Summary

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 changed the nature of power over people and territories that shapes and directs the social and political world. A five-state study that spans 500 years, this is a historically oriented work. The theme 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.