ABSTRACT
Throughout five centuries of modem history, the European nation gradually usurped and absorbed clerical and dynastic mythologies and put them to work confirming its ends: the wielding of power over economic relation ships in human society. Secular laws and institutions established national categories of value, credit, social organization, and human differentiation. National citizenship legitimization, immigration rules, paper currencies, and passport regulations developed alongside jim crow and apartheid laws and codes. Mythologies of identity grew up with the authority of the laws that came forth from the power of governments and frontier conquerors who acted on their own and on behalf of their governments. From Cromwell to Hitler and beyond, the racial explanations of authorities for otherwise inex plicable arrangements became enduring and self-serving truths. “Our or ders,” said the Dutch East India Company to its overseas managers and administrators, “must be your laws.” Repeated arguments on behalf of the rightness of those laws became enduring verities. Adherence to the laws of the nation required little coercion when they were perceived as built on an accurate reading of reality. The laws and the shared sentiments about them became cultural verities. It was Manifest Destiny, God’s will.
