An interesting claim: the nation-state didn’t exist before, and was caused by, the industrial revolution. Oh there were empires before, but most people didn’t identify much with empires, or see empires as much influencing their lives. In contrast people identify with nation-states, which they see as greatly influencing their lives.
Ancient Egypt also had a fairly large labor surplus compared to many other ancient societies: the amount of labor required to feed itself was relatively small, leaving lots of manpower available to do things like build pyramids. Or store excess grain in good years and distribute it in bad ones.
Goethe was late to that conclusion. In "War and the Rise of The State," Bruce Porter describes strong evidence of links between the emergence of nationalism, state-building and war going back to about 1600.
Or the adoption of nationalism was driven by the discovery that it worked better on the battlefield than the alternatives. Goethe famously was at the Battle of Valmy in 1792 when a French citizen army defeated a Prussian mercenary one. He consoled his defeated Prussian colleagues: "From this place, and from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can all say that you were present at its birth."
"What makes you think revolts and civil wars are correlated with nationalism's absence?"
The relative lack of revolts and civil wars in Egypt indicates that people didn't want to split the country and that ambitious generals trying to cut out a piece of the kingdom would not be seen as legitimate rulers, only those who controlled the Egyptian capital and were acknowledged by the priests would be accepted as rulers. Even during the Akhenaton debacle the country stayed united and united it reinstated the old ways after Akhenaton's death. The military was powerful enough to contend with mighty foreign empires and yet people didn't fear infighting between the generals and/or governors.
There also was not just one continuous line of pharaohs. Dynasties died out or were replaced through marriage (when a princess married outside of the royal family). It was the institution that the people were bound to, this is really evident in the Hyksos case I talked about earlier. The people living in the Hyksos occupied part of Egypt had not lived under a pharaoh for almost two centuries when the Hyksos were finally driven out of Egypt and everyone seamlessly united under the pharaoh again. There were no separatists, no minorities speaking another language or worshipping other gods (except for some foreign merchants of course) and (for the times) very little violence was necessary to keep even the most remote village under the control of the central government.
Finally there are texts where Ancient Egyptians divided the world up into 4 groups, somewhat equivalent to how other people later came to distinguish races and ethnicities. If I recall correctly they saw Egyptians as one group, Nubians (black Africans in Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia, black people born and raised in Egypt were considered proper Egyptians) as another, the peoples of the Libyan desert as yet another group and the peoples of the Levant, Mesopotamia and Anatolia (probably also the Minoans) as the fourth group.
There seem to be two reasonable claims and one silly one entangled in this article and discussion:
1) The crucial foundation for a nation-state is a substantial, coordinated bureaucracy, not a common ethnicity, language or religion.
This is reasonable. China had a nation-wide bureaucracy and exam system to select that bureaucracy long before industrialization. So did Rome although the bureaucratic elite was more hereditary than meritocratic and the tests (the honors race) were more of rhetorical and sporting prowess than literacy and numeracy. England had a national census and the beginnings of a national bureaucracy can be traced to Henry Plantagenet's spread of the King's Court to promote a common law administered by his appointees in the 12th century.
2) Industrialization also requires the large-scale coordination of resources, properties, contracts, labor and infrastructure. Thus industrialization creates the conditions for nation-state formation and nation-state formation facilitates industrialization.
Napoleon restructured the French state to mirror the army with centrally administered national exams in a common language (which, among other things, opened up universities to jews and closed them to exclusive speakers of Provencal, Occitan, Britannic etc.). He also replaced the sale of judgeships and magistrate officers to local nobles with a centralized legal code and appointees. So the authors claims that French nation-building was linked to a project to industrialize and modernize the economy are correct.
3) There were no real nation-states before industrialization. This is silly.
The idea of nationalism spread from northwest Europe to the rest of Europe and to the rest of the world because it had a better track record than the alternatives.
Shakespeare was a small town boy who made good in the big city, then retired back to his small town. He was a pretty representative Englishman for his time.
Now, there was a big difference between England and Eastern Europe. The English, of all levels of society, were more nationalistic and more advanced than Eastern European peasants. They were more nationalistic because they were more advanced and more advanced because they were more nationalistic.
What makes you think revolts and civil wars are correlated with nationalism's absence? (You need nonlocal collective sentiment to wage revolution or civil war.)
Why would the priests develop a rationalization system based on an 'Egyptian people' rather than based on duties owed to the pharaoh and benefits conferred on his subjects? (Here, there's likely some textual evidence one way or the other.)
If some localities are more likely to accept the pharaoh's rule because of historic ties to the pharoah, why couldn't that replace nationalistic sentiment as the basis for boundaries?
There must have been some nationalistic sentiment, otherwise revolts and civil wars would have been much more common than they were. In fact most cities didn't even have walls, so civil war was apparently not even something an Egyptian expected to see in their lifetime. At the end of the second intermediate period the Egyptians from Upper Egypt reconquered Lower Egypt from the Hyksos, after two centuries, and the country quickly became a unified state again and that was not the only time Egypt bounced back to its original borders after an occupation. It seems like there were definite borders between areas that immediately accepted the rule of a pharaoh and those that did not and those borders corresponded to the borders of the cpuntry of Egypt.
The intertwining of the priest class and the government would also inspire nationalist sentiment, I'd wager.
Right, but we still are faced with whether there's anything terribly important that's qualitatively different.
I suggest the difference is this. (Please correct me if it contradicts the evidence.) Despite the national characteristics of Ancient Egypt, it did not inspire nationalism. What was missing is the sense of a communal tie among ordinary Egyptians. The nationhood of Egypt, such as it was, was organized entirely vertically. Egypt was united by its submission to the pharaoh and the pharaoh's duties to his subjects, not by sentimental ties binding ordinary Egyptians to ordinary Egyptians, which could only be induced by the multifariousness of the interventions of the modern bureaucratic state.
[The question is whether the relative isolation of England or the cultural commonalities among Egyptians (along with very important but highly focused state interventions) suffices to induce a genuinely nationalistic sentiment.]
OK, then granting your point about Shakespearean nationalism, the question is whether this speaks to the question of mass nationalism. Shakespeare, after all, appealed to Londoners, whereas the mass of the Englishmen were farmers.
Pragmatically, it could argued Scots have got the best of both worlds under the present arrangements, since their parliament is able to push through a more generous arrangements than the rest of the country, but Scotland doesn't have to find all the funds. Cynics might interpret that as a subtle bribe to stay in..
However, that's still a compromise, and compromises will always send the signal "not a real country"to some.
Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Corsica, making him Italian. "Napoleon" is Italian for Big Man of Naples. His mother and father were Letizia and Carlo, not Joie and Charles.
It means whoever served the pharaoh willingly (no slaves were used in the construction of holy monuments as far as we know). In addition they believed the gods favored Egypt more than other lands. All Egyptians also shared a common language and religion. The country of Egypt strongly tied into their culture and mythology: the Nile (floodings), the desert. It's really as much nation state as you're gonna get without the technology necessary for a welfare state.
The thesis in the main essay is that cultural naturalism is a byproduct of bureaucratic nationalism. If the thesis is true, then Scotland should have fused with England, given that bureaucratically they were united from before the industrial revolution.
[My impression from afar agrees with the thesis. The Scottish national issue seems subterfuge for a political issue: the Scots hate austerity more than the English do and like the welfare state more. (Odd, considering the stereotype of a Scot.)]
Ancient Egypt also had a fairly large labor surplus compared to many other ancient societies: the amount of labor required to feed itself was relatively small, leaving lots of manpower available to do things like build pyramids. Or store excess grain in good years and distribute it in bad ones.
Goethe was late to that conclusion. In "War and the Rise of The State," Bruce Porter describes strong evidence of links between the emergence of nationalism, state-building and war going back to about 1600.
Or the adoption of nationalism was driven by the discovery that it worked better on the battlefield than the alternatives. Goethe famously was at the Battle of Valmy in 1792 when a French citizen army defeated a Prussian mercenary one. He consoled his defeated Prussian colleagues: "From this place, and from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can all say that you were present at its birth."
"What makes you think revolts and civil wars are correlated with nationalism's absence?"
The relative lack of revolts and civil wars in Egypt indicates that people didn't want to split the country and that ambitious generals trying to cut out a piece of the kingdom would not be seen as legitimate rulers, only those who controlled the Egyptian capital and were acknowledged by the priests would be accepted as rulers. Even during the Akhenaton debacle the country stayed united and united it reinstated the old ways after Akhenaton's death. The military was powerful enough to contend with mighty foreign empires and yet people didn't fear infighting between the generals and/or governors.
There also was not just one continuous line of pharaohs. Dynasties died out or were replaced through marriage (when a princess married outside of the royal family). It was the institution that the people were bound to, this is really evident in the Hyksos case I talked about earlier. The people living in the Hyksos occupied part of Egypt had not lived under a pharaoh for almost two centuries when the Hyksos were finally driven out of Egypt and everyone seamlessly united under the pharaoh again. There were no separatists, no minorities speaking another language or worshipping other gods (except for some foreign merchants of course) and (for the times) very little violence was necessary to keep even the most remote village under the control of the central government.
Finally there are texts where Ancient Egyptians divided the world up into 4 groups, somewhat equivalent to how other people later came to distinguish races and ethnicities. If I recall correctly they saw Egyptians as one group, Nubians (black Africans in Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia, black people born and raised in Egypt were considered proper Egyptians) as another, the peoples of the Libyan desert as yet another group and the peoples of the Levant, Mesopotamia and Anatolia (probably also the Minoans) as the fourth group.
There seem to be two reasonable claims and one silly one entangled in this article and discussion:
1) The crucial foundation for a nation-state is a substantial, coordinated bureaucracy, not a common ethnicity, language or religion.
This is reasonable. China had a nation-wide bureaucracy and exam system to select that bureaucracy long before industrialization. So did Rome although the bureaucratic elite was more hereditary than meritocratic and the tests (the honors race) were more of rhetorical and sporting prowess than literacy and numeracy. England had a national census and the beginnings of a national bureaucracy can be traced to Henry Plantagenet's spread of the King's Court to promote a common law administered by his appointees in the 12th century.
2) Industrialization also requires the large-scale coordination of resources, properties, contracts, labor and infrastructure. Thus industrialization creates the conditions for nation-state formation and nation-state formation facilitates industrialization.
Napoleon restructured the French state to mirror the army with centrally administered national exams in a common language (which, among other things, opened up universities to jews and closed them to exclusive speakers of Provencal, Occitan, Britannic etc.). He also replaced the sale of judgeships and magistrate officers to local nobles with a centralized legal code and appointees. So the authors claims that French nation-building was linked to a project to industrialize and modernize the economy are correct.
3) There were no real nation-states before industrialization. This is silly.
The idea of nationalism spread from northwest Europe to the rest of Europe and to the rest of the world because it had a better track record than the alternatives.
Shakespeare was a small town boy who made good in the big city, then retired back to his small town. He was a pretty representative Englishman for his time.
Now, there was a big difference between England and Eastern Europe. The English, of all levels of society, were more nationalistic and more advanced than Eastern European peasants. They were more nationalistic because they were more advanced and more advanced because they were more nationalistic.
What makes you think revolts and civil wars are correlated with nationalism's absence? (You need nonlocal collective sentiment to wage revolution or civil war.)
Why would the priests develop a rationalization system based on an 'Egyptian people' rather than based on duties owed to the pharaoh and benefits conferred on his subjects? (Here, there's likely some textual evidence one way or the other.)
If some localities are more likely to accept the pharaoh's rule because of historic ties to the pharoah, why couldn't that replace nationalistic sentiment as the basis for boundaries?
There must have been some nationalistic sentiment, otherwise revolts and civil wars would have been much more common than they were. In fact most cities didn't even have walls, so civil war was apparently not even something an Egyptian expected to see in their lifetime. At the end of the second intermediate period the Egyptians from Upper Egypt reconquered Lower Egypt from the Hyksos, after two centuries, and the country quickly became a unified state again and that was not the only time Egypt bounced back to its original borders after an occupation. It seems like there were definite borders between areas that immediately accepted the rule of a pharaoh and those that did not and those borders corresponded to the borders of the cpuntry of Egypt.
The intertwining of the priest class and the government would also inspire nationalist sentiment, I'd wager.
Right, but we still are faced with whether there's anything terribly important that's qualitatively different.
I suggest the difference is this. (Please correct me if it contradicts the evidence.) Despite the national characteristics of Ancient Egypt, it did not inspire nationalism. What was missing is the sense of a communal tie among ordinary Egyptians. The nationhood of Egypt, such as it was, was organized entirely vertically. Egypt was united by its submission to the pharaoh and the pharaoh's duties to his subjects, not by sentimental ties binding ordinary Egyptians to ordinary Egyptians, which could only be induced by the multifariousness of the interventions of the modern bureaucratic state.
[The question is whether the relative isolation of England or the cultural commonalities among Egyptians (along with very important but highly focused state interventions) suffices to induce a genuinely nationalistic sentiment.]
OK, then granting your point about Shakespearean nationalism, the question is whether this speaks to the question of mass nationalism. Shakespeare, after all, appealed to Londoners, whereas the mass of the Englishmen were farmers.
Sure, Shakespeare's "Henry V" is chestbeating English nationalist propaganda (which is why Olivier filmed it during WWII).
Pragmatically, it could argued Scots have got the best of both worlds under the present arrangements, since their parliament is able to push through a more generous arrangements than the rest of the country, but Scotland doesn't have to find all the funds. Cynics might interpret that as a subtle bribe to stay in..
However, that's still a compromise, and compromises will always send the signal "not a real country"to some.
Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Corsica, making him Italian. "Napoleon" is Italian for Big Man of Naples. His mother and father were Letizia and Carlo, not Joie and Charles.
It means whoever served the pharaoh willingly (no slaves were used in the construction of holy monuments as far as we know). In addition they believed the gods favored Egypt more than other lands. All Egyptians also shared a common language and religion. The country of Egypt strongly tied into their culture and mythology: the Nile (floodings), the desert. It's really as much nation state as you're gonna get without the technology necessary for a welfare state.
The thesis in the main essay is that cultural naturalism is a byproduct of bureaucratic nationalism. If the thesis is true, then Scotland should have fused with England, given that bureaucratically they were united from before the industrial revolution.
[My impression from afar agrees with the thesis. The Scottish national issue seems subterfuge for a political issue: the Scots hate austerity more than the English do and like the welfare state more. (Odd, considering the stereotype of a Scot.)]