The Historical Political Economy of Nationalism

Abstract

Abstract The canonical literature on nationalism traces the formation of modern national identity back to broad processes of economic and cultural modernization. By contrast, this chapter emphasizes its political origins and dynamics of modern national identity formation. This new perspective allows us to account for the emergence of three main classes of nationalism. First, a “liberal” nationalism embedded within the emancipatory political project of the Atlantic revolutions of the late eighteenth century that, when successful, led to a unified nation state. Second, a “conservative” nationalism that, reacting against liberal nationalists, employed a set of premodern attributes, such as a particular religion or ethnicity, as the building blocks for its concept of nation. Finally, a multiplicity of “periphery” or territorially circumscribed nationalisms, ranging from Zionism to anticolonial movements, which generally formed in response to the conservative variety of nationalism.