ABSTRACT
The chapter shows that the formation of nation-states in Western Europe mainly followed a process in which economic and political centrality tended to coincide. Minority nationalism, on the contrary, mostly arose in economic and political peripheries. The chapter thus argues that the nationalism of the rich, synthetically defined as the national mobilisation of a periphery economically more advanced than the centre, represents a novelty in the history of nationalism, although it also highlights two exceptions represented by nationalist movements in the Basque Country and Catalonia at the turn of the twentieth century, which, to some extent, can be considered forerunners of the nationalism of the rich.
