ABSTRACT
Most people have a casual impression that nations have been around a long time, since the Middle Ages if not earlier: France, England, and China have long been France, England, and China, common sense tells us. At fi rst glance, then, there is nothing surprising about the historical scope of this volume, which reaches back to the mid-sixteenth century. Yet, as the editors suggest in their general introduction, this dating in fact cuts against the grain of many recent theories of nationalism, which locate its origin only in the nineteenth-century or later. is “modernist” school of thought, as it is often called, dominated the fi eld of nation studies in the 1980s and remains infl uential, although alternative perspectives, emphasizing the varieties of national forms and diff ering paces of development, have played an increasingly signifi cant role in the last two decades. is chapter sketches in broad strokes the theoretical debate about when nations began to appear, and suggests some reasons for why it is worthwhile to talk about “nationhood” in societies before the nineteenth century, especially in the case of Britain. After all, our sense of what a nation is will depend a good deal on what point in history we think national consciousness emerged.
