ABSTRACT
The new nation had to be created and lodged in history and the new unit was not merely an imagined community it was also imagined in time, it had a history, it had a trajectory and it had a fundamental logic. Three ideas can uncover the logic of the process: the idea of an imagined community; plus two further ideas, which have been used to access this aspect of the business of the creation of new states and nations: collective memory and the national past. In the peripheral territories, for the people who lived within the boundaries of the newly created states, their imagined community became more restricted in its extent; it got smaller it became more ethnically homogeneous and leadership groups assumed a clearer focus. Thus locale comprises the political community within which individuals live, the ideas within the immediate environment, the ideas of parents and siblings.
