Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism / Benedict Anderson

Some of the peoples on the eastern coast of Sumatra are not only physically close, across the narrow Straits of Malacca, to the populations of the western littoral of the Malay Peninsula, but they are ethnically related, understand each Other’s speech, have a common religion, and so forth. These same Sumatrans share neither mother-tongue, ethnicity, nor religion with the Ambonese, located on islands thousands of miles away to them. Yet during this century, they have come to understand the Ambonese as fellow-Indonesians, the Malays as foreigners.