Power and the Nation in European History

Cambridge University Press, 6/9/2005
EAN 9780521845809, ISBN10: 0521845807

Hardcover, 402 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

Few would doubt the central importance of the nation in the making and unmaking of modern political communities. The long history of 'the nation' as a concept and as a name for various sorts of 'imagined community' likewise commands such acceptance. But when did the nation first become a fundamental political factor? This is a question which has been, and continues to be, far more sharply contested. A deep rift still separates 'modernist' perspectives, which view the political nation as a phenomenon limited to modern, industrialised societies, from the views of scholars concerned with the pre-industrial world who insist, often vehemently, that nations were central to pre-modern political life also. This book engages with these questions by drawing on the expertise of leading medieval, early modern and modern historians.

Introduction Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer
Part I. Approaches and Debates
1. Were there nations in antiquity? Anthony D. Smith
2. The idea of the nation as a political community Susan Reynolds
3. Changes in the political uses of the nation
continuity or discontinuity? John Breuilly
Part II. The Middle Ages
4. Germanic power structures
the early English experience Patrick Wormald
5. The historiography of the Anglo-Saxon 'nation-state' Sarah Foot
6. Exporting state and nation
English institutions and English identity in medieval Ireland Robin Frame
7. Late medieval Germany
an under-Stated nation? Len Scales
Part III. Routes to Modernity
8. The state and Russian national identity Geoffrey Hosking
9. Ordering the kaleidoscope
the construction of identities in the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since 1569 Robert Frost
10. Nationhood at the margin
identity, regionality and the English crown in the seventeenth century Tim Thornton
11. The nation in the age of Revolution Ian McBride
Part IV. Modernity
12. Enemies of the Nation? Nobles, foreigners and the constitution of national citizenship in the French Revolution Jennifer Heuer
13. Nations, nation and power in Italy, c.1700–1915 Stuart Woolf
14. Political institutions and nationhood in Germany, 1750–1914 Abigail Green
15. Nation, nationalism and power in Switzerland, c.1760–1900 Oliver Zimmer
16. Nation and power in the liberal state
Britain c.1800–c.1914 Peter Mandler.