The nation is an imagined thing, as Benedict Anderson concluded back in 1983 in his appropriately-named classic Imagined Communities.[1] Nations are fictions that weave themselves into the fabric of history. They are territories bounded and colored in on maps. They invoke feelings of belonging, loyalty, and love. Of course, the nation is not a perceptible, physical thing, but is made real to us through our identities, our loyalties, our upbringings.

The historians whose works we’ve read over the course of the semester have all tackled the idea of the nation in their own respective ways. Is it something to be transcended, considered, dismissed? Clavin has argued for the imagining of transnationalism as a honeycomb that gives shape and structure to nations, networks, and spaces.[2] More recently, our very own Dr. Banerjee has noted the importance of imagining concepts as transversals in order to mentally comprehend the ever-shifting, blending nature of ideas.[3]

Of course, nationalism is an idea in it of itself, and it has shifted and blended as it has traveled across the world, leaving behind nation-states in its wake. As a concept, it may have originated in Europe, but given its global spread, I think it is safe to say that it’s effectively transcended its Western origins.

What does all this talk of nations and nationalism have to do with Iran and Thailand? Both countries developed their own conceptions of nation in the 19th and 20th centuries, and thinking about their commonalities and differences can begin to lead us toward a global intellectual history of nationalism. Both states notably maintained their political independence throughout the era of high imperialism, and reoriented themselves around the idea of nation. Threatened by Western encroachment, the ruling parties of Qajar and later Pahlavi Iran and the Kingdom of Siam (as Thailand as then known) set forth agendas of nation-building that fundamentally defined their existences as states and as peoples.

Thongchai Winichakul’s brilliant 1994 work Siam Mapped illustrates how the Kingdom of Siam began conceiving itself as a nation, with a great focus on its territoriality.[4] Before the age of high imperialism, Southeast Asian kingdoms conceived of themselves not in terms of strict, demarcated borders nor centralized states, but as polities comprising loose territorial definitions and as part of hierarchies in a complicated tributary system. This changed as the West pushed into the region; Britain overtaking Burma and France Vietnam from the mid-19th century onward. It became a necessity for Siam to adhere to Western conceptions of “border” and “sovereignty,” and its rulers entered crucial negotiations with the European powers as they rushed to assert Siam’s authority over its tributary states. An idea of Thai nationhood and territoriality developed, and would strengthen over the course of time. One example of this legacy is a Cold War map cited by Thongchai, imagining the country’s very territory as under threat by neighboring communist rule.

Iran, too, suffered great fear and humiliation when set against Britain and Russia. Forced to make great territorial and economic concessions to the two powers, it lost its provinces in the Caucasus and was plunged into financial and political disarray. Under the reign of Reza Shah (r. 1925-1941), the country aimed to reverse these trends and regain a self of national self-confidence. Educational textbooks linked the Iranian nation to the glorified pasts of the Achaemenid and Sassanian Empires; they taught their readers geography with a nationalist bent, imagining a greater Iran than the one they lived in that had been reduced due to corruption and cowardice. One textbook imagined Iran’s “natural borders” as stretching from India to the Caspian Sea.[5]

Both countries also positioned themselves as homelands for their peoples. In fact, Siam’s renaming of itself as “Thailand” was one part of its nationalist project. It was now a country for the Thai. Common conceptions of the country’s history selectively identify the present state’s past in a way best fitting a nationalist narrative. For instance, the country’s monarchy privileges an idealized idea of the historic Kingdom of Sukhothai for its spirituality and kingship, in contrast to the Kingdom of Ayutthaya, owing to its constant warring.[6] Iran may not have changed its name in its peoples’ own eyes, but it had been known to Europe as Persia until 1935, when it requested it be referred to as Persia. Iran under Reza Shah pursued a policy that marked Iran as a Persian homeland, a “Persianization” process that involved enforcement of the national faith, Twelver Shi’ism, and the national language, Farsi. Iran’s non-Persian, non-Shi’i ethnic groups were simply told to love the nation on the basis of their sharing of the land.[7]

I’ve attempted to cover much here, and have had to generalize quite a bit to keep this post coherent. My point is, nationalism itself may be understood better through the practice of global intellectual history, itself a subfield of transnational history. Through comparing case studies from across the world, even those that may have little explicit similarity to each other, we can trace the spread of ideas and the varying ways in which they were adapted and interpreted.

“Wake Up Thai People!” An anti-communist map of Thailand.

[1] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).

[2] Patricia Clavin, “Defining Transnationalism,” Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (2005), 421-439.

[3] Milinda Banerjee, “Transversal Histories and Transcultural Afterlives: Indianized Renditions of Jean Bodin in Global Intellectual History” in Engaging Transculturality edited by Laila Abu-er-Rub et al., (Abingdon, 2019), 155-169.

[4] Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: The History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu, 1994).

[5] Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946 (Princeton, 1999), 180-215.

[6] Paul Handley, The King Never Smiles (New Haven, 2006), 26.

[7] Ali Ansari, Iran Since 1921: The Pahlavis and After, (London, 2005), 40-74.

A Tale of Two Nations? The Creations of Iran and Thailand