Comparative Review: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and John Darwin’s After Tamerlane

Nations and empires have, particularly since the late-eighteenth century, dominated the way we imagine the organization of the polity. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) and John Darwin’s After Tamerlane (2008) provide nuanced accounts of these highly politicized concepts. Influenced by the historiographical context of their writing, they both attempt to expand and reimagine commonplace conceptions of nationalism and empire, each at a time when their respective unit of analysis was seen in reductionist terms. While Anderson focuses on nations as a source of identity, Darwin looks at empires as a source of power. Both complement each other in their efforts to help us understand globalization and the making of the modern global world order, in what international relations scholars would call constructivist (Anderson) and realist (Darwin) terms. Ultimately, in a ‘Chakrabartian’ spirit, they both contribute to ‘provincializing Europe’, widening our lens from an Eurocentric to a global understanding of the formation of nations and empires.

In a speech on March 8, 1983 in Florida, president Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire.’^[1] Nationalism was then seen as a subsidiary to the overarching ideologies of Marxism and Liberalism; the Cold War had buried Woodrow Wilson’s dream of a peaceful ‘society of nations’ in its post-World War II embodiment through the United Nations. It is in this climate that Anderson, a child of late empire himself, presented nationalism as an alternative, non-ideological way of understanding Cold War politics, especially wars between Marxist nation-states (Anderson, p.1). Influenced by the Renanian understanding of the nation, Anderson sees nations not as ‘natural’ formations based on a predefined set of characteristics, but as emotional communities created and imagined in conversation with wider forces such as empire, and through processes of memory and forgetting. As creators of identity, nations draw people to self-sacrifice and inter-class solidarity. Anderson highlights the connections between the lower and upper classes within an administrative unit in a way that a history of globalized capitalism could not explain. Why would an ‘unusually well-educated and progressive aristocrat,’ such as Suwardi Suijaningrat, appeal to the ‘poor slaves’ with which he only shared a territorial unit, Indonesia, created by the Dutch? (Anderson, p.118).

Fast forward to the early 2000s: the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and Fukuyama’s celebratory ‘end of history’ in the shape of US global supremacy, together with US involvement in the Middle East, led to renewed claims of an ‘American Empire’ (Darwin, p.481). Simultaneously, the appearance of a single global market, increased migration flows, globally organized media and ecological upheaval seemed to render the nation-state powerless, both as an actual political entity and as an unit of analysis (Darwin, pp.7, 12). It is in this context that Darwin reminds us, not in a ‘Hobsonian’ but in a value-free fashion, that ‘the history of the world is an imperial history, a history of empires’ (p.491). A world of nation-states may pathologize empires, but empire is ubiquitous across time and space. How do empires help us understand globalization? According to Darwin, all previous historical promises of ‘globalization,’ ie. world unity, after 1400 have been disrupted by competing empires. But today we may be witnessing a new era, an era of ‘great convergence’ where either Tamerlane’s dream of world unity will be realized through modern-day globalization or will be once again crushed by ‘Eurasia’s resistance to an uniform system’ (Darwin pp.504-6).

            While Anderson focuses on nations as a source of identity, Darwin looks at empires as a source of power. For Anderson, the nation is a powerful ‘cultural artefact,’ even if philosophically poor (p.4). It originates from and against preceding cultural systems such as the religious community and the dynastic realm, and is aided by changing apprehensions of time derived from the development of print-capitalism. These changes give space for a new imagination, one that is often unselfconscious and haphazard, but also highly modular and open to ‘pirating.’ It is born from the reciprocal relationship between administrative units and local actors, who give meaning to their common experiences through ‘pilgrimages’ (Anderson pp. 53-55). Its main elements still resonate in today’s world order: the nation is limited (think about concepts of citizenship), sovereign (democracy does not often go beyond the nation-state), and it is imagined as a community of ‘horizontal comradeship’ regardless of actual inequality (who is gonna guarantee human rights but the nation-state?). But despite its twentieth-century marriage with the state, the imagination of the nation is above all an emotional, cognitive process. For Anderson, the history of nationalism is not that of ideology and elites, but of human agency, of remembering and forgetting, of co-option and resistance to existing systems of rule. It helps us understand the making of the modern world order both in terms of identity formation and of contingent changes in consciousness.

Darwin’s focus is not how empires imagine themselves but how they operate, i.e. ‘impos[ing] one state’s predominance over other societies by assimilating them to its political, cultural and economic system’ (p.416). The methods and objects may differ, but their ultimate aim remains. Darwin is not preoccupied with questions such as why the ‘nation’ tag gets added to empires (what Anderson would call official nationalism), or what changes in consciousness make ‘empire denied’ after World War II. Instead, Darwin’s interest lies in shifting global balances-of-power; thus, when the UN declares a world of ‘free nations’ after the war, Darwin interprets this not as the reinforcement of a new ‘national’ imagination but as a power shift from one geographical region (Europe) to others (the US and the USSR), which usher new empires beyond the old colonial molds (pp.442-3). When talking about decolonization, Darwin asserts that ‘it was not the case that a family of new nations emerged fully formed from Asia’s ancien regime’ because ‘imperial rule had often strung together different ethnic groups and ridden roughshod over old ethno-cultural boundaries’ (p.445). This is a powerful critique to Anderson that highlights the limits of the imagination: how widespread were post-colonial nationalisms imagined beyond a certain native bilingual intelligentsia? How did conflicting imaginations coexist and which ones were ultimately successful? Questions of identity formation have to be balanced with questions of power - how it is held and justified, and how it changes hands. Darwin provides a sophisticated account of these power-shifts and of attempts by particular superpowers to achieve a world unity last dreamt of by Tamerlane in the 1400s.

 In International Relations terms, we could call Anderson a constructivist, as he examines how a particular aspect of international relations (nations) are historically and socially constructed, rather than inevitable or essential. Darwin would fall closer to the realist side, framing world politics as a field of conflict among actors pursuing power. These are not deterministic stances but they can help us understand their approaches. Ultimately, both approaches are not incompatible. The tools Anderson gives us to understand how nations are imagined is applicable to empires, and Darwin’s tracing of the history of empires can help explain the birth of nations within and against empire.

            Moreover, their different approaches should not blind us from a fundamental similarity: both authors attempt to destabilize Eurocentric accounts of nations and empires and to ‘provincialize Europe.’ While Anderson globalizes the history of nationalism, Darwin globalizes that of empire. Imagined Communities places the birth of the nation in the imagination of creole elites in the New World, and Anderson is explicit about this in the preface to the second edition, stating his aim to combat ‘Eurocentric provincialism’ in the study of nationalism (p.xiii). But this attempt to move away from conventional approaches to nationalism is not only evident in where nationalism is born, but also in his choice of examples: being a historian of Southeast Asia, Anderson draws most of his examples from that region, in particular from Indonesia, a country very close to his heart.^[2] For Darwin,  in order to understand empire we need to broaden our view from a narrow, European-centred analysis to one that sets ‘Europe’s age of expansion firmly in its Eurasian context’ and recognizes its ‘connection with other Old World civilizations’ (p.18). This will enrich our understanding of the recent role of Europe in the current episode of globalization, and of the resilience of non-European states and cultures facing European expansion (Darwin p.6). The West is not the only source of historical change, as both nineteenth-century free-traders and Marxist-Leninists had assumed (Darwin pp.9-10). Darwin is however cautious of going too far, and gives credit to Europeans as the “chief authors of the two great transformations that were locked together in the ‘modern world’ of the 1870s to the 1940s,” ie. commercial and territorial empires based on industrial imperialism (pp.15-16).

            Anderson and Darwin provide competing interpretations of the relative importance of nations and empires in the making of the modern global world order. While Anderson sees nations as fundamental units of identity formation and imagination, Darwin considers empires as preceding and outlasting nations, and thus more worthy of study. Their differences do not merely reside in their units of study, but also in their styles and approaches. Anderson’s style is evocative and piecemeal, Darwin’s is systematic and all-encompassing. In International Relations terms, Anderson could be called a constructivist, Darwin a realist. Ultimately, their different approaches allow us to read them in complimentary terms. Anderson’s focus on the imagination and processes of cognition can be applied to empires, and Darwin’s narrative of power struggles can help us understand why some imaginations are more enduring than others. They both also contribute to the wider project of provincializing Europe, a necessary standpoint in any analysis of the current multipolar world order.

References

Anderson, B. Imagined Communities (New York, 2006).

Anderson, A Life beyond Boundaries (London, 2016).

Darwin, J. After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 (New York, 2008).

 Reagan, R. “Address to the National Association of Evangelicals ("Evil Empire Speech")". Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project. University of Maryland, College Park. March 8, 1983. URL: http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/reagan-evil-empire-speech-text/ Accessed 9/27/2019.

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^[1] Ronald Reagan, “Address to the National Association of Evangelicals ("Evil Empire Speech")". Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project. University of Maryland, College Park. March 8, 1983. URL: http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/reagan-evil-empire-speech-text/ Accessed 9/27/2019.

^[2] Anderson, A Life beyond Boundaries (London, 2016), p.71.