Traditions that look ancient are often recent, and Hobsbawm's introduction sets out why they get manufactured and what their manufacture reveals.

Living custom, he argues, needs no inventing; where the old ways still work, nobody has to revive them. Invention occurs when continuity with the past is asserted rather than inherited — sometimes grafted onto an existing practice, more often assembled from the stock of ritual, symbol and moral exhortation that religion, princely display, folklore and freemasonry left lying about. Swiss nationalism supplies the example: folksong, marksmanship and physical contests reworked into federal festivals with flags, processions, gun salutes and patriotic choirs, all in the idiom of improvement.

He sorts these inventions into three overlapping kinds — those that bind a group, those that legitimate authority and status, and those that instil belief and value — and treats them as symptoms, evidence of strains a society would not otherwise be seen to have.