ABSTRACT
The historian faces a number of problems when studying nations. This chapter begins with noting a few of the problems of analyzing nations and their history, and then turn to the problems of evaluating nations in world history. The investigation of the history of nations and nations in history is faced with a two-pronged difficulty. One part of the difficulty is how the category nation is to be understood. The second part is the evaluation of evidence from antiquity and the Middle Ages, specifically, ways by which a relatively stable culture, encompassing a territorially extensive population, may have taken shape during those historical periods. A consequence of this investigation into the history of nations and nations in world history is that one may recognize a persistent pattern of alternatives of the social relations formed by humans beyond that of the family.
