Imagined Communities and "Breaker Morant"

Near the close of Chapter Six Benedict Anderson draws a critical distinction between official nationalisms and the more spontaneous linguistic-nationalisms of the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. Let the following quotation from his summary on pages 109-111 provide a context for you to reflect on the very troubling portrait of nationalism and identity displayed in "Breaker Morant."

...[F]rom about hte middle of the nineteenth century there developed what Seton-Watson terms "official nationalisms" inside Europe. These nationalisms were historically "impossible" until after the appearance of popular linguistic-nationalisms, for, at bottom, they were responses by powerful groups--primarily, but not exclusively, dynastic and aristocratic--threatened with exclusion from, or marginalization in, popular imagined communities. A sort of tectonic upheaval was beginning, which, after 1918 and 1945, tipped these groups towards drainages in Estoril and Monte Carlo. Such official nationalisms were conservative, not to say reactionary, policies, adapted from the model of the largely spontaneous popular nationalisms that preceded them....In the name of imperialism, very similar policies were pursued by the same sorts of groups in the vast Asian and African territories subjected in the course of the nineteenth century. Finally, refracted into non-European cultures and histories, they were picked up and imitated by indigenous ruling groups in those few zones (among them Japan and Siam) which escaped direct subjection....In almost every case, official nationalism concealed a discrepancy between nation and dynastic realm....The reason for all this was not simply racism; it was also the fact that at the core of the empires [think Britain] nations [think Australia] too were emerging...And these nations were also instinctively resistant to "foreign" rule. Thus, imperialist ideology in the post-1850 era thus typically had the character of a conjuring trick.

Taking your lead from this quotation explain the diverse nationalist and dynastic tensions at work in the court martial of Morant, Handcock, and Witton, who it might seem to us now were the witting victims of this "conjuring trick."