ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the main features of the Nationalist Project. It will present a broad description of social and cultural change in the Marchlands as a whole, following the ideas and values of the Nationalist Project, as it competed with other projects. Some comments will touch on contrasts at different scales across the region, but the purpose of this chapter is not to provide a geography of the Nationalist Project. The chapter is intended to discuss the socio-cultural changes in which the geography of the Marchlands is embedded. The other chapters in this part of the book will then narrate the variety of experiences of the nationalist period as spatial modernity through a detailed discussion of multi-scalar place particularities and place relations, ranging from the local to the global.
