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This lecture provides of ancient Israel that were revealed in the Hebrew Bible. It looks at some of the main themes and goals of modern nationalism. One section is devoted to suggesting possible causal links between the two in certain political frameworks and Christian traditions. The lecture also argues that based on the context of competing territorial states, the term ‘covenantal’ nationalism in certain early modern societies has proven to be the first kind of nationalism. This would be followed over a hundred years later by secularising nationalisms, which are both civic-territorial and ethnic-romantic.

This final chapter discusses some of the more modern ideological underpinnings of the Indo-Aryan origin debate in India as different forces compete over the construction of national identity. Other concerns motivating some of the participants on both sides of the Indigenous Aryan debate are also considered, showing how the same theme of Aryan origins has been used to support a variety of agendas on the Indian subcontinent. It is suggested that although the promotion of Indigenous Aryanism is undoubtedly extremely important to notions of identity and to the politics of legitimacy among certain Hindu nationalists, such concerns are not representative of all the scholars who have supported this point of view. Unfortunately, however, the whole Indigenous Aryan position is often simplistically stereotyped and conveniently demonized, both in India and in the West, as a discourse exclusively determined by such agendas. This bypasses other concerns also motivating such reconsideration of history: the desire of many Indian scholars to reclaim control over the reconstruction of the religious and cultural history of their country from the legacy of imperial and colonial scholarship. The manifold concerns that the author perceives as motivating Indigenous Aryanists to undertake a reconsideration of this issue are discussed, and it is argued that although there are doubtlessly nationalistic and, in some quarters, communal agendas lurking behind some of this scholarship, a principal feature is anticolonial/imperial.

This introductory chapter provides a background of Black Nationalism. Black Nationalism is a political philosophy that has played an integral part in African American social thought from the nineteenth century forward. There are two main threads of this philosophical tradition: classical and modern. Classical Black Nationalism is a political framework guided primarily by concerns with the creation of a sovereign Black state and uplifting and “civilizing” the race. With regards to Black Nationalist thought in the twentieth century, two moments loom large: Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1910s/1920s and the Black Power Movement in the 1960s/1970s. Modern Black Nationalism is characterized by two specific shifts away from the foundational ideas that governed the classical form. It departs from its predecessor in the general lack of an explicit emphasis on an independent Black nation-state. It also shifts attention to mass culture and Black working-class life.

This book asserts that William Shakespeare's plays and poems possess elements of politics and political philosophy, or, more specifically, the rise of modern secular nationalism. Such a phrase can be defined as the decline in the political legitimacy of warrior and priestly castes, and the rise of government as a specialised domain serving utilitarian purposes. The first part of the book examines Shakespeare's depiction of ancient Greco-Roman politics, mainly in Antony and Cleopatra , Julius Caesar , Coriolanus, and Troilus and Cressida. The second part discusses major concepts of early modern political philosophy — the state of nature and social contract theory, secular nationalism as a solution to sectarian conflict, the decline of corporatist feudalism and the rise of market individualism — through Shakespeare's plays,Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, Henriad, and King Lear.

This chapter examines different aspects of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Czech-Jewish relationship regarding the struggle over schools and language choice. It emphasizes that national movements typically have sought to link the political with the cultural, to achieve sovereignty or power for a particular group—defined variously in terms of language, broadly shared cultural traditions, and a sense of shared historical destiny—that is imagined to be cohesive and able to act in concert on the stage of history. It explains that because of the equation of culture and politics in modern nationalism and, just as importantly, because of the role that the technical and professional intelligentsia has played in promoting nationalism's claims, the issue of public education has often been paramount.

This chapter presents Malcolm X’s travels in Africa during the months leading up to the Stanleyville (Kisangani) crisis of November 1964. Speeches, diaries, correspondence, FBI surveillance reports, and circumstantial evidence indicate that, during the final months of his life, Malcolm X may have been involved in recruiting African American volunteers through the OAAU (Organization of Afro-American Unity) and the OAU (Organization of African Unity) to serve in the Congo as mercenaries in opposition to white South African forces, a project that may have been a model for a similar effort soon undertaken by Che Guevara. In the wake of the 1964 U.S. airlift of Belgian paratroopers into Stanleyville to rescue white hostages, Malcolm spoke of the history of hand-severing, a reference which links him to Sheppard. Malcolm’s frequent commentary on the subject, in many of his most important forums during the final year of his life, locates the trajectory of African American involvement in the Congo at the center of his political vision and organizational praxis, and, by extension, at the heart of modern Black nationalism.

William Link introduces key contexts for the book, namely that the origins, onsets, and resolutions of the American Civil War are best understood as a global struggle. Not only was the creation of a new American nation a result of the war, but this creation also occurred in concert with a worldwide emergence of modern nationalism. By 1860, the American South contained the world’s largest and most valuable enslaved population, and the huge wealth in cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco secured through slave labor is what drove exports, trade, and profit in American and global financial centers. This book suggests new ways to situate US Reconstruction as affecting and being affected by global events, and it argues that Reconstruction cannot be understood unless we extend our analysis beyond national borders.

This chapter analyzes the wider reverberations of debates about the premodern origins of modern nationalism. It looks at the different ways in which issues of origin and identity were articulated in Western historical writing up to the beginning of the thirteenth century, and Byzantine historiography of the same period. It argues that debate about premodern ethnic and national identity has a specific valency, with its roots in Western modernity. The concepts and questions used in the discussion of premodern ethnicity and national identity are therefore rooted in a Eurocentric framework, so as to avoid misrepresenting ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ modes of identification when used in premodern Eurasia. These problems are not solely those of interpretation, but are also rooted in the way that the sources for premodern European history are organized and encountered by modern historians.

Chapter 4 shows why we must extend our genealogies of religion and race past the Enlightenment by comparing Johann Gottfried Herder and Schleiermacher on language and on the formation of groups. Both men are seminal figures in the linguistic turn in the humanities. Both argue that we think by applying concepts (as Kant had argued), but that these concepts are not innate but linguistic. Both follow the logic of this insight to its conclusion—people who have different mother tongues think and experience differently. Religious and national groups are formed by culture and language. Though Herder explicitly rejects Kant’s theories of race, this cultural turn ironically supplies a link missing from Kant’s race theories. Kant cannot say why individuals who belong to certain groups share the mental and moral characteristics of those groups. Herder and Schleiermacher open the possibility that this link is cultural and linguistic rather than biological.