Nationalism and democracy are now universal and the standard explanation is that they arose in Northwest Europe after c. 1750, when notions of popular sovereignty, civic equality, and the primacy of vernacular culture congealed. Nationalism and democracy are peculiar mutations of a much older phenomenon that can be termed "political ethnicity," a typically secular cultural complex invoked to identify rulers and subjects as fellow members of a state-centered community which  saw itself as distinct from, and generally superior to, other communities. In northwest Europe nationalism (and its ideological confederate, democracy) were tied to earlier expressions of political ethnicity by a host of discursive, symbolic, and social features whose outlines were visible in many cases as early as the 14th or 15th century. In most of Asia the vast size and ethnic heterogeneity of empire joined Inner Asian domination to preclude political ethnicity on the European model. However, in a second, more modest Asian rimland zone smaller political units, more limited ethnic heterogeneity, and protection from Inner Asian conquest favored political ethnicity comparable to patterns in pre-18th century Europe. All across this sector ethnic patterns showed remarkable, if hitherto unrecognized, similarities in dynamics, chronology, and discursive expression.