Although many contemporary readers might assume that old European monarchies never had to deal with ethnicity because they were homogeneous, in fact this was not at all the case: monarchies and empires were often diverse, but because there was no question of the people ever ruling themselves, it never mattered whether the people shared ethnic ties with one another or their rulers. The rise of nationalism, Anderson emphasizes, also meant the rise of ethnicity as a politically relevant category.
Of course, this whole process was a response to “the popular national movements” that grew from the 1820s onward, and ultimately was merely “the empire to appear attractive in national drag.”
When they moved toward a single language and “a beckoning national identification,” becoming representatives for their populations rather than untouchable rulers, each dynasty gained both legitimacy and a possibility of being ousted. So the same language could be at once the dynasty’s “universal-imperial” language and the people’s “particular-national” one, and dynasties had to choose between promoting different languages and satisfying the groups who spoke them. Anderson begins by noting that ethnicity had nothing to do with 19th-century monarchies-virtually every one ruled over ethnic groups besides its own-and that each dynasty turned the local vernacular into its administrative language as “a matter of unselfconscious inheritance or convenience.” In parallel, languages became the basis of specific imagined communities.
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