Summary

We have now come to the end of a long journey across the history of the modern world, walking through different disciplinary landscapes, across forests of data, and underneath cascades of statistical models. The journey started with the Capetian kingdom of medieval France and showed how subsequent state centralization and the development of networks of voluntary organizations led state elites to extend alliance relationships – previously confined to other elite factions – to the rest of the population. Political identities and loyalties were restructured accordingly, and the first nation-states were born, based on the idea of popular sovereignty and national solidarity. The story then branched out and traced how the rest of the world gradually adopted this new template of political legitimacy, led by nationalists who dreamed of overcoming the hitherto taken-for-granted ethnic hierarchies of empire and achieving self-rule in a national state as powerful and legitimate as those first nation-states.

This dream became realized wherever the domestic and international power configuration allowed nationalists to overthrow or absorb the old regime, often helped by cascading creations of nation-states in the neighborhood or other parts of the empire (see the summary of the findings in Figure 7.1). Realizing these dreams often came at the price of war: many nationalists met stiff resistance from imperial or dynastic rulers who knew that there would be no place for them in the new national order based on the “like-over-like” principle.