[3] According to Anderson's theory of imagined communities, the main historical causes of nationalism include: All of these phenomena coincided with the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism [incongruence, divide] between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so.

He describes the act of reading a daily paper as a "mass ceremony:” "It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull.

Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion."

Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.