Power and the Nation in European History

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Len Scales, Oliver Zimmer
Cambridge University Press, 9 de juny 2005 - 389 pàgines
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.

Des de l'interior del llibre

Continguts

Were there nations in Antiquity?
33
The idea of the nation as a political community
54
continuity
67
the early English experience
105
being English in medieval Ireland
143
The state and Russian national identity
195
identity regionality and
232
The nation in the age of revolution
248
Enemies of the Nation? Nobles foreigners and the constitution
275
Nation nations and power in Italy c 17001915
295
Political institutions and nationhood in Germany 17501914
315
Nation nationalism and power in Switzerland c 17601900
333
Britain c 1800c 1914
354
Index
370
Copyright

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Passatges populars

Pàgina 344 - Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992; Eric J.
Pàgina 33 - Pharaoh only ; and the king of Ethiopia. The main events of our fifty years' period are the conquest of Samaria, the capital of the kingdom of Israel, by the Assyrians in 721 BC, and the failure of Sennacherib to possess himself of Jerusalem in 701. Of the final scope of Isaiah's ideas, so far as we can apprehend it, and of the character and grandeur of his prophetic deliverances, I do not here speak.
Pàgina 230 - Act for the better propagation and preaching of the Gospel in Wales, for the ejecting scandalous ministers and schoolmasters, and redress of some grievances — to continue in force for three years.
Pàgina 315 - In other words, men and women decide who they are by reference to who and what they are not. Once confronted with an obviously alien 'Them', an otherwise diverse community can become a reassuring or merely desperate 'Us'.
Pàgina 119 - Plantagenets ; but without them, if you will consider well, what had it ever been ? A gluttonous race of Jutes and Angles, capable of no grand combinations ; lumbering about in potbellied equanimity ; not dreaming of heroic toil and silence and endurance, such as leads to the high places of this Universe, and the golden mountain-tops where dwell the Spirits of the Dawn. Their very ballotboxes and suffrages, what they call their "Liberty...
Pàgina 38 - For a discussion of this, see Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 57-9. This appropriation was true also of Quakers, and traditionalists decried the erosion of the outward signs of that 'peculiarity'.
Pàgina 246 - ... occasion should arise, but that I shall be able to prove it so. To the argument founded on this spiritless and pitiful position, time has given an answer, by bringing forth that stupendous event, the Revolution in France, an event which I do but name, for who is he that can praise it as it merits? Where is the dread now of absolute power, or the arbitrary nod of the monarch in France? Where is the intolerance of Popish bigotry? The rights of man are at least as well understood there as here,...
Pàgina 56 - Nationalism itself can be defined as an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a population deemed by some of its members to constitute an actual or potential 'nation'.
Pàgina 39 - Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 56. 67. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 15. 68. Katherine Verdery, "Nationalism, Postsocialism, and Space in Eastern Europe,

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Sobre l'autor (2005)

Len Scales is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Durham. He has written articles for various journals such as Past and Present and the Journal of Contemporary History.

Oliver Zimmer was educated at the University of Zurich (Lic. Phil. I) and at the London School of Economics and Political Science (PhD), and he began his academic career at the University of Durham in 1999. In 2005 he took up a University Lectureship (CUF) at the University of Oxford. Previous publications include A Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland 1761–1891 (Cambridge, 2003) and Nationalism in Europe, 1890–1940 (2003).

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