Power and the Nation in European History
Power and the Nation in European History
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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.
- A comparative study of the formation of nations and nationalism in European history
- The first volume to engage medieval, early modern and modern historians in debate on the origins and nature of nationalism
- Features an international line up of leading theorists and historians
Reviews & endorsements
'The sixteen essays in L. Scales and O. Zimmer (eds), Power and the Nation in European History combine to form an excellent volume, ranging chronologically from medieval to modern times.' Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature
Product details
June 2005Paperback
9780521608305
402 pages
229 × 152 × 23 mm
0.64kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 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.
