Fans pick 100 books like Nationalism

The sources found in Collective Identities illustrate how national ideas were received, fashioned, and conveyed by thinkers in many parts of Europe during the modern era. Each volume also includes a number of opening essays and chapter introductions which provide helpful references to additional foundational texts and matters of historical context. In sum, the volumes perform the very valuable service of introducing readers to some common elements in many ‘discourses’ from the period as well as important local variations in style and content.

This work provides another sample of how the national idea was understood and represented by a leading figure from the European world. Along the way, one gains an introduction to many influential events, people, and ideas from the ‘classical age in nationalism,’ albeit as filtered through the sensibilities of one who was himself a subject of considerable controversy. Certainly, this immersion in the personality of Mazzini (1805-72) is no small part of the work’s appeal, at least for me. Memorable too is the odd little piece at the end in which an acquaintance offers a view of the exiled author as he might be found at home in his London abode: Clad always in black out of mourning for Italy, and puffing away on cigars, the smoke pierced here and there by the flight of a small bird ("He loved these signs of freedom"). I would pair this work with… show more.

Kedourie (1926-1992) was a scholar of Middle Eastern history who also exerted quite an influence upon the field of nationalism studies. This was achieved through his famous Nationalism and the follow-up project cited here. The diverse sources collected in Nationalism in Asia and Africa are introduced with a lengthy opening essay in which Kedourie attempts to account for the ‘family resemblance’ among the movements in question (mainly of late 19th and early 20th-century vintage). The sources themselves are far from ordinary. See for example document 17, which details the final days of an imprisoned Egyptian political dissident – these spent pouring over a few prized works (Bagehot, Rousseau, a volume of Arabic poetry, and the Koran) and scratching out with his boot lace a plan for the "constitution of a Muslim government." Kedourie can indeed surprise and intrigue the reader with his choices.

This book was recommended to me in graduate school and was a natural fit for the kind of comparative research I was then busy with concerning the global dispersion of national ideas among cultural elites in the nineteenth century. That story is contextualized here through an examination of the life and thought of Yen Fu (1854-1921). Shwartz's work was immediately praised as a model for such a study and continues to appear frequently in bibliographies and course reading lists.

Salman shows how the anti-slavery discourse became part of American imperialism and how contentious this issue became during US colonial administration over the Philippines. While the American administration acted with growing determination and harshness against slave-holding societies particularly in the Muslim southern part of the Philippines, it also adopted abolitionism as a legitimation for colonial rule over the entire Philippines. Salman exposes the paradoxes of imperialist rhetoric in which people were subjugated to free them from slavery. 

Borders are far more than mere demarcations of territory, argues Canadian academic and activist Harsha Walia in a book I greatly appreciated for connecting seemingly disparate phenomena into a cohesive takedown of the modern state and its service of corporate power.

The conventional wisdom that corporate globalization eliminates national boundaries is only true, Walia explains, for an increasingly mobile global ruling class. For a global underclass of migrant labourers and asylum seekers, borders are increasingly entrenched, segregating newcomers as a source of cheap labour from the working class and fuelling the exploitation of both.

Walia describes how this segmentation undermines labour standards for all and fuels a xenophobic backlash against the depredations of global capitalism. 

I have selected a non-academic title which has gained a lot of attention over the past year or so. Its author is a journalist (for titles such as The Spectator, Daily Telegraph, and The Washington Post) and podcaster (Tommies & Jerries), but her Anglo-German background, storytelling flair, and social media presence have made her an important new voice in interpreting German history for the English-speaking world. This book is a handy starting point for those who want a concise chronological narrative of the period.

One of the first scholars to write a full-length monograph on Manchukuo, Duara delves into the Chinese and Japanese writers who viewed northeast China under Japanese occupation as a means to envision their own Pan-Asianist ideals. He analyses this in the context of a broader "East Asian modern" in Manchukuo, and utilizes political and literary sources to unearth previous connections with previous iterations and currents of Chinese nationalism tied to the Pan-Asianism of the early twentieth century.

Takashi Fujitani offers a surprising historical narrative, telling the story of Korean soldiers in the Japanese army alongside that of Japanese-American soldiers in the United States during World War II. What is striking here is how total global war pushed both the United States and Japan to similar policies toward minority populations. Both abandoned more “vulgar” forms of racism (explicit discrimination) for what Fujitani calls a “polite racism,” where minority groups were now deemed as capable of cultural assimilation. But what really is inspiring is that Fujitani juxtaposes two wartime enemies—the United States and Japan—to show just how similar they actually were. 

Gellner is, for me, one of the most original social thinkers of our time and shocks you out of your assumptions.

In this book, among much else, he offers the most incisive version of his theory of nationalism. Turning Kedourie on his head just as Marx did to Hegel, he argues that nationalist ideas are so much froth and are a product of larger structural forces. They arise in the transition from agro-literate to industrial societies.

Nationalism’s real significance is not a return to a folk past, but its creation of high cultures in the language of the people propagated in national educational systems that provide the basis of scientific modernity. So far from being a cause of war, nationalism makes a liberal international order possible.

Brilliantly written, this is an iconoclastic counter to both Smith and Kedourie.