ABSTRACT
The last half-century has created at least in theory a world of nation-states, itself a piece of globalisation, though in tension with some other forms of globalisation. The concept of the sovereign state that emerged in Europe in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries was married to the concept of the nation that emerged in the late eighteenth and nineteenth. That was a means of increasing the power and efficiency of states – partly in order to compete with one another – through mobilising their citizens more effectively and extracting tax more thoroughly. But even those states that enjoyed historical continuity did not enjoy ‘national’ homogeneity: they had to construct it by social and political involvement, and often by invoking a myth of homogeneity, though some at least had a core ethnie, as Anthony Smith would argue.3
