ABSTRACT

The story of the nation-state and its identity is an eighteenth-century phenomenon at its origins. The rise of nationalist thinking (often involving ethnic, racial, or even religious identities that sought institutional and territorial expression) became entwined with the problems of global interrelations and the interpenetration of cultures. Ambitious European powers spread across the world, buttressed by assumptions of economic, military, and often racial superiority in the form of tales they told themselves and their new subjects again and again by way of governance, culture, and education. Having grown over the preceding centuries, these empires peaked at the end of the nineteenth century only to decline rapidly as the counter-narrative of the anti-colonial struggle took hold in Africa and Asia, with particular intensity in the aftermath of World War II. Most obviously, the rise in nationalist feeling among the subject peoples during the nineteenth century was accompanied in many cases, whether in Europe or South America or later in Asia and Africa, by a narrative of cultural and often linguistic specificity. Imperialism, colonialism, and remote political authority in general were indicted not only for imposing foreign political control and enabling economic exploitation, but also for suppressing indigenous languages and cultures to the benefit of both European settler groups and the metropolitan center, whether London, Madrid, or The Hague.