nineteenth-century archaeology by plotting them against the evolution of the
idea of the nation and the interest in the past. Connected to this were the
political practices of colonialism and imperialism, whose links with archae-
ology are explored later in this chapter.
NationalismNationalism is a term that has been deWned in many ways. The sociologist
Ernest Gellner and the historian Eric Hobsbawm saw it as ‘primarily a
principle which holds that the political and national unit should be congru-
ent’ (Gellner 1983: 1; Hobsbawm 1990: 9). Before them, Kedourie, in his
oft-reprinted post-war workNationalism, had aptly deWned nationalism as a
doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century... BrieXy, the
doctrine holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known
by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of
government is national self-government.
(Kedourie 1993: 1).Nationalism is distinguished from patriotism 3 in that the latter only encom-
passes feelings of support for, loyalty to or belief in a nation, whereas theWrst
also refers to an organized political doctrine and movement which aimed at
the political self-determination of the nation. Patriotism, also deWned by
some as proto-nationalism, was operative earlier in history, certainly during
the medieval period. Although some see nations as having existed for millen-
nia before our era in places such as Egypt (Smith 2005), this view is not widely
held (for an update on the debate see Scales & Zimmer 2005). The argument
proposed in this book aligns itself with those who think that the nation only
became constitutive of state power and legitimacy from the late eighteenth
century onwards.
Nationalism is a complex and diverse ideology that can be subjected to a
variety of typologies. One of them is the distinction made by many experts
between civic or political nationalism and cultural or ethnic nationalism. In
theWrst case, the concept of the nation is coupled with a universal recognition
of both individual rights and the sovereignty of the people within the nation,
and with the notion of popular freedom, which individuals are ready to defend
even at the cost of their lives (Hobsbawm 1990: 18–19; Smith 1991a: 10).
3 Several authors such as Linda Colley (Colley 1992) confusingly discuss eighteenth-century
nationalism as a term interchangeable with patriotism. I will follow Hobsbawm (1990) and
others in their contention that nationalism only appears as a political ideology at the end of the
eighteenth century.
An Alternative Account 5