Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is Benedict Anderson's 1983 🏷️#book defining the nation as "an imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign," imagined because its members will never meet yet hold an image of shared communion.

Limited because every nation has borders beyond which other nations lie; sovereign because the concept arrived as the divine right of kings dissolved; and imagined as a deep, horizontal comradeship people will die for. What made it thinkable was print capitalism: publishers who had exhausted the Latin market turned to the vernaculars, fixing dialects into standard print-languages and assembling readerships that could picture themselves as fellow nationals. Newspaper reading becomes a mass ceremony performed in silent privacy by millions who each know the others are performing it too — a habit that, with the novel, instills the "homogeneous, empty time" Anderson takes from Walter Benjamin, in which a nation moves through history as one body.

Anderson locates the nation-state's origin outside Europe, among the creole pioneers of the Americas — colonial-born elites barred from advancement in the metropole who assembled new political identities out of provincial print circuits. Later chapters treat official nationalism, in which dynasties retrofit themselves as national to survive popular movements, and, added in the 1991 revised edition, the census, the map, and the museum as colonial instruments of totalizing classification that taught subject populations to picture their territory as a nation. Verso issued a further revision in 2006.

The book is among the most-cited works in the social sciences and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Its critics contest both its dating and its reach: Partha Chatterjee argued that it leaves the colonized only modular European forms with which to imagine themselves, feminist scholars have examined the gendered language of national fraternity, and Adrian Hastings challenged the modernist claim that nations could not precede print.