Beautiful" in Latin), more and morecrops up in advertising and popular magazines. Yet there are also plenty ofTaiwanese patriots who revere the "Chinese classics," Confucian morality, and soon. And everyone reads the "writtenChinese" that is read on the mainland.Furthermore,not that far over the horizon, there is the soi-disant nation-state ofSingapore, with a population overwhelmingly "Chinese" (originally from themainland's Southeast littoral) but declaring itself Singaporean/Not Chinese. Themainland seems to have no difficulty in dealing with these "Chinese" as if theybelonged to another nation. But the durable dictatorship of Lee Kuan-yew'sPeople's Action Party (1957 to the present) has shown interesting anxieties. For

AMERICAN HISTORICALREVIEW OCTOBER 2001


4/10

Commenton ThreePapers 1283several decades, "Chinese-language schools" were repressed in favor of English-language schools, not least because the violently anti-Communist regime hadstarted life with the idea that Singapore, too, was another battlefield in the Chinesecivilwar, as well as in the larger Cold War. During the 1980s, however, angered andperhaps worried by Western criticism of its repressive practices and the growinginfluence of American culture on local youth, the regime re-stressed the importanceof Mandarinand developed an elaborate (and ultimately futile) programto reviveand deepen Confucianism as a core "Asian Value."

If, in these sketchy notes on Taiwan, mainland China (or just China?), andSingapore, there are clear and strong resonances with major themes in the articlesof Wahrmanand Robertson, we should not really be surprised. Colonists from themainland arrived (spontaneously) in significant numbers in the same seventeenthcentury that saw the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers and their epigones on thenortheast coast of the Atlantic. The rise of the Manchu Ch'ing dynastyafter 1644eventuallybrought Formosa under notional imperial rule (perhaps like the UnitedStates' various Pacific "possessions"). At various times and places, Japanese,Portuguese, Dutch, and Spaniardsestablished outposts and created limited zones ofcontrol. Aboriginal inhabitants were increasingly marginalized and mistreated.Imperial administration, such as it was, grew more rapacious and corrupt as timepassed. But the island only became formally a "regular"province of the empiretoward the end of the nineteenth century. Not long afterward, the (first) Sino-Japanese War broke out, Peking was defeated, and had to cede Taiwan to Tokyo(1895). This cession did not cause a great deal of pain in China, because it occurredin a monarchical-imperialworld-era in which state borders waxed and waned withmilitarysuccess or failure and diplomatic horsetrading. (Nothing offers a greatercontrast to this era than our own, where national borders are sacred. The UnitedStates "acquired"Alaska by deal and purchase only thirty years before Japan"acquired"Taiwan by deal and force, but selling it has long since become literallyinconceivable.)

The resonances between contemporary Taiwan-China and the Thirteen Col-onies-United Kingdom of the late eighteenth century suggest a broader compara-tive framework for some kinds of historical and theoretical investigation. Thisframework would allow us to think about "settler" or, more clearly, "creole"communities right across the Americas from Argentina and Chile, through Mexicoand the United States as far as Anglo-Canada and French Canada, as well asAustralia, New Zealand, South Africa, Taiwan, and Singapore. All came into beingin the era of High Monarchy. All were created by maritime expansion of theimperial core, often over vast distances. All experienced mestization of one kind oranother (out of sexual relations with aborigines, imported slaves, natives, orEuropeans originatingoutside the empire). All, at different times and to differentdegrees, felt themselves slighted and misruledby the metropole's political, military,and/or ecclesiastical emissaries. In the historical era of nationalism, all faced/facethe ambiguities of their "mongrel origins," as Daniel Defoe would have said.In later eighteenth-century Spain, "pureblood" Spanish creoles from, say,Argentina and Mexico were called, disparagingly, americanos in Madrid and

AMERICAN HISTO)RICALREVIEW OCTOBER 2001


5/10

1284 BenedictAndersonSalamanca.This adjectivedid not exactlymean that theywere not Spanish at all butrather a degenerate, morally dubious, uncouth "sort-of" Spanish. In London, untilfairly recently, "Australian"and "NewZealander"had exactly the same disparaging"poor cousin with a shady past" connotation. (This scorn was usually returned inkind, in such anti-metropolitanepithets as maturrangoand "pommie.")Conversely,there were always plenty of creoles and mestizos for whom the allure of themetropole and its high civilization engendered substantial loyalties, even in thegravest crises. The long war for American independence and the far longer andmore devastating wars for the independence of the Spanish colonies are surelyinexplicable without these loyalties. Australia still hesitates to declare itself arepublic. Settler New Zealanders are only now toying with the idea of callingthemselves pakeha according to the Maori idiom. And the grandchildren ofKuomintang "settlers"are self-consciously "tryingto become Taiwanese."If in this transhistorical frame, we can line up all the creoles/mestizos together:English, Scottish, German in the United States, Spanish in Spanish America,French in Canada, Portuguese in Brazil, English and Irish in Australia, Dutch andEnglish in South Africa, Chinese in Taiwan and Singapore (should one add Englishand Scots in Ireland?)-still, that transhistoricity conceals or can conceal someimportant distinctions. Wahrman's "English Problem with Identity" strikinglyunderscores one of these: the absence of anywell-understood and accepted idea of"normal nationalism" in the 1770s and 1780s. The (American) Declaration ofIndependence was made in the name of a People who still had no name. Thesituation was not too different in Spanish America. When Jose Francisco de SanMartin,marchingin from Argentina, destroyed the last citadel of imperial Spanishpower in the viceroyalty of Peru, he had, as it were, to baptize its residents asperuanos, including the "Indian" communities speaking nothing but Aymara andQuechua. Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador-these states did not come intobeing instantly,without tergiversations, and free from fiats, fantasy, and firepower.After the French Revolution, which only became "French" by a sort ofunconscious esprit d'escalier, nationalism gradually developed into a normativeinternational framing. It did not become hegemonic until the formation of theLeague of Nations after The Great War and almost a century and a half afterGeorge Washington'striumph.Nonetheless, as time passed, people more and moreknew what they had to do and what they had to "look like." The PhilippineRevolution against Spain in the 1890sworked from by-thenwell-established modelsof nationness, with which the Liberator was not blessed. But even its great hero,Jose Rizal, of part Spanish,Tagalog, Chinese, and perhaps Japanese descent, wrotehis astoundingnationalist novels in Spanish,not his native language,Tagalog, partlybecause he wanted to be read in Spain. And it took him almost a decade to abandonthe imagery of Spain as an indifferent, cruel Mother.

FROM THIS VANTAGE POINT, the roughly150years that elapsed between the AmericanDeclaration of Independence and the formation of the League of Nations ought to



6/10

Comment on Three Papers 1285be read also as the period of a tenacious, defensive war of position on the part ofnationalism'searly enemy: Legitimacy-marvelously understood as the opposite ofnationalism's lowercase legitimacy.If one considers the Declaration of Independence, for example, eighteen of itstwenty-threeparagraphs(one of these has nine subparagraphseach beginning with"For") commence accusingly with the word "He," and only two commence with"We."The enemy is George III, King of Great Britain, not of the English nor ofLindaColley's British, who are never in fact referred to. One does not get any sensethat this language is merely a tactical ruse, designed to win sympathy in themetropole, in the way that, in our time, Argentineans could tactically denounce"Thatcher's War in the Malvinas" to left-wing English reporters. The eighteenchanted He's of Thomas Jefferson's text show us two simple things: the first is thatit is partly an anachronism to write about the transatlantic crisis of the 1770s interms of conflicts between two nations, and therefore ambiguities about who theAmericans or the British were were not simply"identitarianquestions"such as arefamiliar to us today but were deeply connected to the quagmire of changing ideasabout fealty. George III was the monarch of many territories in Europe, theAmericas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, and the fealty he required was to hisperson, not at all to any function as the "representative"of a nation. (Even today,many patriotic Australians feel loyal to Elizabeth II but not in the least to TonyBlair or Great Britain.) The fact that George III's grandfather George I knewalmost no English, and his father, George II, not a great deal more, was a matterof general indifference. Indeed, the House of Hanover did not bother to anglicizeitself to House of Windsor until the middle of the Great War!

It has not been sufficiently noticed that far the largest part of Europe'sextra-European empires (to say nothing of intra-European ones such as Austro-Hungary) were accumulated under the sign of Legitimacy. This is plainly true ofBritain, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austro-Hungary,and Russia. The Netherlandsacquiredthe "NetherlandsEast Indies" at the same moment that it acquiredfor thefirst time a monarchy (1815). France might appearto be the exception, but the great"French"expansions in India, North America, and the Caribbeantook place underthe ancien regime.French Algeria, Cambodia,Vietnam, Guinea, Senegal, the IvoryCoast, and Djibouti were all projects of Charles X, Louis-Philippe, and LouisNapoleon. The conquests of 1880-1905, mainly in Africa, were essentially logicalextensions of what had previously been achieved under Legitimacy.

The peculiarityof High Monarchy (Empire in the classical sense) was that it hadno permanentboundaries: these could collapse completely and even disappear (theKingdom of Poland or Burgundy) or could expand seemingly without limit. It didnot absolutely require a permanent capital. (The most powerful ruler of earlysixteenth-century Europe, CharlesV, was on the move almost all his life.) It was notuntil quite late that the "big"monarchs were understood as mere "representatives"of national or ethnic groups. This is why Victoria was unembarrassedlyrelated toevery ruling house in Europe, why Wittelbachs ruled in Athens and Munich,Hohenzollerns in Bucharest and Berlin, Habsburgs in Vienna and Madrid, Bour-bons in Madridand Paris, and so on. The Romanovs were Czarsof All the Russias,



7/10

1286 BenedictAndersonthe Habsburgsand Bourbons Kings of (All) the Spains-which included Naples, thePhilippines, and Cuba-the Hanoverians from Victoria's time Empresses/Emperorsof India as well as Kings/Queens of Great Britain. It was exactly this "absence" ofapical nationality that made imperial fealty possible. And how grand it seemed!Monarchs were a species set apart.When they marriedin older times, their queensbrought vast territories, peoples, industries, and strategic fortresses along asdowries. They were rightly famous for their ingratitude, but they regardedthemselves as responsible only to the one higher authority in Heaven.

From this angle, we can see that what doomed the great European empires-startingwith the Spanish at the beginning of the nineteenth century-was the slowdecline of Legitimacyitself. It was not necessaryfor a monarchto be a racist to rulean empire, since his family was above any other. But for a post-(serious)monarchical regime to create, expand, or retain an empire, in the name of a nation,racism was absolutely essential. Finally, when these monarchies were gone, theywere really gone, fffffft, so to speak. Today, one can speak poignantly of genocidebut not of dynasticide, let alone of impericide. Even regicide has an archaic smellto it.But it did not have this smell, perhaps, until Ekaterinburg, 1918, just as theLeague of Nations was trying on its party clothes. Certainly not in seventeenth-century England or in late eighteenth-century France. Execution of a "divinemonarch"-in public, not by intrapalace assassination-was understood every-where as something completely extraordinary:damnable or heroic. Nothing showsthis more clearly than the ludicrous weepings of the generally sensible EdmundBurke over the death of the terminallyvapid Marie Antoinette (clearlythe ancestorof equally ludicrous weepings of too many British intellectuals over "PrincessDi").But who was entitled to sentence the Monarch to death? Execution in the name ofwhat? Furthermore, once he or she was executed, that dynastywas thought to beended for good. To be replaced by what/who? Something interesting shows upalready in the language of the Declaration of Independence. Here, the "royalwe"is signally, cautiously displaced by another we-We The People. (But if George IIIhad fallen into Washington's hands, can one imagine him being tried andexecuted?)

The guillotining of Louis Bourbon on January21 of the Year II, at the behest ofa National Assembly elected by universalmale suffrage (which in the United Stateshad to wait a furthercenturyand a half for its realization) clearly marks the pivotalmoment at which divine monarchy and the nation-state passed each other onhuman history's moving escalators. Before this act, it was possible for jurists,publicists, and intellectuals to speak about the "nation" of France, with a certainlgerete--without it mattering a great deal and with plenty of ambiguities. Butbeheading a king (even if he and his ancestors had had hundreds or thousands oflesser mortals beheaded over the years) was an enormous political and ideologicalblow against a system of social and religious ordering that had dominated Europefor centuries. It could only be justified by a new Sovereign We, before whom theformer Monarchwas placed as just another-delinquent, treasonous-Frenchman.The new Sovereign was bound to have a character different from that of its

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2001


8/10

Comment on Three Papers 1287predecessor. Executions also showed this difference. A monarch could have peopleexecuted while dallying with a mistress or out hunting for deer. He was immune tothe laws by which his servants carried out the killings he decreed. He could be"light" f he felt so inclined, since behind him stood God. But the National We whoguillotined Louis Bourbon could not be "light," since its legitimacy did not comefrom God but rather from some self-generated Good.

The Goodness of the Nation was a new and remarkable idea, since it appearedin the face of plenty of contrary evidence. Some of this type of evidence is nicelydisplayed in David A. Bell's article "The Unbearable Lightness of Being French."If French intellectuals, politicians, and publicists worried about the frivolity,decadence, debauchery, selfishness, superficiality, and lack of patriotism of theirfellow countrymen (and this could not entirely be attributed to the example andinfluence of the monarch, the aristocracy,and the prelates) at the same time thatthey endorsed the new guillotining Sovereign, it would be a mistake to regard theapparent contradiction as an incoherence or an aporia.

The Nation was the first historical polity for which the Future was an essentialfoundation. Moving onward through Walter Benjamin's "empty, homogeneoustime," it was not headed for the Day of Judgment, and it knew it had no place inHeaven or in Hell. So it thought, and continues to think, about future Frenchmenand future Americans, who in their uncountable numbers stand lining up in Limbofor their entrance onto the national territory. These ghostly French and Americans,innocent of any crimes, frivolities, and other sins, are those before whom presentlyliving citizens are morally arraigned, and to whose standards of virtue they areasked to do obeisance. They are understood as the guarantee that no matter howappallingthe behavior and morals of "actuallyexisting"French and Americans, WeThe People in the transcendent sense, and in the sense of Rousseau's General Will,is always Good. One might even go so far as to wonder whether this exaltedGoodness does not generally require a lot of worry and dissatisfaction about thepresent condition of the nation. In this sense, the France of the 1780s and 1790sdoes not seem so different from the United States of today, which, depending onthe observer, can be seen as teeming with inner-city gangsters and rapists, drugdealers and addicts, corrupt politicians, welfare cheats, fascist Minutemen, shadylawyers, grasping HMOs, witless generals, intolerable teenagers, environmentmuggers, whining ethnics, corporate psychopaths, etc. etc. without these percep-tions in the least undermining the solid conviction that-somehow-America isGood.

IF THE JOHN ADAMS ADMINISTRATION enacted the repressive Sedition Acts against itspolitical rivalsin 1798, and the deafening level of vituperationbetween the rivalrousFederalists and Republicans persisted well into Jefferson's regime, these episodeswere immediately preceded by the solidarity of the revolutionary years, andfollowed by the Era of Good Feeling. Explaining these oscillations is complicatedby the fact, not well recognized in our time in these United States, that in the world



9/10

1288 Benedict Andersonof the 1790s America was a rather unimportant country on the periphery of theinternational system, a bit like Australia in the 1990s. The Big Powers were all inEurope. Between 1792 and 1815, London and Paris were almost continuouslyengaged in warfare for dominance in Europe and other parts of the world, and inthese wars a large number of lesser powers were lined up with one or another side.Until Robespierre's fall in 1794, during Washington'ssecond term, this conflict hada genuine and powerful ideological character. But this character faded during theDirectory, and can be said to have ended with Bonaparte'scoup d'etat of November7, 1799, at the halfway point of the Adams administration. Jefferson concluded theLouisiana Purchase at the end of 1803 only months before Napoleon's grandiosecoronation as Emperor took place (presided over, amusingly,by a calmly kidnappedpope). Furthermore,the First Consul's restoration of slaveryand the slave trade forthe Paris-controlled empire in 1802 not only reversed the emancipatory policy ofRobespierre and the Jacobins, and reassured Southern slaveowners terrified byHaiti, but opened the way for London to take the decisive abolitionist step in 1808.Two years into James Madison's administration, the Horrible He of 1776 wentpermanently mad, and the regency of his raffish son began. Four years later,Napoleon was gone, and monarchywas restored or imposed everywherein Europe.Reactionary He-Britain become abolitionist, Radical France welcoming its first-ever Emperor and the restoration of slavery: rather confusing for everyone,especially those who had from a distance identified with the initial positions of oneor the other.In retrospect, the oscillation of that time can seem not too different from theyears of the Cold War in the U.S. of A.: huge national solidarity during the battleagainst Hitler and Hirohito; in its immediate aftermath, the violent and rancorouspartisanship of the McCarthyera more or less spanning the time from the BerlinBlockade to Stalin's death; a subsequent Era of (relative) Good Feeling under theEisenhower-Kennedy-and-Khrushchevera as the conditions emerged in which itbegan to be possible for conservative American journalists, scholars, and diplomatsto speak with unconscious irony of dangerous "conservatives"rather than "Reds"in the Kremlin.

The moments of violent partisan attachments in the time of Adams and earlyJefferson, as in that of Truman and early Eisenhower, look today like the periodicsmall storms that disturb the placidityof nationalist democracies and give them newenergywithout seriously endangeringthem-the Dreyfus Affair, the General Strikeof 1926, the mini-revolutionof Pieter Troelstra's Dutch labor movement in 1918. Inthe angry 1790s, Republicans and Federalists still envisioned the same ghostlyGood Americans up ahead-and this deep unity lasted until the War Between theStates six decades later.The partisan conflicts, in any case, pale by comparison with what happened inSouth and CentralAmerica. Over large parts of the continent, the firsthalf-centuryafter independence was a time of endless internal warfare and caudillist rule. Thestriking exception was the biggest countryof them all: Brazil. One could ask oneselfwhether the exceptional stabilityof the United States (until 1860) and monarchicalBrazil (until 1888) was not partly due to the fact that these were the only two



10/10

Comment on ThreePapers 1289countries where slavery was not abolished in the same decades during whichindependence was achieved. It is interesting to imagine what would have happenedto the United States if the remarkable Washington had the far more remarkableLiberator'svision, audacity-and profoundly antagonistic constituencies!

BenedictR. O'G.Anderson s Aaron L. BinenkorbProfessorof InternationalStudies (Emeritus) at Cornell University.He is a specialist in the modernpoliticsof SoutheastAsia, as well as the theoryandpracticeof nationalism ngeneral.He took his PhD in governmentat CornellUniversity n 1967underthe directionof GeorgeMcT.Kahin.His majorpublicationsareJava n a Timeof Revolution(1972), ImaginedCommunities:Reflectionson the OriginsandSpreadof Nationalism (1983; revised and expanded, 1991), LanguageandPower.ExploringPolitical Cultures n Indonesia (1990), and The SpectreofComparisons: outheastAsia, Nationalism,and the World 1999).


Documents

Anderson, Benedict - To What Can Late Eighteenth-Century French, British, And American Anxieties Be Compared