["Nations and Nationalism, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis article examines the modernisation projects formulated within the Armenian press during the late nineteenth century under Russian imperial rule. The press's agency in creating modernisation projects is analysed not only in the Andersonian sense of providing the possibility of imagining a nation, but also in terms of its specific function as an institution of a stateless nation. The article examines the interpretive stances and conceptual frameworks that patrons supplied—both through direct financial influence and indirect ideological support—and explores how different forms of patronage shaped the editorial directions of various periodicals. At the same time, it investigates what the press itself patronised, functioning as an agent of institutional construction. A key finding is the ‘unequal distribution’ of cultural, economic, and political components of modernisation. Moreover, the article argues that the activation of the purely political renders the fractures within the ‘package’ of modernisation components all the more visible.\n"]