LAW, NATIONALITY AND NATIONALISM: MONARCHICAL ALLEGIANCE AND IDENTITY

Whatever the causes of the successive breakdowns in governments on both sides of the Atlantic between 1660 and 1832 examined in this book, it is important to establish from the outset that nationalism was not among them; and the evidence for this hypothesis throws much light on those real causes which will be discussed below. Early-modern societies sustained a variety of forms of collective self-consciousness, but these turned only to a small degree on the later preoccupations of ethnicity and language; here as elsewhere, a new term in the early nineteenth century accompanied a new phenomenon. Nationalism was a mentality which postdated, and (it will be argued) necessarily postdated, the profound redefinitions compelled by the events of 1776 and 1789. Its histories appropriately begin with the French Revolution and the Romantic reaction to it, less appropriately finding in early-modern states only ‘protonationalism’: ‘roots’ or obscurely-expressed ‘origins’ of what is wrongly assumed to be a single phenomenon, that nationalism which came to ‘maturity’ in the nineteenth century.

National identity in the ‘old society’ was indeed a very different matter from its later forms, and the early phenomena were in no strong sense the ‘origins’ of the later ones.