ABSTRACT
This chapter tracks the evolution of geographically specific challenges to political entities that were forerunners of what people might now understand as separatist movements. Separatism as a consistent theme was not yet developed, yet the yearnings of peoples to cast off an oppressor and have a state that reflected their sense of growing national consciousness. As a state-based political phenomenon, separatism did not much exist prior to the advent of post-Westphalian states and, arguably, before the rise of nationalism and the 'nation-state' in the 19th century. The issue of Greece's separation from the Ottoman Empire marks perhaps the next clearest example of early separatism, if reprising questions about whether separatism can only be such if it is from within a state. The creation of the state of Belgium in 1830 is one of the earliest and least ambiguous examples of successful separatism from a conventional state.
