The Long Way Back to Ourselves

7.1

Nationalism: The Imagined Community

This episode looks at how a passport decides whether you may cross a border, work, or vote. You learn why belonging to a nation feels older than it is: Benedict Anderson called it an imagined community in 1983, and Ernest Gellner argued most nations are younger than the railroad. The episode traces how school, press, census, and map manufactured this feeling, using Eugen Weber's research on rural France, where much of the population barely spoke French around 1870 and became French within two generations. It also covers how the Scottish kilt's clan tartans were assembled by an English textile manufacturer and Scottish nobles around 1800, an example of invented tradition.