Modernity, Nation, and Empire

Narrative Arc

Nations Did Not Always Exist

The story usually told about the 19th century goes something like this: ancient peoples, long united by blood, language, and shared destiny, finally achieved political expression through the nation-state. France became France. Germany became Germany. The nations were always there — history simply released them.

That story is false. Or at least, it is a story that historians have spent the last century carefully dismantling.

Nationalism emerged in the late 18th and 19th centuries as a product of very specific historical conditions: the spread of Enlightenment ideas about popular sovereignty and self-determination, democratic revolutions, and above all, industrialisation. Modernization theory in the study of nationalism identifies this cluster of transformations as the real birth of the nation — not the discovery of something ancient, but the invention of something new.

Two theorists above all others have shaped how we understand this process.

Ernest Gellner argued that industrial societies, unlike agrarian ones, required mass literacy and a standardised culture — workers who could read manuals, follow instructions, and communicate across regions. This created a pressure for cultural homogeneity that pre-modern rulers had neither wanted nor needed. In short, Gellner's theory holds that industrialisation made ethnic and national identity politically central for the first time.

Benedict Anderson took a different angle. He defined nations as "imagined communities" — not ethnic facts but symbolic constructions, held together by shared language and communication. His key insight was that national consciousness emerged first not in Europe but in the Americas, where creole elites used print capitalism (newspapers, novels, shared vernacular texts) to imagine themselves as unified communities distinct from the metropole. The mechanism was cultural and communicative, not biological.

German Romanticism and the Ethnic Turn

If Anderson's model of nationalism was primarily communicative, the German Romantic tradition took a darker turn. Philosophers and historians like Johann Gustav Droysen and Heinrich von Treitschke portrayed nations as organic, spiritual communities with historical destinies inscribed in blood and culture. Prussia was cast as the carrier of the German spirit. This intellectual tradition tied national identity to ethnic-cultural authenticity — and provided intellectual scaffolding for what would follow in the 20th century.

Hans Kohn later named this fault line explicitly: a divide between civic nationalism (French and English models, built on institutions and political participation) and ethnic nationalism (Central and Eastern European models, built on descent and cultural homogeneity). The distinction remains influential, though contested — civic nationalism has its own exclusions, and the boundary between the two models has always been blurrier in practice than in theory.

Enlightenment and Empire: Two Sides of One Story

The 18th century Enlightenment is often described as a great European intellectual achievement — a triumph of reason, tolerance, and universal human dignity. The philosophy was real. But so was its entanglement with empire.

Recent revisionist scholarship insists that the Enlightenment cannot be understood as a purely European intellectual event, abstracted from the material world. The wealth that funded Europe's salons, libraries, and consumer culture was substantially generated through colonial exploitation, plantation slavery, and forced labour. The consumer revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries was inseparable from an empire of slavery.

This matters not just as context. Decolonial scholars argue that modernity itself — as a political and intellectual project — was constitutively dependent on colonialism. In this framework, the traditional periodisation of European intellectual history, which begins modernity with the Enlightenment, is wrong. Decolonial theorists locate the birth of modernity in 1492 — the moment of colonial expansion — arguing that the Enlightenment's "darker side" was colonialism, not an unfortunate contradiction but an intrinsic part of the same project.

The Imperial Century and Its Logics

The 19th century saw European powers carve up most of the world. The economic logics behind this were complex and contested. From a Marxist-Leninist perspective, imperialism represented the monopoly stage of capitalism — surplus capital seeking investment in colonised territories, combined with the need for captive markets and raw material extraction. Walter Rodney's landmark work argued that Africa was not underdeveloped by nature but underdeveloped by Europe — colonial relations locked African economies into providing raw materials while industrialisation accrued entirely to Europe.

The colonial project also came with a knowledge system. Aníbal Quijano's concept of the "coloniality of power" describes how colonial domination persisted — and persists — not only through political and economic control, but through the naturalisation of racial hierarchies and the presentation of Eurocentric knowledge as universal truth. Epistemic violence — the systematic devaluation and erasure of non-Western ways of knowing — was integral to the colonial enterprise.

Inside Europe, similar dynamics operated in less visible forms. Euro-Orientalism describes how Western Europe constructed Eastern European societies as backward, static, and in need of Western modernisation — using the same representational machinery that Edward Said identified in colonial discourse about the Middle East and Asia. Eastern Europe became the "internal other."

The Great Wars and Their Causes

The long 19th century ended in catastrophe. How it ended, and why, remains one of the most contested questions in all of European historiography.

For WWI, the earliest explanatory tradition assigned sole guilt to Germany — a verdict written into the Treaty of Versailles. The 1920s revisionist historians, including American scholars Sidney Bradshaw Fay and Harry Elmer Barnes, challenged this, arguing that multiple powers bore shared responsibility. Germany, in their telling, was as much victim as aggressor.

In the 1960s, German historian Fritz Fischer swung the pendulum back. His 1961 work Griff nach der Weltmacht (Germany's Aims in the First World War) argued that Germany had pursued deliberate expansionist goals and bore principal responsibility for the war. The Fischer controversy shook West German historiography.

Contemporary structural approaches have moved beyond this assignment-of-blame framework. Scholars now emphasise multi-nation causation: the alliance system, the arms race, colonial rivalries, the security dilemmas of great-power competition, and the logic of military mobilisation schedules that left almost no room for diplomatic reversal in August 1914. More recently, Christopher Clark's revisionist work has reassessed British agency in 1914, arguing that Britain, uniquely among the major powers, could have stayed out.

For WWII, the traditional explanation ran directly through Versailles: the punitive treaty humiliated Germany, created economic ruin, and made Hitler's rise inevitable. Revisionist scholarship since the 1990s has challenged this, arguing that Versailles made Europe "less stable" but did not make WWII inevitable. Drawing a straight line from the treaty to the gas chambers flattens out contingency, ideology, and human choices that cannot be reduced to impersonal structural forces.

The Holocaust and Its Memory

The Holocaust occupies a unique and contested place in European historical consciousness. The Historikerstreit ("historians' dispute") of the late 1980s in West Germany crystallised the fundamental questions. Ernst Nolte's 1986 article argued that the Holocaust should not be treated as a singular historical event — that it was, in part, a reactive response to the Bolshevik threat — and that it should be studied comparatively like any other atrocity. The response, especially from Jürgen Habermas, was fierce: treating the Holocaust as comparable to other crimes risked normalising it and deflecting German responsibility.

The debate was never purely academic. Historical revisionism on both left and right involves consciously constructing narratives of the past to serve present political purposes. Historiographical disputes reveal contemporary political sensibilities as much as they illuminate historical events.

Meanwhile, Holocaust memory has globalised. The duties of remembrance that emerged primarily in German and Jewish contexts have spread into a wider framework — one in which different communities invoke the Holocaust as a reference point for understanding their own historical traumas. This raises genuine tensions: does globalised Holocaust memory enable comparison and solidarity across different histories of suffering, or does it create hierarchies of victimhood? Michael Rothberg's concept of multidirectional memory argues that memories of different atrocities — the Holocaust, colonialism, Stalinist crimes, slavery — interact and inform one another, rather than competing in a zero-sum struggle.

The California School and the Great Divergence

A final thread runs through this period that is easy to miss from a European-centric perspective: the question of why Europe industrialised first.

The traditional answer was essentially internal to Europe: superior institutions, Enlightenment science, Protestant work ethics, distinctive cultural values. Joel Mokyr's influential account emphasises a "culture of growth" — a cluster of beliefs, values, and institutions (including the Republic of Letters and the Industrial Enlightenment) that fostered innovation.

The "California School" — associated with historians like Kenneth Pomeranz and Andre Gunder Frank — challenged this Eurocentric story directly. Pomeranz argued that as late as 1750, the most advanced regions of Europe and China (particularly the Yangtze Delta) were economically comparable — comparable in living standards, market institutions, and consumption. Europe's subsequent dominance was contingent on two material factors: fortunate access to coal deposits, and colonial possession of the Americas, which supplied agricultural surpluses that freed European labour for manufacturing.

The California School's intervention matters not just for economic history. It unsettles the idea that European modernity was an endogenous achievement — a product of uniquely European capacities. Instead, it situates European industrialisation within a global history of resource extraction and colonial power. Europe did not rise; it extracted.

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Core Concepts

The Nation as Imagined Community

Benedict Anderson defined the nation not as an ethnic fact but as an "imagined community" — a symbolic construction sustained by shared language, media, and communication. Crucially, the imagining is not deceptive; it is structurally necessary. No member of a nation of millions will ever meet most fellow members. The community is real, but it is held together by symbols, not biology.

Print capitalism was central to Anderson's account: the mass production of newspapers and novels in vernacular languages created shared temporal and spatial horizons that enabled populations to imagine themselves as unified.

Civic vs. Ethnic Nationalism

Hans Kohn's distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism identifies two different logics of national identity:

• Civic nationalism defines membership through political participation and institutional belonging. It is in principle inclusive — anyone who subscribes to the national civic compact can become a member.
• Ethnic nationalism defines membership through descent, language, and cultural heritage. It is in principle exclusive — membership is ascribed, not achieved.

Kohn associated civic nationalism with Western European states (France, Britain) where the state preceded nationalist consciousness, and ethnic nationalism with Central and Eastern Europe where nationalist movements preceded and created states. Scholars have since complicated this map, noting that civic nationalisms have regularly produced their own forms of exclusion.

Coloniality of Power

Aníbal Quijano's concept of coloniality of power describes a mechanism by which colonial domination outlasts formal colonialism. Even after independence, colonised societies remain structured by:

• Racial hierarchies naturalised during the colonial period.
• Eurocentric knowledge systems presented as universal and rational.
• Economic dependencies that were created through extraction and persist structurally.

Coloniality is not colonialism — it is the matrix of power that colonialism installed and that survives decolonisation as a formal political event.

Epistemic Violence

The term describes the systematic destruction of non-Western knowledge systems — Indigenous epistemologies, African philosophical traditions, Asian ways of knowing — through their classification as primitive, irrational, or pre-scientific. Colonial power was maintained not only through guns and administrative control but through the delegitimisation of other ways of knowing. This epistemological dimension of colonialism persists in the continued dominance of Western academic frameworks in global knowledge production.

Hybridity and the Third Space

Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha introduced the concept of the "third space" — an interstitial cultural zone where coloniser and colonised encounter one another and produce hybrid identities that transgress essentialist binaries. Colonial identities are never simply imposed; they are negotiated, mimicked, and subtly subverted in ways that produce something new. Hybridity does not resolve the power differential, but it does challenge the idea of stable, authentic, pure identities on either side.

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Annotated Case Study

The Historikerstreit: When Historians Fight in Public

What happened. On 6 June 1986, the West German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an article by historian Ernst Nolte titled Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will ("The Past That Will Not Pass"). Nolte argued that the Holocaust should not be treated as a singular, unparalleled event in world history. He proposed that it should be studied comparatively — alongside other instances of mass killing, particularly Stalinist terror — and suggested that Nazi extermination policies were in part a reactive response to the perceived Bolshevik threat.

The response was immediate and charged. Philosopher Jürgen Habermas accused Nolte and other conservative historians of engaging in an ideologically motivated relativisation of Nazi crimes — a move he argued was serving contemporary political purposes (rehabilitating German nationalism at a moment of Cold War reassertion).

Why it matters. The Historikerstreit was not merely a professional dispute between academics. It exposed a fault line that runs through all historical memory: the relationship between scholarly methodology and political purpose.

• Singularity vs. comparability. Is the Holocaust historically unique, or is it a variant of a broader human capacity for organised mass murder? The answer shapes everything: how it is taught, how it is memorialised, what political conclusions are drawn from it.
• Intentionalism vs. functionalism. The dispute also touched on causation within WWII itself. Intentionalists argued that the Holocaust was the planned result of Hitler's ideology from the beginning. Functionalists argued that it emerged from a cumulative process of radicalisation and bureaucratic improvisation.
• The politics of revision. Nolte's critics were not wrong to notice that revisionism serves political ends. But his defenders were not wrong either that historical comparisons are legitimate scholarly tools. The dispute shows that these questions cannot be disentangled from the political contexts in which they are posed.

The wider lesson. As research on collective memory shows, revisionists from left and right consciously struggle to provide narratives suited to their present political views. That does not automatically make revision wrong — some revisions improve on received wisdom. But it is a reason to be alert to the motivations behind any reframing of historical catastrophe.

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Compare & Contrast

Anderson vs. Gellner on Nationalism

Both Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner argue that nationalism is a modern construction, not an ancient natural fact. But they offer different accounts of what produced it.

	Anderson	Gellner
Key mechanism	Print capitalism; imagined symbolic community	Industrialisation; need for cultural standardisation
Role of ethnicity	Minimal — nations are communicative constructs	Central — ethnic identity becomes politically salient under industrial pressure
Where nationalism began	The Americas (creole nationalism)	Industrial Europe
What holds nations together	Shared language, media, imagined solidarity	State-enforced cultural homogeneity
Tone	More culturalist, contingent	More structural, functionalist

Neither account is complete on its own. Anderson better explains the cultural and symbolic dimensions of national identity. Gellner better explains the structural conditions that made nationalism politically useful. Most contemporary scholars draw on both.

Fischer Thesis vs. Multi-Nation Causation

On WWI origins:

	Fritz Fischer	Multi-Nation / Structural
Primary cause	German deliberate expansionism	Systemic great-power competition
Who is responsible	Germany (sole or primary responsibility)	Multiple powers; structural forces
Historical period of influence	1960s–70s	Contemporary mainstream
Methodological approach	Archival, intentionalist	Structural, comparative
Political context	Post-WWII German reckoning	Post-Cold War historiographic maturation

Christopher Clark's more recent revisionism complicates both, by reassessing British agency and agency of other powers in 1914 — and by raising the question of whether Britain's entry made the conflict a world war rather than a European one.

Mokyr vs. California School on European Industrialisation

	Mokyr	California School (Pomeranz)
Why Europe industrialised first	Distinctive culture of growth: beliefs, institutions, Republic of Letters	Contingent material factors: coal, colonial extraction
Eurocentrism	Accepts European distinctiveness, grounds it in culture	Challenges Eurocentric exceptionalism
Role of colonialism	Secondary or absent	Central — Americas critical for supplying resources
Pre-industrial East Asian development	Not the focus	Comparable to Western Europe until c. 1800
Critique	Can seem to naturalise European exceptionalism	May exaggerate similarities between regions

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Common Misconceptions

"Nations are ancient — they were always there."

The claim that nations are primordial — that the French have always been French, the Germans always German — is precisely what Anderson and Gellner set out to dismantle. Nationalism is a modern ideology that emerged from specific historical conditions. The "ancient" traditions of nations are often quite recently invented, or retrofitted onto diverse populations by political actors with present-day agendas.

"The Enlightenment and colonialism were opposites."

The Enlightenment's ideals of reason and universal rights sit uneasily with the Atlantic slave trade and colonial extraction. But they were not simply contradictory. Recent scholarship shows that the material infrastructure of Enlightenment intellectual culture was substantially generated by colonial exploitation. The universalism of Enlightenment rhetoric was routinely suspended at the borders of "civilised" Europe.

"WWI was Germany's fault."

The Treaty of Versailles assigned sole war guilt to Germany. Decades of historiography have complicated this verdict. Structural historians point to alliance systems, arms races, imperial competition, and security dilemmas shared by all major powers. Fischer's rehabilitation of German responsibility was itself a corrective to 1920s revisionism that had gone too far in exculpating Germany. The contemporary consensus holds that responsibility was distributed — though not equally.

"The Treaty of Versailles made WWII inevitable."

This is one of the most persistent misconceptions in popular historical understanding. Revisionist scholarship argues that while Versailles created instability and genuine grievances that Hitler exploited, it did not make WWII inevitable. Many contingencies intervened: the choices of politicians in the 1930s, the specific ideology of National Socialism, the failure of collective security. Blaming Versailles flattens all of that into a single structural cause.

"European modernity was a purely internal European achievement."

Pomeranz's work directly challenges this. Until approximately 1800, leading regions of China and Europe were economically comparable. Europe's subsequent dominance was contingent on coal and colonial resources — not on some deep cultural superiority that was always already present.

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