Through “Census, Map, Museum” Anderson argues that nationalism is a product of how people think about their country. These thoughts are created by censuses, maps, and museums. Developed by the British, censuses in the Middle Eastern Asian states categorized by race while steadfastly ignoring religious affiliations. This classification made it possible for a “systematic quantification” of arbitrary racial lines ultimately leading to the development of segmented groups of the population identifying as united in a false “sameness” (168). Simultaneously, maps created by imperial states forced the new nations to think differently about the boundaries between kingdoms and alienated people from groups formerly unrecognized as separate. Finally, Anderson
