Nations Before Nationalism

In search of an explanation of how a sense of ethnic identity evolves to create the concept of nation, Armstrong analyzes Islamic and Christian cultures from antiquity to the nineteenth century. He explores the effects of institutions--the city, imperial polity, bureaucratic imperatives of centralization, and language divisions--on the development of ethnicity. Political science furnishes the focus, anthropology and sociology provide the conceptual framework, and history affords the evidence. Or