Benedict Anderson

British-American political scientist who wrote Imagined Communities — the most influential account of nationalism — arguing that nations are imagined communities made possible by print capitalism.

Imagined Communities: the nation is an imagined political community — members will never know most of their fellow members, but they share an image of communion. Print capitalism: the spread of newspapers and novels in vernacular languages created the national imaginary. Nationalism preceded and created ethnicity, not the reverse.