Best Books on the History and Theory of Nationalism

Nationalism is the most powerful political force of the modern world. It has unified countries and shattered empires. It drove the decolonization movements of the twentieth century and the ethnic conflicts that followed them. It is the emotional bedrock of modern statehood and, at its extreme, the ideology behind some of history's worst atrocities. And yet nationalism is surprisingly hard to define. Is it a doctrine about the proper relationship between nations and states? A feeling of solidarity with people who share your language, culture, or history? A political project invented by elites to mobilize populations? Scholars have been arguing about these questions for decades, and the disagreements are not merely academic. How you understand nationalism shapes how you respond to it. ## The Classic Account: Benedict Anderson's *Imagined Communities* Benedict Anderson's 1983 book is the starting point for most serious discussions of nationalism in academic circles. Anderson's central argument is that nations are "imagined communities": the members of even the smallest nation will never meet most of their fellow members, but they carry in their minds an image of their communion. What made this imagining possible, Anderson argues, was print capitalism. The spread of printing presses and vernacular newspapers in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries created shared reading publics who consumed the same texts in the same language at the same time. This gave rise to a sense of simultaneous shared experience that could be the foundation for national consciousness. *Imagined Communities* is a short book and can be read in an afternoon. Its influence has been enormous. It shifted the debate from treating nations as natural or inevitable toward examining how they are constructed and maintained through cultural and political practices. ## Ernest Gellner's *Nations and Nationalism* Ernest Gellner's account of nationalism, developed across several works and most concisely in *Nations and Nationalism* (1983), argues that nationalism is a specifically modern phenomenon tied to industrialization. Pre-modern agrarian societies had no need for the kind of cultural homogeneity that nationalism demands. Industrial societies, with their need for mobile, literate workforces who can communicate with strangers, require standardized national cultures and educational systems. Nationalism, on this account, does not awaken pre-existing nations. It creates them. The nation is a product of nationalism, not the other way around. Gellner's argument is controversial, particularly for nationalists who believe their nation's identity stretches back centuries. But it is one of the most intellectually serious attempts to explain why nationalism became politically dominant when it did and not before. ## Hasia Diner, Eric Hobsbawm, and the Invention of Tradition Eric Hobsbawm, in *Nations and Nationalism Since 1780* (1990), extends Gellner's analysis with an enormous range of historical evidence. Hobsbawm is particularly good on the paradox that many apparently ancient national traditions, tartans, national anthems, official histories, were invented quite recently, often in the nineteenth century, to give new political projects the appearance of deep historical roots. Hobsbawm's concept of "invented tradition" has become standard in the field. It does not mean these traditions are fake in the sense of being meaningless. It means their antiquity is constructed, and the construction itself is politically significant. ## Nationalism in the Contemporary World The resurgence of nationalist politics across Europe, the United States, and Asia in the 2010s sent scholars back to the classic texts with new urgency. Understanding why populations that had seemed committed to international integration turned toward national identity as a primary political loyalty requires both the theoretical tools developed by Anderson and Gellner and close attention to the specific historical circumstances of each country. The books listed here provide the conceptual vocabulary for that analysis. They will not tell you whether nationalism is good or bad, but they will give you a far more precise understanding of what it is, where it came from, and why it continues to shape political life in ways that neither optimists nor pessimists about human nature fully predicted. ## Further Reading Explore more books on [political history and theory](/category/history).