BR
ID
GE
MA
N
Æ
(leading to the armed conflicts that characterised so much of
the medieval world).
An important shift in Europe came with the end of the cen-
tralised administration of the Holy Roman Empire (which, by
the time it was formally dissolved by Napoleon in 1806, effec-
tively comprised a number of individual, largely self-governing
territories) and the spread of vernacular languages following
the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Once
printed, books in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish
began to shape the people who spoke and read them into cohe-
sive groups at the expense of sacred languages such as Latin and
Arabic that were mainly spread through manuscript culture.
A s a consequence, nationa lly imagined cultures bega n to slowly
take shape from the late 16th century. With the disparate re-
mains of a centralised state and the rise of vernacular languag-
es rubbing up against older imperial and religious belonging,
Europe began to coalesce – often painfully – into states that
took on something of a national character.National awareness
England was an interesting case in point. Henry VIII’s split from
Rome and creation of the Church of England was not an attempt
to forge a national consciousness, but the unintended conse-
quences were to create an identity – one with a vernacular lan-
guage and geography, helpfully bounded by the sea rather than
other states, that was recognisably national. Increasingly, local
communities found themselves identifying with a place called
‘England’, even though it was still ruled by a monarch. This na-
tional awareness was only intensified by the civil wars of the mid-
17th century, culminating in the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’
of 1688 that ushered in constitutional as opposed to absolutistmonarchy. Over the subsequent decades, a national parliamen-
tary system prevailed over an increasingly limited monarchy.
Another significant moment in mainland Europe was the
Treaty of Westphalia (1648) that brought an end to the im-
perial wars of religion, including the Thirty Years’ War, and
which enshrined the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the
European states involved. That treaty also coincided with the
establishment of scientific techniques of measuring and map-
ping territory that enabled cartographers and diplomats to agree
on national boundaries. It began the modern conception of na-
tional territory whereby, in sharp contrast to empires, sovereign-
ty was established consistently over every inch (or centimetre)
of the nation’s territory. A glance at the change in state bound-
aries drawn on maps and atlases made in 1700 compared with
earlier charts created in 1500 is startling: suddenly, national
boundaries appear everywhere (though they could, inevitably,
be subject to significant changes over the next three centuries).
Many of these changes created the conditions for what most
historians see as the most decisive event in the history of the rise
of the modern nation state : the French Revolution of 1789. The
political opposition to the Ancien Régime of France’s Bourbon
dynasty drew on many of the developments over the previ-
ous 200 years of vernacularisation and state centralisation to
make nationhood the main rallying cry of the revolutionaries.
Between 1770 and 1789, a staggering 895 books were printed
w it h ‘n at ion’ or ‘n at ion a l ’ i n t hei r t it le s. “ T he n at ion,” w rote one
revolutionary in 1789, “is prior to everything. It is the source of
everything.” It became a foundational principle of the republi-
can state that “all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation”.
One of the new republican nation’s most compelling legacies
was the completion of the Carte de Cassini, a monumental mapA new kind of monarch
King William III/II, pictured shortly
after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688
that brought him to power in England,
Scotland and Ireland, and heralded
a more constitutional monarchy