Few would doubt the central importance of the nation in the making and unmaking of modern political communities. The long history of the nation as a concept and as a name for various sorts of imagined community likewise commands such acceptance. But when did the nation first become a fundamental political factor? This book represents the first attempt to breathe new life into the scholarly debate surrounding the formation of nations and nationalism in European history by drawing on the expertise of leading medieval, early modern and modern historians.

Introduction Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer; Part I. Approaches and Debates: 1. Were there nations in antiquity? Anthony D. Smith; 2. The idea of the nation as a political community Susan Reynolds; 3. Changes in the political uses of the nation: continuity or discontinuity? John Breuilly; Part II. The Middle Ages: 4. Germanic power structures: the early English experience Patrick Wormald; 5. The historiography of the Anglo-Saxon 'nation-state' Sarah Foot; 6. Exporting state and nation: English institutions and English identity in medieval Ireland Robin Frame; 7. Late medieval Germany: an under-Stated nation? Len Scales; Part III. Routes to Modernity: 8. The state and Russian national identity Geoffrey Hosking; 9. Ordering the kaleidoscope: the construction of identities in the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since 1569 Robert Frost; 10. Nationhood at the margin: identity, regionality and the English crown in the seventeenth century Tim Thornton; 11. The nation in the age of Revolution Ian McBride; Part IV. Modernity: 12. Enemies of the Nation? Nobles, foreigners and the constitution of national citizenship in the French Revolution Jennifer Heuer; 13. Nations, nation and power in Italy, c.1700-1915 Stuart Woolf; 14. Political institutions and nationhood in Germany, 1750-1914 Abigail Green; 15. Nation, nationalism and power in Switzerland, c.1760-1900 Oliver Zimmer; 16. Nation and power in the liberal state: Britain c.1800-c.1914 Peter Mandler.