Since historians are generally engaged in research of a highly specialised kind, and since we are notoriously jealous of our own periods, it may at first seem predictable that an eighteenth-century historian should claim that the modern connection between power and the nation dates from some time in the eighteenth century. Worse still, it may sound as if I am setting out to reinvent the wheel, since the French Revolution has been accorded a pivotal role in the emergence of nationalism by almost every standard work on the subject. In what follows, however, I shall offer fresh arguments in defence of what is, admittedly, a traditional view. By exploring a number of features of nationhood that have so far received relatively little attention, I hope to clarify some of the issues that have divided ‘modernists’ from their critics in recent discussions of nations and nationalism. Although my focus is on the Irish, who are often cast as honorary Slavs in typologies of nationalism, I shall consider them alongside the ‘old’ western nations of Britain and France: it is a fundamental premise of my central argument, indeed, that none of them can be understood in isolation.

The approach adopted here is also rooted in the history of ideas, an area somewhat out of fashion among scholars of nationalism since the classic works of Kedourie and Berlin.