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This chapter traces the history of the decline of the Mauryas and investigates the reasons behind the collapse of the Mauryan dynasty. One of the more obvious reasons for the decline was the succession of weak kings after Aśoka Maurya. A further and immediate cause was the partition of the empire into two, the eastern part under Daśaratha and the western part under Kunāla. This chapter suggests that the causes of the decline of the Mauryas must in large part be attributed to a top-heavy administration where authority was entirely in the hands of a few persons, and an absence of any national consciousness.

This chapter presents an essay on German diaspora during the Middle Ages. It suggests that of all the community of German migrants it was the Transylvanian Saxons that best deserved the description of a diaspora. This is because they acquired distinctive political, jurisdictional, and ecclesiastical privileges in the kingdom of Hungary, which were sufficiently powerful and autonomous to develop a strong national consciousness but sufficiently remote from other Germans to feel essentially self-reliant.

While the search for economic self-sufficiency in Korean immigrant life remained important, Korea’s loss of national sovereignty to Japan between 1905 and 1910 emerged as the single most important issue for Korean immigrants. After annexation, Koreans in the United States no longer perceived themselves to be solely sojourning labor migrants in search of opportunities for economic betterment, but rather stateless exiles in search of ways to help their homeland. This chapter examines a series of dramatic events in San Francisco beginning in the spring of 1908 with the assassination of American diplomat Durham Stevens that politicized the national consciousness of Korean migrants in the United States. The responses elicited by these events of 1908 marked a decisive moment in the development of a diasporic nationalism that would seek to establish a sovereign Korean state and create ties that bound dispersed Korean settlements to each other.

This chapter examines the origins of ethnic pluralism. Most countries have populations with multiple and opposing ethnic consciousness, and such ethnic pluralism is a necessary condition for ethnic violence. In order to explain ethnic violence, one must therefore consider why only some places turned out like France—a country that has been successful at popularizing a common national consciousness. To help explain the French case, the chapter compares the nation-building processes in France, Spain, and the UK in the context of unity and disunity. It also discusses the interrelationships among path dependence, situationalism, and ethnic consciousness before assessing ethnic pluralism in large empires such as the Ottoman Empire and the former Soviet Union. Finally, it explores the role of overseas colonialism and missionaries in promoting ethnic diversity by focusing on Rwanda, Burundi, and Burma.

This chapter explores how Frantz Fanon’s national consciousness emerges only out of deliberate challenges to relations of subordination and alienation. Unlike with Rousseau’s general will, in Fanon national consciousness takes shape through collaborative struggles first to oust those people and interests fundamentally opposed to the emergence of an indigenous citizenry’s will and then to move beyond this to the ongoing and dialectic work of creating institutions that would transform a nation that had been appendage to another metropolitan center. While Fanon distinguished the possibilities of national consciousness from the failures of a narrowed and cynical nationalism, it is more of an evocative regulative ideal that captures what is involved in forging a world that is no longer colonial. Precisely because it enables and nurtures ongoing mobilization it is deliberately hijacked in policies that rely on the retreat of most of the citizenry into induced passivity. Fanon’s formulation of national consciousness sustains all of the features that make Rousseau’s idea of the general will compelling while, if not transcending its limitations, productively reexamining them through a creolized lens. These insights are further illuminated in Kwame Gyekye’s of the effective forging of meaningful unity in multinational states.

French and German influences combined in early Italian Romanticism, but the focus continued to be the problem of foreign rule and political disunity. Added to this was the absence of a common Italian language, in contrast to the wide use of Castilian in Spain and the successful imposition of French in France. The role of the Papacy and the position of the Catholic Church quickly became a focus of nationalist and liberal critique. Into this situation came Manzoni, an ardent Catholic sympathetic to liberalism and the national cause, and a leading figure in the search for a workable national language. Influenced by medievalists such as Fauriel and Sismondi, Manzoni’s early works examined medieval history in drama and historiography. Italian historical novelists, among them D’Azeglio, used medieval and early sixteenth-century themes in order to heighten national consciousness. Manzoni’s ‘The Betrothed’, influenced in part by Scott, opted for a realistic social and local canvas at the time of Spanish rule in Lombardy in the middle period of the Thirty Years’ War. Although not directly oriented towards the nationalist goal, this work was later adopted by liberal nationalists as a founding text. The book was a critique of the abuse of personal power. The novel’s Catholic roots ran deep. Manzoni, who had first made his name in drama and poetry, and had written history in order to explain his play on the Lombards in Italy, included a great deal of history in his historical novel.

This chapter considers the evidence which supported the arguments that the Presbyterian churches furnished a major mechanism through which ‘Empire penetrated to everyday life’, and that Presbyterianism was fundamental to the articulation of Scottish national identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite the religious divisions of the time. It notes Hastings' observations that the role of clergy in ‘ensuring something of a collective consciousness’ between groups of different social status and levels of education, arguing that through their ministry they were teachers not just of religion but also of history. It observes that in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Scotland, the Presbyterian churches had both the power and the means to influence and shape ‘national consciousness’. It concludes that the foreign mission movement, through the institutional life of the churches, not only brought the empire home to the Scottish people but it also gave them a new sense of themselves.

Where does the historical novel go after the last decades of the nineteenth century? What effect does the impact of Modernism have in the period from the 1890s to c.1940? What new techniques might literary Modernism bring to it? How would its themes alter under the impact of the First World War, which deeply affected the rest of fiction? How might the historical novel adapt to the focus on alienation and the subconscious, and to experimentation with narrative techniques? Then, what can be said about the purpose of the historical novel in areas beyond Europe—in Latin America, for example, and in the former colonial territories of Britain, France, or the Netherlands? In these novels the problems of colonialism and post-colonial reconstruction are evident. Once again the question of national consciousness and identity arise, as they had earlier in nineteenth-century Europe. How do we account for the flourishing of the historical novel in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? Where should the historical novel go now, and what themes might it adopt, if past themes and methods will prove to be exhausted? These, of course, are all topics for further study.

From the late 1960s to the late 1980s, few studies have focused on American national consciousness and national identity as intellectual and cultural historians avoided the problem of nationalism. Historians interested in reopening the national question in America can learn a lot from a comparative perspective that draws on the history of Germany, eastern Europe, and the Third World. For example, Hans Kohn described the contrast between nationalism in western Europe on the one hand and in central and eastern Europe on the other. This chapter examines the national symbols employed by Americans to personify their country, from the Statue of Liberty to Uncle Sam. It also discusses four requirements of nationality: place, principles, polity, and people.

This chapter presents some comments about the significance of William James's philosophy. James was a friend of Josiah Royce from his youth to the end of James's beneficent life. As a pupil of James for a brief time, Royce thought of himself as James's disciple; although perhaps a very bad one. According to Royce, James is an American philosopher of classic rank because he stands for a stage in our national self-consciousness—for a stage with which historians of our national mind must always reckon. This statement shall be the focus of the present discussion, which also estimates the significance of the stage in question, and of James's thought insofar as it seems to express the ideas and ideals characteristic of this phase of national life.

This chapter demonstrates how the extensive body of patriotic writing on the Bosnian Christians’ suffering reconfigured South Slavic categories of identification, and established suffering as a foundational sentiment of national consciousness. For many, depictions of hardships elicit reactions of recognition and sympathy for the expressed pain. At other times, historians have responded to politicized accounts of victimization with notions of “cultural construction” and even “myth.” The chapter poses questions about the nationalist investment in depictions of suffering and the reason for the persistent nationalist demand for certain voices of suffering. It also describes a historically specific genealogy of nationalist subjectivity, a political outlook that emerged over the course of the nineteenth century.

This chapter discusses Hadassah's American foundations. American zionist ideology had much in common with core American values and the American ethos. Hadassah's ideology is no exception to this rule, echoing American national ideals and characteristics fundamental to American culture. In the absence of a national common denominator, such as country of origin or heritage, the American national consciousness was largely formed on the basis of ideological identification with and commitment to a set of universal values. An individual's American identity is based on a system of ideas that has penetrated the daily life of American society and constitutes a living faith for most Americans.

This chapter explores conceptions of Italian national consciousness in the Adriatic territories. It focuses on the impact of nationalist ideas and educational philosophies on policies designed to promote national belonging in the new eastern border territories after World War I and in the first years after the Fascist takeover. Principles embedded in Fascist educational reforms, predicated on notions of the primacy of the state over the needs of individuals, influenced the development of the nationalization legislation. The chapter explores how attempts to inculcate conceptions of nationalism tied to Latin and Italian heritage affected nationalizing policies and their enactment in the borderland.Regionally-based understandings grounded in the Habsburg commercial heritage of Italy’s new borderlands that conflicted with Italian nationalist and irredentist ideas provoked legal conflicts at the root of the Paulovich case.

This chapter studies working-class nationalism and antisemitism in post-war Poland. It argues that in early post-war Poland, citizen–state relations expressed themselves in part through national identity. In this context, antisemitism took on new meaning in Poland because it became not only an expression of fears about national identity and cultural vulnerability, but also a means of defining the state and citizenship. Thus, national identity paradoxically sharpened as Poland approached homo-ethnicity. Before and during the war, Polish workers had expressed a strong national consciousness, and post-war reconstruction invoked national themes. The professed class nature of the new state, however, and the practical concerns of the workers eventually made allegiance to the state a central issue. That allegiance was potentially based not just upon prosperity or nationalism, but upon agreement with certain programmes and policies of the communist regime.

Scholars of nationalism have argued that any national consciousness before 1800 was the province of small elites, who had little interest in engaging subjects in a national project, and lacked the technologies to do so. Highlighting the wide range of media available to early modern communities, this chapter argues that forms of national memory spread through the lively practice of local memory. Local memory practices, initially mostly associated with religious purposes, were used both to shape communal identities and to distinguish that community from other communities. They could be used to assert one’s importance to the larger world of region, state, kingdom, and nation, and conversely, rulers might forge a relationship with a community by becoming a stakeholder in a local memory culture. In this way notions of the national could spread and be used as a rhetorical tool in early modern society, without destroying alternative ways of thinking about the past, like the local.

This chapter focuses on two related subjects: the sharpening of historical awareness and the formation of Russian national consciousness. Mature historical narratives inspired historical fiction and drama. Tolstoy’s War and Peace offered a powerful nationalistic view of the Napoleonic Wars. Russians of all political persuasions attempted to articulate a view of Russia as a multinational empire and to define specifically Russian historical path. These attempts caused sharp generational conflicts reflected in literature, particularly the novel. Pushkin, neglected by the mid-nineteenth-century radicals, by the end of the century emerged as the poet of national significance, the incarnation of Russian national spirit.