在最广泛的意义上，这本书讲的是一个连字符（“一”）的用法，即英语表达中“民族一国家”中间的那个特定的连字符，它是如何成为一个被自然化了的等号的。本书从历史的角度探讨，在十九和二十世纪之交的中国——大约从甲午战争到1911年中华民国成立，这一自然化过程是如何开始、如何完成的。这是一部知识文化史，而不是社会史或制度史。很多读者似乎把我的观点理解为，在历史或者理论层面，民族主义（natlorlalism）涵义中的“民族”（ethno-nationalist）和“国家”（statist-nationalist）这两个组成部分是绝对可以分离而且互不交迭的。我在《界大舞台：十九二十世纪之交中国的民族主义》中阐述的观点与此恰好相反。把这两个概念分开，从而启发性地探讨一个我认为是被掩盖了的历史和理论问题——也就是，民族和国家是如何合二为一的：连字符的问题。写这本书的意义就在于寻找这两者在二十世纪早期融合的历史进程和历史与理论逻辑。作者希望这本书能在中国遇到赞同和反对它的读者，希望它能激发讨论以增强我们历史化地思考和研究历史可能性的能力。

Modern-day Europeans by the millions proudly trace back their national identities to the Celts, Franks, Gauls, Goths, Huns, or Serbs - or some combination of the various peoples who inhabited, traversed, or pillaged their continent more than a thousand years ago. According to Patrick Geary, this is historical nonsense. The idea that national character is fixed for all time in a simpler, distant past is groundless, he argues in this unflinching reconsideration of European nationhood. Few of the peoples that many Europeans honor as sharing their sense of "nation" had comparably homogeneous identities; even the Huns, he points out, were firmly united only under Attila's ten-year reign.Geary dismantles the nationalist myths about how the nations of Europe were born. Through rigorous analysis set in lucid prose, he contrasts the myths with the actual history of Europe's transformation between the fourth and ninth centuries - the period of grand migrations that nationalists hold dear. The nationalist sentiments today increasingly taken for granted in Europe emerged, he argues, only in the nineteenth century. Ironically, this phenomenon was kept alive not just by responsive populations - but by complicit scholars. Ultimately, Geary concludes, the actual formation of European peoples must be seen as an extended process that began in antiquity and continues in the present.The resulting image is a challenge to those who anchor contemporary antagonisms in ancient myths - to those who claim that immigration and tolerance toward minorities despoil "nationhood." As Geary shows, such ideologues - whether Le Pens who champion "the French people born with the baptism of Clovis in 496" or Milosevics who cite early Serbian history to claim rebellious regions - know their myths but not their history. "The Myth of Nations" will be intensely debated by all who understood that a history that does not change, that reduces the complexities of many centuries to a single, eternal moment, isn't history at all.

The definitive, bestselling book on the origins and development of nationalism.
Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson's brilliant book on nationalism, forged a new field of study when it first appeared in 1983. Since then it has sold over a quarter of a million copies and is widely considered the most important book on the subject. In this greatly anticipated revised edition, Anderson updates and elaborates on the core question: what makes people live, die and kill in the name of nations? He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was adopted by popular movements in Europe, by imperialist powers, and by the anti-imperialist resistances in Asia and Africa, and explores the way communities were created by the growth of the nation-state, the interaction between capitalism and printing, and the birth of vernacular languages-of-state. Anderson revisits these fundamental ideas, showing how their relevance has been tested by the events of the past two decades.