BiblioVault - Books about Nationalism & Patriotism

A Nation of Politicians

Gender, Patriotism, and Political Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Padhraig Higgins

University of Wisconsin Press, 2009

Between the years 1778 and 1784, groups that had previously been excluded from the Irish political sphere—women, Catholics, lower-class Protestants, farmers, shopkeepers, and other members of the laboring and agrarian classes—began to imagine themselves as civil subjects with a stake in matters of the state. This politicization of non-elites was largely driven by the Volunteers, a local militia force that emerged in Ireland as British troops were called away to the American War of Independence. With remarkable speed, the Volunteers challenged central features of British imperial rule over Ireland and helped citizens express a new Irish national identity.
In A Nation of Politicians, Padhraig Higgins argues that the development of Volunteer-initiated activities—associating, petitioning, subscribing, shopping, and attending celebrations—expanded the scope of political participation. Using a wide range of literary, archival, and visual sources, Higgins examines how ubiquitous forms of communication—sermons, songs and ballads, handbills, toasts, graffiti, theater, rumors, and gossip—encouraged ordinary Irish citizens to engage in the politics of a more inclusive society and consider the broader questions of civil liberties and the British Empire. A Nation of Politicians presents a fascinating tale of the beginnings of Ireland’s richly vocal political tradition at this important intersection of cultural, intellectual, social, and public history.

Winner of the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book, American Conference for Irish Studies

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National Identity

Anthony D. Smith

University of Nevada Press, 1993

Why do people feel loyalty to a nation, as well as to family, region, class, and religion? When is a healthy sense of national identity transformed into virulent nationalism? What are the ethnic roots of so many contemporary conflicts? Can nations be created by design when colonial or multiethnic empires collapse? And what, exactly, is a nation? Such controversial questions are analyzed in this stimulating new text. Smith asks why the first modern nation-states developed in the West and considers how ethnic origins, religion, language, and shared symbols provide a sense of nation—even to the Basques, Kurds, and Tamils who are without states of their own. He illuminates his argument with a wealth of detailed examples: the divisions in the former Soviet Union, ethnic separatism within Europes, pan-Arab and pan-African movements, the successes and failures of nation-building on every continent. Throughout National Identity Smith stresses the positive as well as the pernicious aspects of strong national allegiances. A provocative final chapter considers the prospects of a post-national world. This will be of particular interest to ethnographers, students of international studies, historical sociologists, and political scientists.

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Nationalism and Revolution in Europe, 1763-1848

Dean Kostantaras

Amsterdam University Press, 2020

This book addresses enduring historiographical problems concerning the appearance of the first national movements in Europe and their role in the crises associated with the Age of Revolution. Considerable detail is supplied to the picture of Enlightenment era intellectual and cultural pursuits in which the nation was featured as both an object of theoretical interest and site of practice. In doing so, the work provides a major corrective to depictions of the period characteristic of earlier ventures - including those by authors as notable as Hobsbawm, Gellner, and Anderson -- while offering an advance in narrative coherence by portraying how developments in the sphere of ideas influenced the terms of political debate in France and elsewhere in the years preceding the upheavals of 1789-1815. Subsequent chapters explore the composite nature of the revolutions which followed and the challenges of determining the relative capacity of the three chief sources of contemporary unrest -- constitutional, national, and social -- to inspire extra-legal challenges to the Restoration status quo.

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Nationalism and Sexuality

Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe

George L. Mosse, With a critical introduction by Mary Louise Roberts

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

This landmark work by George L. Mosse, first published in 1985, examines the history of sexuality through the lens of bourgeois respectability and nationalism. Using a daring breadth of German and English sources, Nationalism and Sexuality pioneered the use of gender stereotypes as a methodology for studying the history of sexuality in mainstream European history. Mosse’s innovative inquiries on gender remain central to discussions about modern constructions of national belonging and the workings of the state. This edition of Mosse’s classic volume includes a new critical introduction by Mary Louise Roberts, whose books include What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France.

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Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec

Richard Handler

University of Wisconsin Press, 1988

Richard Handler’s pathbreaking study of nationalistic politics in Quebec is a striking and successful example of the new experimental type of ethnography, interdisciplinary in nature and intensively concerned with rhetoric and not only of anthropologists but also of scholars in a wide range of fields, and it is likely to stir sharp controversy.
Bringing together methodologies of history, sociology, political science, and philosophy, as well as anthropology, Handler centers on the period 1976–1984, during which the independantiste Parti Québéois was in control of the provincial government and nationalistic sentiment was especially strong. Handler draws on historical and archival research, and on interviews with Quebec and Canadian government officials, as he addresses the central question: Given the similarities between the epistemologies of both anthropology and nationalist ideology, how can one write an ethnography of nationalism that does not simply reproduce—and thereby endorse—nationalistic beliefs? Handler analyzes various responses to the nationalist vision of a threatened existence. He examines cultural tourism, ideology of the Quebec government, legislations concerning historical preservation, language legislation and policies towards immigrants and “cultural minorities.” He concludes with a thoughtful meditation on the futility of nationalisms.

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Nationalism and the State

John Breuilly

University of Chicago Press, 1993

Since its publication this important study has become established as a central work on the vast and contested subject of modern nationalism. Placing historical evidence within a general theoretical framework, John Breuilly argues that nationalism should be understood as a form of politics that arises in opposition to the modern state. In this updated and revised edition, he extends his analysis to the most recent developments in central Europe and the former Soviet Union. He also addresses the current debates over the meaning of nationalism and their implications for his position.

Breuilly challenges the conventional view that nationalism emerges from a sense of cultural identity. Rather, he shows how elites, social groups, and foreign governments use nationalist appeals to mobilize popular support against the state. Nationalism, then, is a means of creating a sense of identity. This provocative argument is supported with a wide-ranging analysis of pertinent examples—national opposition in early modern Europe; the unification movement in Germany, Italy, and Poland; separatism under the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires; fascism in Germany, Italy, and Romania; post-war anti-colonialism and the nationalist resurgence following the breakdown of Soviet power.

Still the most comprehensive and systematic historical comparison of nationalist politics, Nationalism and the State is an indispensable book for anyone seeking to understand modern politics.

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Nationalism

Five Roads to Modernity

Liah Greenfeld

Harvard University Press, 1992

Nationalism is a movement and a state of mind that brings together national identity, consciousness, and collectivities. It accomplished the great transformation from the old order to modernity; it placed imagination above production, distribution, and exchange; and it altered the nature of power over people and territories that shapes and directs the social and political world. A five-country study that spans five hundred years, this historically oriented work in sociology bids well to replace all previous works on the subject. The theme, simple yet complex, suggests that England was the front-runner, with its earliest sense of self-conscious nationalism and its pragmatic ways; it utilized existing institutions while transforming itself. The Americans followed, with no formed institutions to impede them. France, Germany, and Russia took the same, now marked, path, modifying nationalism in the process.

Nationalism is based on empirical data in four languages—legal documents; period dictionaries; memoirs; correspondence; literary works; theological, political, and philosophical writings; biographies; statistics; and histories. Nowhere else is the complex interaction of structural, cultural, and psychological factors so thoroughly explained. Nowhere else are concepts like identity, anomie, and elites brought so refreshingly to life.

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Nationalism in Architecture of Modern Iran

Niloofar Kakhi

Gingko, 2023

A historical account of the development of nationalism in Iranian architecture between 1905 and 2015.

Nationalism in Architecture of Modern Iran is the first comprehensive book on modern architecture in Iran to be published in English. It addresses the relationship between nationalism and architecture in Iran and discusses the role Western architects played in the development of modern architecture in the country while introducing some of the most significant and recent projects in Iran. It investigates what it means to design a building that bears an Iranian or Islamic-Iranian identity and how to construct a conceptual platform for critically assessing representations of national identity in contemporary architecture. This book will directly help practicing architects and policymakers of the built environment, especially in Iran, as well as give a comprehensive understanding of the modern history of architecture in Iran to art historians and a broader audience. It introduces some of the most significant and recent projects in Iran for the first time.

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Nationalism in India

Past and Present

Irfan Habib

Seagull Books, 2024

A persuasive redefinition of nationalism by one of the most eminent historians of India.

What makes a people living in a mere “geographical expression” a nation? From the French Revolution onwards, the word “nation” came to denote a people who wish to be collectively free. But free from what—colonial rule and inequality? Or religious and cultural diversity?

In this timely and succinct essay, Irfan Habib charts India’s struggle to consolidate a nationalist identity, to identify what it sought to be free from. Even as the colonial regime denied the very possibility of nationalism in the subcontinent, opposition to British rule fomented just such a sentiment. But resistance against colonial exploitation alone could not unify the Indian people. Internal inequalities—caste, poverty, religious bigotry—remained (and still remain) to be tackled.

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Nationalism in Iran

Updated Through 1978

Richard W. Cottam

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979

For a brief period in the early 1950s, Iranian nationalism captured the world's attention as, under the leadership of Mohammad Mossadeq, the Iranian National Movement tried to liberate Iran from British imperialism. Regarding nationalism as a major determinant of the attitudes and loyalties of those who embrace it, Cottam analyzes the complex religious, national, and social values at work within Iran and examines, more generally, the turbulence of nationalism in developing states and its perplexing problems for American foreign policy.

In a new 40-page chapter, added in 1978, Cottam updated his pioneering study by examining the condition of Iran fifteen years after his first analysis-from its rapid economic growth as an oil producer to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's unsuccessful efforts to rouse nationalistic sentiment in his favor.

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The Nationalization of the Masses

Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich

George L. Mosse

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

First published in 1975, The Nationalization of the Masses is George L. Mosse’s major statement about political symbols and the means of their diffusion. Focusing on Germany and, to a lesser degree, France and Italy, Mosse analyzes the role of symbols in fueling mass politics, mass movements, and nationalism in a way that is broadly applicable and as relevant today as it was almost fifty years ago. In this analysis Mosse introduces terms like “secular religion,” “political liturgy,” “national mystique,” “the new politics,” and “the aesthetics of politics” that are now standard in studies of nationalism and fascism, demonstrating the importance of his cultural, anthropologically informed lens to contemporary discourse. This new edition contains a critical introduction by Victoria de Grazia, Moore Collegiate Professor of History at Columbia University, contextualizing Mosse’s research and exploring its powerful influence on subsequent generations of historians.

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Nationbuilding and the Politics of Nationalism

Essays on Austrian Galicia

Andrei S. Markovits

Harvard University Press

The province of Galicia was the easternmost land of the old Habsburg Empire. Throughout the nineteenth century it was noted for political conflicts and the cultural vibrancy of its three major national groups: Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews.

This volume brings together for the first time eleven essays on various aspects of the last seventy-five years of Austrian Galicia's existence. Included are general surveys on Galicia within the imperial Habsburg system and on the fate of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews within the province. Various aspects of Ukrainian development receive special attention, and a major bibliographic essay completes the volume. Among the leading specialists represented are Peter Brock, Paul R. Magocsi, Ezra Mendelsohn, Ivan L. Rudnytsky, and Piotr Wandycz.

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A New Scotland

Building an Equal, Fair and Sustainable Society

Gregor Gall

Pluto Press, 2022

Inequality and unfairness still stalk Scotland after more than twenty years of devolution. Having done little to shield against austerity, Brexit and an increasingly right-wing Westminster agenda, calls for further constitutional reform to solve pressing political, economic and social problems grow ever louder. The debate over further devolution or independence continues to split the population.

In A New Scotland, leading activists and academics lay out the blueprints for radical reform, showing how society can be transformed by embedding values of democracy, social justice and environmental sustainability into a coherent set of policy ideas.

Structured in two parts, the book takes to task the challenges to affect radical change, before exploring new approaches to key questions such as healthcare, education, public ownership, race, gender and human rights.

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